Ian Dodds Consulting’s (IDC) Monthly Best Practice: Mar 2013

Building high performance inclusive cultures and liberating talent

In recent times I’ve been working with clients who wish to place the emphasis of their diversity efforts on inclusion. They seek to do this by building high performance, inclusive cultures in which everyone: is able to perform to their best both for now and for the future; feels that they can openly express their ideas and opinions and have them listened to; is committed to providing the best products to diverse customers, clients and service users. It is clear that such an approach is going to deliver significant, bottom line benefits or performance gains.

IDC’s approach to this is to help clients build proficiency in:

1.      Ensuring their talent management processes are free from unconscious bias.

2.      Developing internal change agents to coach managers across their organisations to be able to:

–        Identify the particular skills and talents of each of their team members;

–        Ensure that they receive informal coaching so that they can apply their skills and talents to improve their performance in their current roles;

–        Ensure that they get the development support they each need to meet their future career aspirations;

–        Be role models in interactive behaviour so that team members’ differing ideas and opinions and points of view are listened to and explored in meetings. Skill in interactive effectiveness is the key to high performance teamwork.

3.      Driving the change to a high performance inclusive culture through the role model example set by each member of the leadership team in inclusive behaviour.

4.      Incorporating this approach into their overall business strategies.

Our clients like this approach to diversity and inclusion because it:

–        Is clearly business beneficial;

–        Is readily incorporated into their overall business strategies;

–        Builds high performance teams;

–        Is sustainable in that we are developing the leadership in the behaviours they need to practise to drive inclusion and high performance and developing internal coaches to roll the change out across each client’s organisation.

If you would like to know more about this highly successful and powerful approach please do not hesitate to contact IDC and we shall be pleased to arrange to discuss it with you.

Dr Ian Dodds,

28 Feb 2013,

iandodds@iandoddsconsulting.com

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