For diversity, inclusion and innovation conferences and employee resource group events
Diversity defines the talent base in organizations today—both demographic diversity and diversity of values. Yet organizations still struggle to engage the best talents of diverse employees in meeting core strategic and business needs. As a result, diversity efforts remain silo’d, internally focused and underleveraged.
In this keynote, Diversity Expert Sally Helgesen draws on 17 years of work with diverse teams around the globe to show how organizations can engage the full talents of all employees in meeting marketplace demands by creating the conditions in which inclusive leadership can thrive. Recognizing that inclusion is not an ideal but a practice, she demonstrates how to define, encourage, model, mentor, measure and reward inclusive behaviors.
Sally articulates the specific leadership competencies that support diverse and inclusive teams.
These include:
- Integrating the contributions of heads and hands
- Eliciting embodied as well as articulated knowledge
- Setting parameters that enable people with differing values and capabilities to collaborate and achieve consensus
- Harnessing the capabilities of the informal power structure
- Developing buy-in at every stage of an initiative
- Communicating directly and transparently across silos and divisions—no taboos beyond civil discourse
In this session, Sally also shows how leaders can use webs of inclusion as both a structure and a method for deploying talent. She shares up-to-date case studies that demonstrate how webs can address specific business challenges while breaking down organizational divisions, getting resources to flow, and vastly expanding a team’s capacity for innovation.
This program offers participants:
- Increased understanding of how to use diversity as a market resource
- Specific techniques for leveraging diverse employees to expand market insight and customer outreach
- A plan for using internal webs to transform employee resource groups into strategic assets in the “new general market”
- A template for integrating market intelligence and diversity outreach in order to strengthen both
This topic can be delivered as a one-hour keynote or a half-day working session.