31. How to be An Inclusive Leader? with Jennifer Brown

“I want to challenge the comfortable in all of us and in myself. I want to invite us to walk that path together because the comfortable amongst us is needed in the change equation so desperately for change to be sustainable, to be at scale, to be accelerated, to address the real pain and inequities in our society.”

In Episode 31, I am joined by Jennifer Brown, Founder and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting (JBC), to discuss the challenges of being an inclusive leader, how to overcome these challenges, and what inclusive leadership means.

Jennifer’s DEI journey has spanned for over 15 years in public speaking, entrepreneurship, consulting, thought leadership, and writing. She is an acclaimed keynoter and podcaster, with her podcast The Will to Change, which has 15,000 listeners per month.
She has received several recognitions, having been named Woman of the Year, Social Entrepreneur of the Year, one of the Top 40 Outstanding Women and so much more. Her sincere commitment and determination to DEI have led to her numerous successes as a
best-selling author of two books, a shortlist winner of the O.W.L. Award, and a winner of the 2019 Nautilus Book Awards' Business & Leadership category. These achievements drawback to her mission of creating inclusive organisations where all of us can thrive, and, encouraging leadership and allyship at all levels with concrete behaviours and actions.

Jennifer offers insight into her DEI journey, and her shift from focusing on DEI representation to ensuring that diverse individuals are respected, understood, hired, and retained in their respective organisations. She shares her personal story, and delves into the importance of this, as an authority figure and as an LGBTQ woman advocating for her community. As she explains, there is an ease in hiding, and seeking what is comfortable but what we actually need is to challenge what is comfortable. Setting that tone and creating psychological safety will normalise open conversations about things that frighten us and are not so often spoken about. These include questions about privileges and invisibility, and the significance of utilising that as a way of fuelling our allyship with others.

Lastly, she speaks about the inclusive leadership continuum, which features in her book – How to be an Inclusive
Leader. She describes that leaders tend to get stuck at each transition stage:

1) Phase 1 and 2, that is between ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ and ‘now I know what I don’t know’. This is complex as they have to overcome resistance, apathy, cynicism, and skepticism..

2) Phase 2 and 3, from the ‘I know what I don’t know’ to ‘deepening my knowledge’. They will have to experiment and fail a lot to learn, which is quite overwhelming, and shame and guilt-inducing for leaders.

3) Phase 3 and 4, here the issue is being stuck in the perfectionism trap between aware and active ‘not knowing’ and ‘not having mastering of how things will turn out’. Leaders will find that they are more vulnerable, they will hold themselves accountable and train themselves to notice bias around them and speak up.

In Phase 4, leaders are advocates and that can be difficult to achieve. As such, leaders require support, patience, flexibility, resilience, forgiveness, and graciousness. It's not about having a short-term focus on calling people out and canceling them when they make mistakes, but about having a long-term view of nurturing the journey of others. This holds more power than pushing people out from contributing to the DEI conversation because of their privileges.

Links:

Jennifer can be found on:

-       Instagram

-       LinkedIn

-       Linktree

For more from Jennifer Brown Consulting, you can visit their website at: https://jenniferbrownconsulting.com/