Beth Ridley uses a cake recipe as a metaphor for inclusive leadership: treat employees like different ingredients, handled separately to bring out their best. When a resistant leader avoided DEI workshops but attended one on belonging, he found it valuable. Her point: change the language, keep the strategy.
Pulling this all together. I like to use really simple analogies. Sometimes people work better with visuals they can remember all of this. Think of belonging again as the outcome that we want. We want a delicious cake, for example. We want our culture to be the best. So belonging kind of represents that, right? Just like, you know, we all want to work together to make the most delicious cake possible. We have to appreciate we have differences at work that come in the package of employees. Every employee is different, just like the ingredients that go into a cake. If we wanted to cobble a cake together, we could throw all the ingredients together, put it in the oven, we'd come up with something, and it might be a tolerable tasting cake. But we're not going for just average cake. We want amazing cake. So that means we have to appreciate, you know, all these different ingredients. All our different employees need to be treated differently to bring out the best in them. And how do you know how to treat each ingredient and pull them together? That is really down to inclusive and flexible leadership behaviors. Or that's the recipe that you follow the directions, right? So the directions may say, you know, don't just crack the eggs. You might want to separate the egg yolk and the whites. Don't just throw in all of the dry ingredients. You may want to sift them. Don't just throw in the butter. You may want to melt the butter. We are being inclusive and flexible in our approach of how we treat our different ingredients, that is different employees, so that when we come together, we're all on our own individual, highest cylinders. And then we're doing so collectively to create a more than tolerable cake, an amazing cake. And then people sort of get that. And again, people see themselves in it. It's easy to understand. I get zero pushback. And I will tell you, ironically and literally, I can't make this story up. Right before I was starting this webinar, I was talking to a client, and I've been doing a series of leadership develop inclusive leadership development workshops with them using these words. And they did have one leader who was very resistant, didn't want to come to any of the workshops. He finally came to my workshop, and so HR followed up with him afterwards and said, how was the workshop? He said, oh, it was really great. A lot of good tidbits, really well done. And they said, so what was your resistance? And he literally said, I thought it was going to be DEI. I am literally not making this up. This happened 30 minutes before joining this. It was DEI. It was just belonging differences inclusion and flexibility. Words matter. Don't scrap your strategies. If you're getting pushback, your strategies are fine. Doing something is better than not doing anything. Keep the momentum going. Bring people in with some different language.
