The Power of Reflecting and Accepting

Working in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion space, I meet a lot of leaders. These leaders vary a lot in background, demographic, tenure and leadership style. Many of them are already, or grow to become, what I would view as ‘inclusive leaders’. This isn’t a particular style of leadership per se but more of way they embody leadership that creates empowering and inclusive results.

One such leader is Pat Phelan, who was recently my guest for Why Care? Episode 21: Self-Reflection as a Superpower. As the episode title suggests, Pat’s inclusive leadership comes from his comfort with self-reflection, although he also credits GoCardeless’s excellent response to Black Lives Matter for encouraging him to reflect on his privileges. Practicing some reflection myself, I realised that self-reflection and the subsequent self-acceptance is a common thread I see amongst the majority of inclusive leaders.

So why is Self-Reflection a Superpower?

At its core inclusive leadership is about possessing an awareness of the repercussions of your actions on those around you. Self-reflection is a critical component for this - leaders need to first be able to reflect on the consequences of their decisions and what led them to making these decisions in the first place.

Being able to self-reflect is also crucial for understanding privileges and how they may have shaped your life. During our discussion, Pat shared that he never actively planned to work in a leadership role and he just fell into one by happenstance. It was during a period of self-reflection years later than he realised this was an example of a privilege he has as a white male, and that people with different characteristics would have likely had to actively work towards leadership roles to even be in with a chance of getting one. With this knowledge, he understands how privilege manifests in organisations and now actively leads as an inclusive leader to minimise and tackle this.

Self-reflection is also key to another common trait of an inclusive leader: Self-acceptance.

Reflection to Acceptance

Self-acceptance takes many forms and most are conducive to inclusive leadership. The first follows on from self-reflection and is about accepting your privileges and the role they likely played and continue to please in your life.

One of Avenir’s signature workshops is ‘Privilege, Bias or Merit?’ and during these sessions we have supported many leaders to reflect on what privileges they may carry. Almost every leader does the reflection part fine, but it is the acceptance that some struggle with. For these people, accepting that privilege may have impacted on their life trajectory somehow implies that they were not deserving of the opportunities they were afforded, or that they should feel guilty for having privilege.

The leaders who truly understand inclusive leadership are those who accept that they have certain privileges despite many being out of their control. They can’t help they born a white male for example, so why should they feel guilty for it? And this is certainly not something anyone should feel guilty for. However, they can identify how their privileges have manifested in their life and use this understanding to reduce the effects of privilege in their organisations.

Using Pat as an example again, he recognises and accepts that gaining his initial leadership position was in part due to privilege, but now he chooses to use his leadership positions to uplift everyone under his leadership, and to reduce the power of privilege on hiring or promotional decisions. This is authentic allyship.

Accept that no one is perfect

The other main form of self-acceptance is the acceptance of making mistakes. One of the most common things I hear in our workshops is, “I’m scared to say or do the wrong thing”. Part of self-acceptance is accepting that nobody is perfect and that people make mistakes, and a mistake is not the end of the world.

Most of the time if a statement or action comes from a place of ignorance (rather than malice), people will forgive you if you acknowledge it and give a wholehearted and genuine apology and take action to learn from your mistake. A very recent example of this is when the singer Lizzo released a song that contained what many consider an ableist slur in the lyrics. She sincerely apologised, acknowledged her mistake and re-recorded the song to remove the lyric – in the space of less than a week.

In her apology she explained how in the US the word isn’t widely seen as a slur so she hadn’t considered it as such, but as a plus sized black woman in the public eye, she knows how hurtful these things can be so she swiftly acted to fix her mistake. Her willingness to be educated combined with her gracious and swift approach prevented this mistake from blowing up into her being ‘cancelled’ like many leaders fear. Instead, she has actually improved her reputation by showing inclusive leadership through self-reflection and self-acceptance of her mistakes.

How Avenir can help

As this article outlines, at Avenir we believe that self-reflection is the important first step in the inclusive leadership journey. Our Inclusive Leadership Programme is designed to help leaders learn self-reflection and self-acceptance techniques as we guide them through the process of becoming a truly effective inclusive leader.  

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