Radical Inclusivity

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Radical Inclusivity

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Hi, Mel.

Hi, Melanie.

Well, I guess we should introduce ourselves. I’m Melanie Parrish, and I’m an executive coach. I’m a content creator and a podcast host, and it’s super exciting to be here with you today.

I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m a professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior at McMaster University, and I’m McMasters first transgender department chair.

Yeah. So we don’t do this a lot, like often we have guests on our podcast, but I thought it would be really interesting to spend some time with you today, because, you know, sometimes we talk about things like radical inclusivity, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about it here.

Yeah, I think radical inclusivity is one of our values, and in a leadership space, it’s, it’s a challenge to think about and implement the value of radical inclusivity?

Yeah, I think it’s I think it can be really challenging, and I think we all think we’re supposed to and then what happens when somebody disagrees with you? Like, then it gets harder, all of a sudden, then that’s where it starts to be work, not just easy, like it’s all, if everybody agrees with you, then it feels like you’re doing radical inclusivity. If you just like all the people that are just like you.

Right? If everybody’s on the same page and the whole team is united, then it feels like we’re all we’re all inclusive of each other, right? Yeah. So
I think so I don’t know, how do we, how do we talk about this? I want to, yeah, how do we start to think about this?

Well, I mean, you know, when I became department chair, I took a values based approach to leadership, and I think that centering values and leadership is is effective. And as I said, radical inclusivity is one of our values, and it’s important, you know, I think it’s important to articulate your values and remind yourself of your values, because as you go through leadership on a day to day basis, you can get tripped up and you can, you can, you know, you can set that aside. But if you’ve articulated your values, and you focus on your focus, and refocus on your values in the day to day implementation of your leadership, you can, you can stare back to that radical inclusivity.

Well, and I think that one of the places that I’m I think it’s really interesting to think about radical inclusivity, and I know that you really work on this as you lead a giant bunch of people, is like, how does it work on teams And and how do we think about teams, I’ve spent some time consulting on, you know, disc profiles and looking for difference in hiring. You don’t want a homogeneous workforce. You want there to be differences, because it leads to better thinking. People who are all the same are at risk of groupthink and sort of affirming each other all the time and not testing out. You know, friction can make ideas better. And I mean, there is a right level of friction, like a functional level of friction. But how do you think about radical inclusivity around teams?

Yeah, so I think with the kind of 101, you know, entry level approach to inclusivity, often you kind of list, you’re kind of aware of those groups that you want to be actively inclusive of, groups defined by gender, ethnicity, language. But when you get into radical inclusivity, you’re going to be inclusive of everyone, and that might require you to be aware of some of your own implicit biases. We have a tendency to. Dislike people who disagree with us. We have a tendency to dislike some kinds of personalities, people who come to work with a personality that’s abrupt or brusque, people who are not neurotypical and and then when we dislike that person, we don’t say, you know, we may fail to identify that that’s our own implicit bias, or that’s a categorical barrier, rather than saying, Well, I’m going to figure out how to work with this person, even though I’m not happy with you know, the disagreement that we have. We may disagree on political positions, we may disagree on on issues at work. But how do you work with somebody who personality irritates you? Figuring those kinds of things out is is a step towards radical inclusivity?

Yeah, I think that one of the things I’ve heard you say is just to be really explicit that you know, sometimes in on almost every team or group, there’s somebody who might be a disturber, somebody who’s like, Oh, they’re like the naysayer or whatever. And I think it’s really interesting to have a value of including those people instead of finding them to be the problem. So you, you allow them to have voice. You treat them with respect. You you can make that explicit to the team like, Yeah, we’re gonna listen to everybody, even if we don’t like their method or their way and and I think it’s really fascinating to start to include people also, because I think sometimes people change as they get heard. If they’ve been playing in in my systems theory that I like to work with, sometimes people play a role, and the naysayer might actually be just a role that they’ve taken on in a group or team and and so that can be really useful. If they are heard and they get integrated more into the team, they can actually put down that role. And sometimes the team has to actually step up and start to play that role consciously, instead of having somebody do it unconsciously, because the naysayer role is really functional on a team to keep people from you know, flying off a cliff because they’ve come up with some harebrained idea.

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting about how people can change when they when they are listened to. In our in our department, we use consensus decision making, and we formalize this consensus decision making, we make sure we know that we’ve listened to everyone in the room before we make a decision. If somebody has a dissenting opinion, they become the focus of attention, and we really do the work of listening to that dissenting opinion. And over the the years, when, as we’ve been using this formal consensus decision making, people have come to believe that if they have a dissenting opinion, they will be listened to, and then it’s not they. I think they’ve relaxed into it. They’ve relaxed into this decision making process because they trust that if they have a dissenting opinion, we’re going to pay attention to them and we’re going to figure out how to incorporate their concerns into our decision.

So we’ve been talking about the workplace, but I’m also curious about sort of this value of radical inclusivity in a time where there’s disagreement in the world, in the in a political forum, there’s a lot going on in the world right now, and people feel so strongly and, and so there’s, there’s a way to play it safe, and there’s a way to do radical inclusivity. And those two might look similar sometimes, but I do think they’re different and, and I’m just curious what, like, what do you think about that?

Well, I’ve been watching you for some time, and I know that on your that you you play in social, social media and Facebook and that kind of thing. And I know that some of your friend I think that your friend group represents the entire political spectrum, and you’ve got, you know, or Democrats and Republicans who you are friends with on Facebook, and you navigate that can Yeah, tell us a little bit about how you navigate those conversations.

Yeah. Well, I think that for whatever reason, I’m quite close to a lot of people that were my childhood friends, like, you know, over 100 Facebook friends, maybe 200 are people that I grew up with. And as an extrovert, I I’m a people collector, so I’m happy to hear their stories and their see the pictures of their kids, and I. And I came from a religious background, so sometimes those people actually have really much more conservative views than I do, and I and I like them. I actually like the people. I don’t always love everything they post. And you know, if people post things that I don’t love or that might feel harmful to our family, I might snooze them for 30 days and wait and see if they come around to a point of view that is less painful to me, but I don’t unfriend them. In most cases, I have a couple of rules, like people who are actively doing work to make same marriage illegal or actively campaigning to take away trans rights for kids. Those people don’t don’t get to stay but I in the 2016 presidential election. When Trump was elected, I actually asked my Facebook friends who were Trump supporters to send me the reasons that they felt good about him being elected, and they did, and then I posted them anonymously on my page, and it actually made me feel better, because they were people I cared for and respected, and they weren’t just giving me rhetoric. They were actually giving me heartfelt reasons. And it made me feel like, well, they may disagree with me, but I believe really strongly in democracy, and these are people who made the best choice they could from their standpoint. And I don’t know. I don’t, you know, I asked my liberal friends not to attack my conservative friends viewpoints, but to listen and and so I do that. I also think one thing that’s really important to think about is that I often don’t have in person conversations with people that have really different political views about politics. I’ll talk about lots of things, but I don’t need I want to know their viewpoints. I want to hear them, but social media is actually a really good place to do that without bickering or without, you know, fighting to the death over an idea. It’s interesting to hear each other’s points of view, and then in person, I often say, Well, I don’t think we want to talk about politics, because I don’t think we’re going to agree. And it may, you know, it probably isn’t going to add much to our relationship. How about if we just go to lunch and and that’s interesting too, because I feel like we have different levels of relationship with people, and we can, we can have difference in ways that work.

Yeah, so what’s the benefit then, either in the workplace or in your personal life, of being inclusive of people who have different viewpoints and different opinions and disagree with you? What’s the benefit there?

I think I’m not a fully formed human yet, so I don’t know all of my ideas yet. So sometimes hearing other people’s ideas that are different for me in a variety of ways, is helpful for understanding them. It’s and they’re not fully formed either. I mean, I have my, you know, my subversive queer activist, you know, hat on sometimes where you know, if they love me, they may change some views about Two Spirit, LGBTQ plus issues and and that’s interesting, you know, I’ve had that happen where people open. I’ve also noticed that sometimes when someone’s, for example, for me, if someone’s really religious, I might I have, I’m not sure what they think. And so sometimes it takes years for me to get around to that conversation with them and find out someone that I made something up about has different views than I thought they had. So I think there’s like we put we have these buckets, and sometimes we think people are in a bucket, but they’re not in the same bucket we thought they were in, right? Yeah, yeah, what about you? What do you like? Where? Where do you see that difference is important, and how do you think about talking about differences or illuminating them?

So. I what I’ve noticed over the years, especially during this past three years when I’ve been chair, is that being open to hearing lots of viewpoints leads to more robust solutions, making sure that you make space to hear a dissenting viewpoint and then understanding the concerns, why is that person descending what? What are the values that, that we’re not honoring for them? When we listen to that, we understand that, we incorporate that into our solutions. We just consistently, we always come up with a more robust solution, and we end up, you know, I end up getting what I thought I came to the meeting for what I wanted the decision to be, and also adding on to an augmenting that decision so that there are solutions that that incorporate other viewpoints and and are better, You know, better solution for the department overall.

Yeah, I think, I think too, it’s, I want to say one more thing that’s around, like, when we hire people, all the research shows that if we don’t use any kind of hiring system like a DISC profile or some psychological testing, or we aren’t intentional about diversity, we tend to hire people who look like us like we feel most comfortable with the people that are like us. And when we step into leadership, we’re very likely to also promote people that look like us. We’re likely to give them positions of power, we’re likely to listen to them more often on committees where so. So I think radical inclusivity also involves sort of lacking those things, like, there’s like a scan that I think is really important, you know, where I’m speaking up for people that are different than me, like, hey, I really want to hear their point of view, even if it’s not my point of view. So there’s, like, this process piece that we do as leaders who amplify all voices, or amplify voices that aren’t necessarily the most loud in the room, period. So if, if I’m the only woman in the room I want or there’s other women in the room, I pay attention to who’s talking and how often the research on who talks in meetings is huge, on if there’s, if there’s three men in a class and there’s 30 people in the class, the men might take up 50% of the talking time. And so as a teacher, I pay attention to who I call on and whose voices I give, because it changes the experience for all the students in that class that there that other voices are heard and amplified.

Yeah. And I also want to throw in neurodiversity here too, because I some of my research has to do with people who are on the autism spectrum, and often people on this on the spectrum who go into the workplace might bring all of the skills that are described in the job description, but they’re not interested in chatting around the water cooler. I had one person I was working with told me they just didn’t understand why they had to eat cake in the in the staff room every time somebody had a birthday that like that was taking time away from getting their job done. And, you know, recognizing that people have different ways of interacting with people, different interests, level in terms of how much they want to interact with other people, you know, but, but if, if we’re going to be sincere in the workplace, what that person’s there to do is whatever the job description says they’re going to do. They’re not actually required to, you know, chitchat, socialize, go out for a beer after work. That’s not part of the job. So, you know, how are we going to be inclusive of people who are getting their job done, doing their job effectively, but don’t want to go out for beers with us after work

Well? And I think that actually is another place to pay attention to that isn’t one of the protected classes, but how people make a family is something that we can be inclusive in our language, like not, you know, doing couples or somebody might live with a parent their whole lives, and that’s a family that isn’t something that’s typical in our culture. And somebody might choose to be single, somebody might choose to have children alone, somebody might choose to never have children. And all of these things are can be othering in the work. Place, and I think as a leader, because this is a podcast about leadership. After all, when we take think about leadership, radical inclusivity involves us figuring out the language to be inclusive in all of these areas. There’s so many, there’s so many different ways to let people be humans, and I think it’s really important, and that’s the leadership pieces, to affirm that the choices and the journey that people are on and and to let them participate fully. Yeah, well, anything else you want to say about radical inclusivity.

Just to be aware of, if you’re in a leadership position and you’re managing people, and, you know, deciding who’s sitting on what committee and what I would be systematic. I think I find that being systematic about populating committees has been a way of overcoming implicit biases and categorical biases, and also be aware of if there’s somebody, if there’s somebody that you find irritating, that you dislike, that you that you don’t, you know you don’t enjoy working with you quit. You can query that. Why don’t? Is there some, you know, Cate category membership here that’s making me dislike this person. But even if you don’t discover that category membership, and you don’t know why you don’t like that person, still take the time to be inclusive of that person.

Yeah, I think you said earlier, we don’t have to like everyone that we lead. Yeah, like we actually can not like someone and still be a good leader. And I think that’s really interesting. I think the other caveat of that is when this thing of people liking people who are like them can also come from other places in an organization so people of color, women, trans People, may have additional scrutiny in their work because people aren’t quite comfortable with them in their role, with who they are, the way that they present, and that may lead to stories about those people, and you have to choose, as a leader, to query whether or not those are discomfort with their identity or actual work problems, but the research shows that those people will be under more scrutiny for their leadership, for their work, for their decisions, For any disagreement that they have within their organizational structure, they will be under additional scrutiny, and so as a leader, it’s important to not take everything at face value, but to query what the whole story is.

Yeah, well, thanks for being here today. Melanie, we don’t often have a podcast without a guest, but this has been fun chatting with you.
It was really fun to talk to you about radical inclusivity, and let’s go experiment.

Thank you for joining us on another episode of the experimental leader. We hope you have found value in today’s episode, because we’re dedicated to helping you become the experimental leader you want to be to access the show notes or learn more. Visit Melanie parrish.com go experiment. You.