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, it’s time to learn how you can put those principles into practice to influence performance across your business. At Salesforce, we promote four essential sets of leadership skills that focus on improving performance and bringing 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 Expectations

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. Employees don’t feel empowered and supported to achieve their goals if there’s 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, everyone processes information through the lens of their 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 are any obstacles that 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 throughout the fiscal year and how success is measured. This is where you simultaneously determine how successful your team is in the pursuit of a goal while providing consistent coaching and support to ensure team members have the best possible chance at success. Use these practices to ensure that equality is front and center.

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

Quarterly check-ins and one-on-one meetings are critical engagements between you and your 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’re meaningful.

As an inclusive leader, make sure you’re creating a psychologically safe space in which your team members 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 affect performance.

Identify and Address Equality Concerns Early

It’s an unfortunate truth that social barriers negatively impact wellbeing. Your team members can be experiencing microaggressions on the job, or blatant discrimination, that’s impacting their experience in the workplace.

It’s important you create a psychologically safe space and encourage and empower your employees to speak out about any concerns they have, including concerns that they’re not being treated fairly. 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 understanding. Take every equality concern seriously, and document how these concerns are addressed throughout the year.

Check Your Bias at the Door

Whether it’s during quarterly check-ins or through the formal performance evaluation process, you must check your 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 your bias requires deep reflection and intentional effort to understand how and why you process information the way you do. To be an inclusive leaders your must know how to check whether your decisions, feedback, or coaching are based on tangible insight or subjective opinion. Ask questions such as these:

• Am I evaluating this person based on what they have or have not accomplished, or based on the fact that they think/act/behave 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?
  
• Would my evaluation practices stand up to scrutiny?
  

Essential Skill #3: Activate & Sustain

To be an inclusive leader it’s important to understand that information is key to fair and objective performance management, and ensure that all team members, including yourself, have the opportunity to grow. Employ these 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 identify 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 supports them in this growth. Similarly, if they have an interest in an area that they wish 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 you face as an inclusive leader. If equality has guided every decision up to this point, and you strategically invest 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 you assign tasks throughout the year and approach the performance evaluation process has a lasting impact on the employee’s experience. Sometimes biases trickle in, and a you can 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.

Here are a few things you need to consider in your quest to be an inclusive leader.

• 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’re 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 with your employees’ 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?
  

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