The Inclusive Leadership Programme

To lead is to belong. To belong is to lead.

The Inclusive Leadership Programme is a one-to-one development programme for individual leaders, delivered over six to nine months. It is built on three elements: how you lead, how your leadership is experienced by others, and the work of bringing the two into alignment. It is demanding work, designed to leave you with an established leadership practice that the people around you can recognise and rely on.

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What the programme is

Leadership research has moved away from treating leadership as a property of individuals and towards understanding it as a relational process: leadership exists in the relationships between people and is co-constructed by those who grant a leader their authority. Leaders are accountable to the people through whom their leadership is realised, and the experience of those people is the measure of the leadership. Where psychological safety is present, people at every level contribute ideas, challenge decisions and take responsibility (Edmondson, 1999); where leadership is shared rather than concentrated in one role, teams perform better (Carson, Tesluk & Marrone, 2007). The programme develops leaders accordingly: its aim is an organisation in which leadership capability is widely distributed, and the leader's success is measured by the capability of the people around them. It is structured around four core foundations: inclusion, belonging, authenticity and innovation.

Foundations

Inclusion

Inclusion starts from understanding difference: the different experiences, needs and expectations people bring to the same organisation. The work of the programme is to bridge the gap between them, so that everyone has an equitable experience and feels genuinely included.

Belonging

People contribute fully only where they feel they belong: where they can speak, challenge and be themselves without penalty. Belonging is built through everyday practice, in who is heard, who is credited and who is developed. The programme works on how you listen, how you respond to contradiction, and what your teams have learned about raising bad news.

Authenticity

A performed leadership style is hard to sustain, and people can tell. The programme builds your practice on who you actually are, including the question most programmes avoid: what you are for. Purpose is woven through the whole programme rather than confined to a single module.

Innovation

New ideas appear only where it feels safe to offer them. Psychological safety is the best-documented condition for people sharing early-stage thinking, and the programme helps you build it in your team, so that new ideas are shared openly and innovation becomes part of how the team works.

How the programme works

How leadership is experienced

We gather structured 360-degree feedback from the people around you, through a process designed around our framework, alongside your own account of your practice. The most useful material is usually the gap between the two, so we do not proceed on self-report alone.
Building the practice

Months of one-to-one work, combining teaching where it helps with coaching where the work goes deeper. Your working week provides the material, and we coach against live leadership situations.
Embedding the practice

The aim is lasting change: the practice becomes how you lead. Progress is reviewed at points agreed at the start of the engagement, and we hold ourselves to the same standard.

The evidence

Companies whose management teams are above-average in diversity report 45% of revenue from products launched in the past three years, against 26% for their peers, with EBIT margins up to nine points higher — BCG, How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation (2018), a study of more than 1,700 companies in eight countries.

Inclusive leaders report 17% higher team performance, 20% better decision quality and 29% more collaboration, and leaders account for up to 70 percentage points of the difference in whether employees feel belonging and psychological safety — Harvard Business Review, What Makes an Inclusive Leader? (2023).

Psychological safety, a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, is associated with learning behaviour, which in turn predicts team performance: Edmondson, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (1999), a field study of 51 work teams published in Administrative Science Quarterly.

Teams with higher levels of shared leadership, where influence is distributed across members rather than concentrated in one role, outperform teams led vertically alone: Carson, Tesluk & Marrone, Shared Leadership in Teams (2007), published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Practicalities

The programme typically runs for six to nine months with regular one-to-one meetings, because practice takes time to develop. Where circumstances require a shorter engagement, we adapt the structure while keeping the method. Team-wide leadership development is delivered under Training & Development and can be added where appropriate.

Layered mountain ridges fading into blue morning light — The Inclusive Leadership Programme

Who it’s forIndividual leaders at any career stage: emerging, mid-career or senior. It suits leaders who want their practice to be experienced as clearly as it is intended, and who are ready to do the work.

Discuss your requirements

Ready when you are. Get in touch and we will set up an introductory call.