Book summary “How to Be an Inclusive Leader”: summary

Introduction

You want to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace, but you often hesitate because you fear saying the wrong thing. You might struggle to recognize systemic inequities or assume that meritocracy alone drives success.

Jennifer Brown argues in How to Be an Inclusive Leader that you must progress through a four-stage continuum from unawareness to active advocacy. You achieve this by recognizing your privilege, checking your unconscious biases, and championing systemic equity.

The book provides a clear roadmap to help you transform your leadership approach.

• How do you assess your current place on the continuum?
• What steps dismantle bias and covering in your organization?
• How do you become a visible champion for marginalized colleagues?

1. Finding Your Role and Reframing Privilege

Your daily choices determine where you stand on the inclusive leader continuum. Some professionals champion equity, while others remain hesitant or defensive.

Leaders often remain on the sidelines due to fear of mistakes or deny inequities, while privilege acts as an invisible tailwind that shields dominant groups from systemic hurdles.

The Three Types of Leaders

In diversity, equity, and inclusion work, you generally fall into one of three categories:

• Leaders who actively champion equity;
• leaders who remain on the sidelines out of fear of making mistakes;
• leaders who deny or deflect the existence of workplace inequities.

Many leaders remain inactive because they fear using the wrong vocabulary. Others offer common deflections to avoid responsibility. They claim people are too sensitive or that unconscious bias training has already solved all major issues.

Understanding Privilege

Privilege acts as an invisible tailwind that provides unearned benefits. It offers protection from systemic hardships, making it difficult for those in power to recognize unequal realities.

You may hold dominant identities and fail to understand how the professional world is optimized for people like you. Having privilege does not mean you are immune to all life hardships. It means you are shielded from specific daily struggles regarding bias, exclusion, and violence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian communities faced increased hate crimes and scapegoating. Black and Hispanic communities were overrepresented in low-paying front-line jobs and suffered higher mortality rates due to deep-seated structural disparities.

Calling In Versus Calling Out

You can alienate people with privileged identities by aggressively calling them out for their mistakes. Inclusive leaders should practice calling in behavior to invite individuals of all backgrounds into the conversation.

Calling out individual harmful actions and microaggressions remains necessary in certain moments. Dismissing entire groups solely based on their privileged identities creates defensiveness. That approach isolates potential allies from participating in systems change.

2. Uncovering Bias and Practicing Humility

Uncovering unconscious biases requires leaders to embrace humility, abandon the need to be right, and conduct inventories of their homogeneous inner circles.

Leaders often suffer from not knowing what they do not know until an experience humbles them and forces them to reexamine their assumptions about systemic fairness. You must progress through the Unaware stage of the Inclusive Leader Continuum by learning with humility about the challenges other identities face, educating yourself on bias, and embracing mistakes as powerful opportunities for growth.

In 2014, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told an audience of mostly women at the Grace Hopper Conference to rely on good karma rather than asking for raises, sparking global backlash. He later acknowledged this as a humbling learning experience that transformed his perspective on workplace equity and accessibility.

The Unaware Stage

Building inclusive environments requires leaders to check their egos at the door, abandon the compulsive need to always be right, and remain open to what they do not know. When participants in inclusion training agree to suspend their need to be right or viewed as good people, they experience a sense of relief that allows them to stay present and genuinely curious about other perspectives.

Wade Davis, the NFL's first LGBTQ+ inclusion consultant, begins his trainings by asking participants if they can agree for the day to be uninterested in being right and uninterested in thinking of themselves as good people. You can adopt this mindset by asking yourself specific questions:

• Can you agree for today to be uninterested in being right?
• For today, can you be uninterested in thinking of yourself as a good person?

Leaders must perform their own foundational research on historical discrimination before expecting individuals from marginalized groups to educate them. Relying on colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds to explain systemic inequities imposes exhausting emotional labor and can lead to burnout among the very people advocating for change.

Uncovering Unconscious Biases

Unconscious biases act as mental shortcuts shaped by socialization, manifesting as affinity bias, confirmation bias, and everyday microaggressions that hinder objective decision-making. Affinity bias leads people to favor those who share similar backgrounds, such as the same alma mater, contributing to widespread C-suite conformity. Confirmation bias causes individuals to ignore information that contradicts their existing beliefs about workplace fairness.

In 2020, approximately 86 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were White men, despite White men making up only 35 percent of the US population. A 2015 New York Times article reported that fewer large companies were run by women than by men named John.

You need to get out of your echo chamber and tackle these biases through deliberate exploration:

• Learn more about the experiences of people with different identities by revisiting school history to understand what may be missing.
• Investigate your biases and examine how they impact your beliefs and view of the world.
• Get out of your echo chamber by intentionally consuming media, books, and social media channels from different identity groups.

The Inner Circle Inventory

The Inner Circle Inventory is a practical assessment tool designed to help leaders identify patterns of homogeneity in their professional and personal relationships and recognize their avoidance of the unfamiliar. By listing trusted peers, mentors, and advisors and marking differences across diversity dimensions such as ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic background, leaders gain a bird's-eye view of their lack of diverse representation.

You can run this assessment yourself by completing a structured grid exercise:

• Write down the names of your trusted inner circle in the first column of a grid.
• Fill in the top row of the grid with various diversity dimensions such as ethnicity, age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, education, disabilities, parenting status, political beliefs, and socioeconomic background.
• Place an X for each person where their identity differs from your own in any given category.
• Total up the X marks to assess the lack of representation and difference in your life.

3. Navigating Identity and Covering

You must educate yourself on privilege, identity, and the unequal playing field to progress. The Aware stage requires you to learn how your own identities shape your worldview.

The Aware stage requires understanding intersectionality and recognizing the heavy emotional tax employees pay when hiding core dimensions of their identity to conform.

Underrepresented colleagues often hide parts of their identity to blend in and avoid discrimination. This constant masking leads to employee fatigue and diminished performance. You can apply specific practices to explore these dynamics:

• Think about your own identities and the way they impact how you show up in the workplace.
• Use the iceberg to understand more about your own identities and those aspects of your identity you chose to keep below the waterline. Challenge yourself to lower your waterline.
• Educate yourself about other identity groups. Examine the assumptions and judgements you make about people from those groups. Understand where these assumptions come from and how biases may influence your perceptions.

Intersectionality and the Privilege Walk

Kimberle Crenshaw originated intersectionality to describe the nexus of multiple stigmatized identities. You carry multiple, complex identities that provide simultaneous advantages and disadvantages. Jennifer Brown uses the Rubik's Cube as a metaphor for intersecting identities where each side represents a different dimension.

The privilege walk exercise forces participants to confront how society privileges certain identities over others through a movement-based activity. Participants start in a horizontal line and move forward or backward based on personal identity statements. This exposes unearned advantages and leads to complex feelings of shock, guilt, and shame for those who find themselves at the front.

Jennifer Brown participated in her first privilege walk and found herself standing at the front of the room with very few others. She experienced shock, guilt, and comfort associated with unearned ease.

Covering and the Iceberg Metaphor

Employees frequently hide core dimensions of their identity to conform to dominant workplace cultures. Using an iceberg metaphor, visible traits sit above the waterline as acceptable norms. Invisible challenges remain hidden beneath to avoid negative stereotyping and microaggressions. This covering ultimately saps energy and stifles creativity.

In Jennifer Brown's sessions, a leader came out as Jewish to his majority Christian management team. An executive admitted hiding that he lacked a college degree. Another shared growing up in an abusive and alcoholic family.

You can reflect on these hiding behaviors by answering direct questions:

• Which aspects of your identity do you make visible?
• Which aspects of your identity do you keep concealed beneath your waterline?
• What would make you feel comfortable and safe enough to lower your waterline?

4. Stepping Into the Active Stage

Traditional corporate leadership rewards certainty. Inclusive leaders must cultivate humility and vulnerability to build trust and psychological safety across differences.

The Active stage demands vulnerability, powerful personal storytelling, and direct involvement in organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

A pharmaceutical company CEO held a three-day meeting with Black women after data showed a career drop-off, which led to authentic dialogue and systems changes. Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly came out in 2014 after reading letters from struggling youth.

Embracing Vulnerability

The Active stage requires leaders to put their learning into practice by embracing vulnerability, sharing personal stories, and taking calculated risks. You can practice this evolution through direct steps:

• Open yourself up with vulnerability and begin to uncover your personal story.
• Start to share it with others.
• Seek out and center the stories of people around you who don't share your identity.
• Learn more about your organization's DEI program and get actively involved in some way.
• Work to get a DEI program started if your organization does not have one.
• Personally commit to becoming a mentor or sponsor to high-potential diverse talent.
• Don't rule out reverse mentoring and opportunities for your own learning as a mentee of someone with a different set of identities.

The Power of Storytelling

Personal storytelling shifts hearts and minds, humanizes leaders, and builds deeper connections that transcend transactional workplace relationships. Erin Weed recommends an arc consisting of Story, Truth, and Universal Truth to structure effective personal stories.

Joze Piranian avoided speaking and interacting with people for 25 years due to a severe stutter. At age 27, he decided to take control of his personal narrative and change his relationship with fear. He challenged himself to talk to a hundred strangers each week, eventually speaking to tens of thousands and becoming an internationally acclaimed speaker. Jennifer Brown overcame vocal surgery that ended her singing career and transformed it into a DEI advocacy platform.

Diving into DEI Actionable Steps

Active involvement requires getting personal, checking leadership pipelines, involving mid-level managers, building cultural competency, and avoiding the trap of taking over existing grassroots efforts without consultation.

During the spring 2020 spike in anti-Asian violence, a company made a one-time charitable donation without consulting their Asian ERG, missing the employees' actual need for leadership solidarity and targeted support.

Conclusion

The four stages of the continuum fit together as a continuous journey of personal growth and systemic responsibility. You must move from unconscious unawareness through careful self-examination and cultural understanding until you reach active advocacy. This transformation requires patience, emotional resilience, and a willingness to accept discomfort while you learn from your mistakes.

1. Assess your daily habits and notice where your blind spots and homogeneous networks limit your perspective.
2. Listen to the experiences of underrepresented colleagues without defensiveness or centering your own feelings.
3. Use your influence to share credit, amplify quiet voices, and advocate for structural changes in hiring and promotion.
4. Accept that inclusion is an ongoing practice rather than a final destination or a static achievement.

10 Key Ideas

1. Jennifer Brown argues in How to Be an Inclusive Leader that you must progress through a four-stage continuum from unawareness to active advocacy by recognizing your privilege, checking your unconscious biases, and championing systemic equity.
2. Privilege acts as an invisible tailwind that provides unearned benefits and protection from systemic hardships, making it difficult for those in power to recognize unequal realities.
3. Inclusive leaders should practice calling in behavior to invite individuals of all backgrounds into the conversation rather than aggressively calling them out and alienating potential allies.
4. Leaders must perform their own foundational research on historical discrimination rather than imposing exhausting emotional labor on colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds.
5. You need to get out of your echo chamber and tackle unconscious biases through deliberate exploration of the experiences of people with different identities.
6. The Inner Circle Inventory is a practical assessment tool designed to help leaders identify patterns of homogeneity in their professional and personal relationships and recognize their avoidance of the unfamiliar.
7. Employees frequently hide core dimensions of their identity beneath a metaphorical waterline to conform to dominant workplace cultures and avoid negative stereotyping or microaggressions.
8. The Active stage demands vulnerability, powerful personal storytelling, and direct involvement in organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
9. Personal storytelling shifts hearts and minds, humanizes leaders, and builds deeper connections that transcend transactional workplace relationships.
10. You must move from unconscious unawareness through careful self-examination and cultural understanding until you reach active advocacy, accepting that inclusion is an ongoing practice rather than a static achievement.