Belonging Builder Learning Lab Overview

So for today, what I want to do is I want to provide a high level overview of a new inclusive leadership development experience that I've developed. We're rolling out that I'm so excited about because it really brings leaders. It provides a framework to guide leaders through every step of the change so that they emerge as true, authentic inclusive leaders and can demonstrate inclusivity as a habit. So there's a program that does all that. I'm going to give a high level overview of that, pause, answer any questions, and then I definitely want you to leave with some practical tips that you can apply right away. So in other words, even if this program is not for you, you found nothing that is of interest to you that is okay. I still want to make sure that you gain some practical tips that I really love that that you can apply right away, right after this call and take to work to again spark more leaders, to keep inclusivity more Top of mind I mentioned I do like to keep these webinars to about 30 minutes because I know people are busy. I might have bit bit off more than I can chew with this one. So it might run about 40 minutes. Apologies if you have to leave. No worries. Like I said, I will make sure everybody gets the recording. Let us dive in. Okay. So last year I developed this experience I call the Belonging Builder Learning Lab. I almost don't want to call it a program, certainly not a training, because it's very different than that. It is really an experience that guides leaders through every stage of the change journey so that like I said, they emerge as more confident inclusive leaders. On the other side, it is meant to be engaged in small cohorts of about four to six people at a time. So consider a leadership team of about six people. Or it could be leaders across the organization that are not of the same team, but come together. I'm even implementing it with industry associations who their members go through in small groups. And they're not from the same organization, but maybe from the same industry. So it doesn't matter. But the point is small groups because that's how people engage more authentically, more quickly. And it's very interactive. It includes a little bit of asynchronous learning on your own, some self reflection, but really the the bulk of it is in small group discussion to talk through how you are internalizing this content to prepare you to show up as a more inclusive leader so that you learn and grow together. I'll explain a little bit more about the content and how it's implemented. But first I just want to start with the outcomes. So I'll talk about the outcomes, a little bit about the approach, the content, some actual results from clients, and then stop there and take some questions. Okay, so the outcomes. At the end of the experience, leaders should be able to articulate why belonging matters to them in terms of their own leadership goals, team goals, and work goals. The true outcome of embracing inclusivity as a competency is so that people feel that sense of belonging so you can achieve all the great things that come from that. Higher engagement, better decision making, that sort of thing. But it really stems from the leader internalizing this. It's not a check the box. It is part of their own leadership aspirations. So that's your first outcome. The second is that they really broaden their appreciation for all the many different dimensions of diversity that are inherent in everyone. Even people who think that they are not diverse, because maybe they make up the majority of the population and some organizations that might mean white men. They are, in fact, diverse. Everyone is diverse. And to feel that sense of belonging, people need to feel that you value and recognize what is unique to them and, you know, those aspects of their own identity and background that really shape and define who they are. So a broader appreciation of that and also an understanding of key inclusive behaviors, the foundational inclusive behaviors that I really recommend that help them better appreciate and bridge across those differences. Third, leave with an actual action plan, something that is doable, something. Something that is inspired by the leader, so it is authentic, it is relevant to them and their work and their role. So therefore, it will be implemented because it is, it is unique to them. And then the fourth outcome is one that, honestly, I wasn't anticipating. It would be such a strong outcome that the folks who go through this program really, really highly value way more than I thought, which was the trust and the connection that comes from the. These interactions with fellow participants. This is important because that trust and bond with the participants becomes almost like the home base that leaders can keep coming back to for inspiration, for support, for ideas that is needed to make inclusivity a habit as they continue to go forward well beyond engaging in this experience. And also, I think that people are just enjoying spending time, quality time with coworkers. They don't get enough of that. So that's an outcome. And when we get to the results that I share, I think you'll be surprised. I was very surprised how highly valued that particular outcome is. Okay, so those are the outcomes. How do we get there? I first want to speak a little bit about the guiding principles and the approaches that we took in developing this that make it again, I can't even call it a training because we do everything of, you know, learning from what doesn't work with training to have sustainable results. We tried to find a better way, a different solution, and we really thought of like, what are the barriers to people embracing new habits, new skills in general, but specifically barriers around doing that with topics related to inclusion and belonging and how do we overcome those barriers in this experience? So the barrier number one that we solve for is honestly, people just don't really, really know what this is all about. And this speaks to some of the content that I got in, got into in previous webinars. You know, let's be honest, words dei these days, those are kind of fighting words in organizations. People immediately tune out. So I like to think, I think people like me because my approach is really approachable. I don't believe anybody needs to get a PhD in this stuff. It's not rocket science. But it does have to be relevant and it does have to speak with people, and it does have to draw people in rather than make people come up with reasons why they shouldn't engage. I like to position things with simple language, approachable content relevant to any role in the organization. You don't have to be in HR for this to make sense and be relevant to you. So we just took like a super practical, hopefully a little bit of a fun approach to this to draw people in. The second barrier is, especially when it comes to inclusion and belonging, people are just kind of afraid to engage. You know, our cancel culture, one mistake and man, you know, they could be paying for it forever. They just don't want to embarrass themselves or hurt someone else because they feel ill equipped to engage across differences. So our solution here is again, in those small groups, but those small discussion groups, the small cohorts that go this through this together, there is a safe and brave space for people to talk candidly, to work through maybe some of their fears and concerns, to step outside of their comfort zone in a controlled environment, with lots of time to practice inclusive behaviors with each other before sort of going prime time with it. So they build their confidence and they start to realize, you know what? This is not that hard. I can do this. Even if someone doesn't consider themselves again to be diverse, they have an opportunity to tap into what makes them unique as the first step of having more courage to engage with what makes other people unique, even if it's unfamiliar to them. The third Barrier is, you know, a common problem with training. What do you do after the workshop is over? So the way that we solve for this is give people a lot of tangible, practical examples of how to implement this. We want people out of the discussion mode into the action mode as quickly as possible because you learn and get better through action. And so lots of tangible examples that people can use to apply immediately, like right away, we call them quick wins that people get all throughout this content so that they can start flexing new muscles and, and practicing so that they have a lot of ways to continue this authentically going forward. And then the fourth barrier, I probably should have put this number one because this is the biggest barrier that is a blocker for even getting started. People just was like no time. Folks are busy. I appreciate that and I want them to pour as much energy into their day jobs, the job that they're getting paid for as much as possible. So we really tried to think about how do we streamline this as much as possible and almost provide content in more like micro doses. So small bits of content more frequently that accomplishes two things. One, it's doable in busy schedules and also it keeps it top of mind because the biggest challenge to showing up with a more inclusive mindset is people just get busy and they default back to their normal ways of doing things. So if we can through this experience, have fewer touches, sorry, have more frequent touch points, but really, really, really bite size that it fits into busy schedules, it's an asset. And so I'll talk a little bit more about that of how we accomplish that. Those are the guiding principles. So the content that unfolds through again asynchronous work and group discussions is nine lessons organized into three phases. So each phase bites off again guides the leader through a milestone in the change journey. So phase one is called Align. It really speaks to building awareness around the benefits of belonging and inclusivity and the own one's innate desire to embrace belonging and inclusivity. It's, you know, the each, each phase has, has content that I'll show you in a little bit to get them there. But also each phase ends with a very tangible outcome. So the outcome of this phase is the leader has aligned the benefits of inclusion and belonging to their own personal leadership, aspiration work and team level goals. And they end with their belonging why statement. They can authentically articulate in their own words why inclusivity matters to them. And this is really important, especially I find your younger early career professionals, your Gen Xers, sorry, your Gen Zers, they're showing up at work and they want inclusive culture of belonging. And just reading it off your website is not enough for them. They want to hear leaders and their new colleagues speak to it authentically. Give me examples of what that looks like. So we're equipping leaders to be able to speak to it authentically. So it's not just like they're saying the corporate jargon. They're actually talking to it in a way that resonates with people so that they believe, yes, this leader gets it. Phase two focuses on the knowledge of what it takes to create that culture of belonging and the ability to demonstrate inclusive behaviors. This phase is called ACT because in this phase, ample time to learn and practice the three foundational inclusive behaviors that I think every leader must demonstrate as much as possible. Be self aware of your own identities and the limitations of your life experiences. Be curious of the identities and life experiences and ideas and perspectives of others and seek to understand those differences, even when you don't agree are the foundational inclusive behaviors. So the goal of ACT is to practice them in the safe space and to leave with an understanding of which inclusive behaviors do you already demonstrate and which are strengths and where can you do a little bit better? And then the third phase, the last three lessons focus on the ability again and the reinforcement piece. So it is to achieve success with fostering a greater sense of belonging by actively demonstrating inclusive behaviors. So leaders will leave with their own personalized commitment and action plan, lots of ideas and resources to be consistent in taking action and then also taking a pause and step back and saying, okay, what does moving forward look like? And they can choose different pathways from one, investing deeper in strengthening inclusive leadership within yourself. Two would be to broaden it a little bit and maybe how to take this and apply it at the team level and then how to think about it more broadly at the organizational level, maybe rethinking policies, practices that have more of a systemic impact across the organization, their choice depending on where they are, where they see opportunity. But it ends with again that action and commitment plan. And also a call with me so that I can talk through and provide any advice, guidance or recommendations for how to move this forward. So again, the learning doesn't stop here. They can deepen or broaden their knowledge and their abilities. Each of those lessons, each nine lessons is comprised of, like I said, sort of a micro dosing of content and engagement. There's up to maximum 15 minutes of pre work to prepare for those small group discussions. And that is always A really short explainer video. I've really honed the practice of taking big concepts and boiling it down to the essence. None of them are more than four minutes. Then you'll have about five minutes of some type of self reflection exercise based on the content in the explainer video. And if they want to, an optional quick win. A quick Win is always something. You can implement this today again to start engaging others outside of the small cohort, your team members for example, then that's asynchronous. You do that on your own by accessing the content platform created. And I'll show that in a second. But then the meat of it is when you meet for your group discussions, they are all designed to be done within 30 minutes. That's actually doable. You know, you got to spend some time. But 30 minutes, people can carve out that time. And honestly they do like those group discussions because they're making these connections with coworkers that have been lacking. And so the group discussions is a time to share your reflections again, solidify it a little bit, learn together, build that trusting network so that when you're ready to implement and demonstrate more broadly, you have that support system. Okay, I want to enough sort of talking about the content. I want to share what the, what the content looks like and just to make it maybe a little bit more real. Okay, so it's on a really simple, easy to access content platform. So like I said, each of the nine lessons is laid out here and each one again has just two steps for the pre work. Again 15 minutes max. You can watch the explainer video. This explainer video is for lesson two. And let's start with the end in mind. Belonging. What it is and why it matters. Belonging. Okay, you don't need to see any more of that. But I promise you, none of them are more than five minutes. Most of them are four and three minutes. So they watch the explainer video. Totally doable. But then to prepare for the discussion, there's always a reflection exercise. It's a simple downloadable, it's a fillable form so they can capture their responses and bring it with them to the discussion. And the questions are thoughtful, they're easy to answer, but thoughtful. But again, it's all about internalizing. What does this mean for you? How do you take action on it? But if somebody's super eager and like I want to take action right away, there's always some quick win suggested exercise. These are things that can be implemented in your next one on one or team meeting or engagement with Anyone that's relevant to the particular topic for that lesson. So that's the layout for each of the lessons. And then at the very end, like I said, you know, once you have access to this, here's just sort of my best of my best and I'm always adding to it. Favorite resources to support you to be an inclusive leader in your day to day. So for example, here's a popular one, seven questions for inclusive decision making. So the next time you're in a meeting or strategic planning, here's seven ways or seven questions that as a team you can pose and answer to help support you to take a more inclusive approach to your decision making. Really practical stuff like that. I always think about how can this work be adapted in meetings because that is where people get their work done. Okay, I just want to talk about results and then I'm going to stop, shut up, I promise you, and then take questions and then move on to practical tips that even if none of this is appealing to you, suggestions of how you can get leaders to practice inclusivity and keep it top of mind more than they currently are now. But just to finish off about this program, in terms of the implementation, there is a lot of flexibility because I know again, I'm trying to take an equitable, flexible approach to this. What might work in one organization may not be the best approach for others. So how you accomplish these nine lessons? As a cohort, you can do one lesson a week, which is what most people do. They like to keep that consistent momentum. They can do the 10 minutes asynchronous, the 30 minutes weekly. A lot of times they already had a standing meeting and they just use 30 minutes of that to have the discussions. Other organizations, that's just too frequent and they can't. So they're going to do those small group discussions with the cohort that's going through this at the same time once a month. That would be nine months. And others kind of batch it and they say, you know what, we want fewer interactions. So we're going to bite off three lessons at a time. That would be about 30 minutes of pre work each time and then two hours when they're together to talk through three lessons at a time. So, and I'm sure there could be other versions of implementation. Facilitation also has options. This was designed to be self facilitated, so a DIY experience, which means that each cohort member takes a turn playing host. I don't even say facilitator because it doesn't even require that much skill. Host to kick off the group discussion. Everyone is capable of doing that. People do share a sense of ownership and accountability and there's discussion guides and everything like that that make it easy. Some people say we don't care how easy it is, we still don't want to do it. So you can have myself or one of members of my team who's certified in this program to show up as a facilitator. Now the advantage of that is we do all the facilitation, but we're also available for one on one coaching and a little bit of extra stuff because we're familiar with this content. Maybe you like that model, but you want to equip your own facilitators internally so they can scale this and do a bunch of small cohorts over some time. And so we're certainly equipped to certify someone within your organization to play that facilitator role. Like I said, I developed the content for all of this myself and my team last year. And then we piloted this at the beginning of this year with a few, few organizations. But we really wanted to get a nice cross section of industries and types of organizations. So here's some of the pilot organizations. So you can see financial services, health and human services, nonprofits, arts and culture organizations, an industry association and a government entity, slash municipality. That way we could get like a lot of feedback from a lot of, you know, different lenses. And we took that feedback and we made refinements and enhancements to the content and feel really strongly about it. So we've been rolling it out more broadly and right now the clients who are engaging in this, they really vary. But I would say the common denominator is a lot of them are in organizations that are experiencing high growth and want to get ahead of that because they know with that growth they have to recruit and retain talent that maybe doesn't look like their traditional workforce. So their workforce is becoming more diverse and or their client base, customer base is becoming more diverse and they need to equip their leaders to lead in this new, more diverse era. So those would include financial services, professional services like consulting firms, a lot of hospitals, and also I would say engineering, construction, manufacturing companies who again, a lot of growth and have realized that to support that growth they can't appeal to only 50% of the population and they got to do better attracting and retaining women, for example. So that speaks to kind of like, you know, and it's also just organizations that are proactive and again seeing where the future is going and what it takes to attract, retain great talent and we want to equip leaders to be able to do that. Those are the organizations that are, that are, I think utilizing this experience, a couple of more specific use cases from current clients. So there was an organization recently underwent a merger. So they've got a new senior leadership team and they're geographically dispersed. Also they don't really have strong connections so they're going through this and one they're establishing in the newly merged organization. Inclusion and belonging is a priority. Our leaders are going to be equipped to demonstrate that and lead by example. And they're building that trusting relationship among the new senior leadership team which, you know, the senior leaders have a really cohesive, you know, relationship that cascades through and will make this post merger experience, I think a lot more effective for everyone. Another use case, there's an organization that they're using this program and integrating it into their emerging leader curriculum. So as they identify top talent through their organization before they can be promoted to the leadership, next level leadership, they go through this. A couple of industry associations saw value in hey, we can create this experience for our members to go through because they're asking for something like this. Their organizations may not be providing this kind of professional development and we can, which will be a real value add for our association. And the fourth use case is a couple of organizations are not using this experience wholesale, but they're picking and choosing some content to weave into the new hire onboarding experience. So all new hires within their first six months must watch some of the explainer videos. Then we facilitate a virtual drop in session where they have that discussion experience. And that's been really valuable because one, it helps the organization stand out in the eyes of new hires. They're like, oh, I've never experienced something like this for our company. They really do mean that inclusion and belonging are core values. And they're giving me as a new hire the opportunity to sort of explore how I can contribute to those company values. But also they're asking me what do I think in terms of my sense of belonging. That feels really good and really special. I talked about the outcomes, but how do we measure success? There are a couple ways embedded in the experience. There's a pre and post engagement self assessment so we can measure right away. How much did those nine lessons move the needle in terms of preparing leaders to demonstrate inclusivity more regularly, longer term, not included in the program, but certainly options once you end the engagement. If you want to go deeper and see how an individual is strengthening Their inclusive leadership skills. There's a IDI inclusive leadership assessment. It's from a third party, but myself and others on my team are certified to do it. I would suggest doing that as a baseline at the end of the experience and then doing it another year later after. Again a lot of Runway with demonstrating inclusive behaviors to see how deeply ingrained it's become in your leadership. The other one I suggest similarly doing it as a baseline right after a leader completes the program and then doing it maybe a year later a team level or an organization wide level workplace culture of assessment in order to gauge again by being a more inclusive leader, is it translating into employees feeling a greater sense of belonging? I don't have long term results. I have a lot of near term results. So these are averages again from the pre and post assessments of going through the nine lesson experience and the on average rated 4.8 in terms of overall experience, the personal impact of the experience and the quality of the content. Some of the questions that are in the self assessment I've shown here. So you can see the impact that it's had just in terms of again how someone feels in terms of their awareness, desire, knowledge and ability to be an inclusive leader from before the experience to after. There's a 70% lift in how people rated themselves in terms of understanding belonging and the benefits. 65% lift in terms of understanding inclusive behaviors, 44% lift in terms of confidence. I'd like to see that more but you know, I think confidence comes from practice, but at least it's a lift. People feel more confident than they did from the beginning. And again the one that surprised me and it really speaks volumes of People want connection, especially leaders. Leaders experience the highest rate of loneliness because who do they talk to? They often don't have those trusted relationships with their peers. This builds it so the sense of connection and trust really really went up among that that core cohort group. And then just some qualitative feedback that also came back from the survey. People like the structure, learn a topic, talk about it, put it to practice. Really intuitive, useful across all levels, a lot of practical tools, easy to digest content, an action plan prompts, new ways of thinking, informative, challenging and fun. We could use more fun at work. Please, please.