Put Inclusive Leadership Principles into Practice

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

List the four essential skills Salesforce leaders focus on to maintain a high-performance culture.
Describe strategies for centering equality within these areas.

Four Essential Skills

Now that you have a better idea of what it means to be an inclusive leader, let’s discuss how we can put those principles into practice to drive performance across your business. At Salesforce we promote four essential sets of leadership skills that focus on improving performance and driving results.

Align & Set Goals
Measure & Manage
Activate & Sustain
Reward & Recognize

These essential skills allow managers to prioritize work, deliver results, tackle underperformance, and reward performers. This unit outlines how to engage in these essential skills while creating inclusive work environments in which employees are empowered to perform their best work.

Essential Skill #1: Align & Set Goals

This essential skill focuses on setting expectations, not just for individual performance, but also for the culture of the team and the company. Employee success relies on clear communication of expectations and goals. Employees won’t feel empowered and supported to achieve their goals if there is confusion about what the goals are.

Ensure goals are understood and mutually agreed upon. Never assume that your team members understand instructions for an assignment or task the same way you do. Always strive to confirm understanding and provide clarity when needed. Remember, we all process information through the lens of our individual perspectives. Ensure that each individual has a clear understanding of what they’re expected to do. Also ask, up front, if the individual thinks there may be any obstacles that will inhibit completing a goal. If there are any, document them and co-develop a plan for mitigating those obstacles going forward.

Essential Skill #2: Measure & Manage

This skill focuses on how performance is managed through the fiscal year and how success is measured. This is where leaders simultaneously determine how successful their teams are in the pursuit of a goal while providing consistent coaching and support to ensure team members have the best possible chance at success. Inclusive leaders can utilize the following practices to ensure that equality is at the center of these practices.

Prioritize Meaningful and Consistent Quarterly Check-ins and One-on-One Meetings

Quarterly check-ins and one-on-one meetings are critical engagements between leaders and their team members, where space is made to ensure alignment, give and get feedback, and take action when needed. The importance of these connections cannot be overstated. These touch points should be used to discuss many topics (progress toward goals, performance—both praise and redirection, career aspirations, and well-being). But the most important aspect of these conversations is making sure they are meaningful.

As an inclusive leader, make sure you’re creating a psychologically safe space in which the team member feels comfortable not just elevating their triumphs, but also addressing their concerns. From an equality perspective, this is a critical step in addressing concerns before they impact performance.

Identify and Address Equality Concerns Early

It’s an unfortunate truth that social barriers negatively impact well-being, especially for individuals with underrepresented identities. Your team members may be experiencing microaggressions on the job, or blatant discrimination and oppression, that’s impacting their experience in the workplace.

We often teach that it’s the employee’s responsibility to let their manager know if they are facing a challenge or obstacle that’s preventing them from completing a task, and this is true. However, it’s important to remember that this practice can seem very risky to a marginalized or underrepresented colleague who is experiencing real discrimination in the workplace. They may be reluctant to say something for fear of being ignored, or worse, retaliated against.

Inclusive leaders create psychologically safe spaces and encourage and empower their employees to speak out about any equality concerns they have. These issues must be addressed before the performance review stage. Listen with empathy during check-ins and one-on-one meetings. Encourage frequent discussion around equality topics throughout the year. Encourage allyship and understanding. Take every equality concern seriously, and document how it was addressed throughout the year.

Check Your Bias at the Door

Whether it’s during quarterly check-ins or through the formal performance evaluation process, we must check our own biases while providing feedback and coaching regarding a team member’s performance. Bias is one of the factors that can destroy fair and equitable performance management and evaluation. Checking one’s bias requires deep reflection and intentional effort to understand how and why we process information the way we do. Inclusive leaders know how to check to see if their decisions, feedback, or coaching are based on tangible insight or subjective opinion. They ask questions such as:

Am I evaluating this person based on what they have or have not accomplished, or based on the fact that they think/act/look/behave/dress differently from me?
Do I measure other team members using the same criteria, or am I evaluating this individual using a different set of standards?
Is there a pattern to how I evaluate underrepresented/marginalized individuals, and does that pattern differ from how I evaluate non-marginalized groups?
Would my evaluation practices stand up to scrutiny?

Essential Skill #3: Activate & Sustain

Inclusive leaders understand that information is key to fair and equitable performance management, and ensure that all team members, including themselves, have the opportunity to grow. Inclusive leaders employ the following techniques to ensure equality emerges in this crucial area.

Identify key data sources. Data should always be at the core of decision-making and performance management/evaluation. Subjective opinion is almost always based on bias and limited perspective. Be sure you’ve identified the sources of information you require to make informed decisions that impact your team. For example, data dashboards, performance metrics, and documentation attached to quarterly check-ins and one-on-one meetings all provide critical data to inform decision-making.
Provide enablement for all. It’s important to invest time and resources into ensuring everyone on your team (including you) has a chance to engage in learning opportunities that help them grow professionally. As you provide feedback on areas of growth, talk to your team members to identify potential enablement that could support them in this growth. Similarly, if they have an interest in an area they would like to stretch in, invest in their interests and passions, and coach them to find ways to apply it to their success in the role. Just be sure to distribute resources and invest in these opportunities equally and fairly across the team.

Essential Skill #4: Reward & Recognize

In a high-performance culture, it’s necessary to reward and recognize high performers. It’s perhaps the most daunting task inclusive leaders face. If equality has guided every decision up to this point, and you have strategically invested resources into enabling your team members to be successful in their roles, then, in truth, this part should be hard. However, there is a way to engage in the reward and recognition process with equality at the center.

The way that leaders assign tasks throughout the year and approach the performance evaluation process has a lasting impact on inclusion. Sometimes biases trickle in and a manager may start giving the same people high-visibility work assignments without realizing it. This means those individuals have more opportunities to demonstrate success, and thus, have a higher chance of receiving rewards and recognition. When assignments are unequally distributed, it ultimately leaves others feeling discouraged or unsupported.

Inclusive leaders know to do the following.

Spread high-visibility projects. Ask yourself, “Are the same people on my team getting high-visibility projects consistently?” Be strategic in assigning tasks based on experience and strengths, while also ensuring everyone on the team has an opportunity to showcase what they are capable of in a visible way. Also, be sure to advertise team members’ triumphs in public forums.
Speak gratitude language. Reward and recognize people in a way that aligns to your employees’s values and what they appreciate. Ask, “Does this reward and recognition speak the ‘gratitude’ language of the employee being recognized? How does this reward align to their values?”
Share the evaluation/reward process. Is your performance evaluation transparent? Do people know what success looks like, and what it takes to be recognized and rewarded? Do team members know how their evaluation impacts their compensation/incentives? Are professional development conversations taking place all year round?

A group of employees celebrating.

The practice of inclusive leadership comes with great rewards for employees, team leaders, and organizations overall. Putting inclusive leadership principles into practice helps build inclusive working environments in which team members feel welcomed, valued, and empowered to do their best work.