Initiatives to promote leadership diversity
Headlines
Workforce and leadership development programmes need to be embedded in an organisation’s human resources strategies.
Good practice in promoting diversity in leadership is good practice for all staff and leadership development, and vice versa.
Diversity-promoting interventions fall into two broad categories of changing organisational culture and supporting individuals.
Organisational change includes adopting effective equal opportunity (EO) policies and giving life to them through your practices, identifying a senior person responsible for change, reviewing recruitment practice and changing if necessary, establishing network/ affinity groups, peer-to-peer mentoring, and ensuring there is staff development which takes into account an individual’s diverse needs.
The West Midlands region has a better rate of adoption of EO policies and many practices but there is room for improvement.
Individual support includes targeted leadership development programmes, mentoring, coaching, work shadowing, succession planning, talent management and advice from role models.
There are also initiatives which encourage the next generation of leaders and to establish peer- to-peer groups across different organisations.
More attention needs to be paid to monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of leadership diversity initiatives.
Having identified barriers to promoting leadership diversity, the Leadership Commission’s research focussed on initiatives undertaken to challenge and overcome these barriers. While leadership development has traditionally focused on improving individuals’ leadership capabilities, successful diversity-promoting interventions fall into two broad categories:
- programmes to change organisational culture to be more accepting and embracing of difference
- programmes to support individuals within the system.
We have summarised and provided some examples of these initiatives under these two headings based on reviews of available data and studies,
information provided by organisations linked to
the WMCA area and our focus groups and case studies. But through our research we have also concluded that both these sets of initiatives work best when they are integrated into an organisations human resources strategy and approach rather than being left as add-ons which can be discarded at any time.
This reinforces another key conclusion that many of the successful diversity initiatives could be adapted to benefit all who were aspiring to leadership positions. This is because many of the barriers to diversity are faced by all though felt more intensely by underrepresented groups. If the approach entailed within these initiatives were integrated into staff and leadership development policies, improving any individual’s abilities to progress and achieve, then all would benefit.
Having identified barriers to promoting leadership diversity, the Leadership Commission’s research focussed on initiatives undertaken to challenge and overcome these barriers. While leadership development has traditionally focused on improving individuals’ leadership capabilities, successful diversity-promoting interventions fall into two broad categories:
- programmes to change organisational culture to be more accepting and embracing of difference
- programmes to support individuals within the system.
We have summarised and provided some examples of these initiatives under these two headings based on reviews of available data and studies, information provided by organisations linked to
the WMCA area and our focus groups and case studies. But through our research we have also concluded that both these sets of initiatives work best when they are integrated into an organisations human resources strategy and approach rather than being left as add-ons which can be discarded at any time.
This reinforces another key conclusion that
many of the successful diversity initiatives could be adapted to benefit all who were aspiring to leadership positions. This is because many of the barriers to diversity are faced by all though felt more intensely by underrepresented groups. If the approach entailed within these initiatives were integrated into staff and leadership development policies, improving any individual’s abilities to progress and achieve, then all would benefit.
In short: good practice in promoting diversity
in leadership is good practice for all staff and leadership development, and vice versa. Stressing this conclusion may be important to counter any criticism that may emerge amongst staff that are not from an underrepresented group because they believe they are being discriminated against.
Furthermore, our research suggests that there is a need to support society-wide initiatives in addition to internal organisational work, and that monitoring and evaluation is needed to check and build on what works best.