How to build inclusive teams: moving from good intentions to action

Executive overview

Most leaders who care about diversity and inclusion stop short of the actions that actually move the needle. The gap isn't values — it's public commitment and deliberate practice.

Stefanie Johnson's framework distinguishes between optimists (who believe inclusion will happen naturally) and inclusifiers (who act on it). The shift requires stating your commitment publicly, facilitating meetings that draw out every voice, setting measurable goals, and redesigning systems that quietly filter out talent.

Recognising that inclusion is a feeling — not just a number — is the foundation; acting on that recognition is what separates inclusive leaders from well-meaning ones.

Diversity vs. inclusion

• Diversity is a number: how many, at what levels, across which functions.
• Inclusion is a feeling: belonging while remaining your authentic self.
• Inclusion is easy when everyone is the same; the challenge scales with diversity.
• Diversity alone yields better decisions and innovation; diversity plus inclusion amplifies those gains further.
• High inclusion reduces turnover — people don't leave organisations where they feel genuinely part of the team.

The optimist trap

• Optimists know belonging and uniqueness matter, but assume progress will happen naturally.
• The World Economic Forum estimates 170 years to reach gender equity at the current pace.
• Seeing diversity numbers tick up creates a false sense of completion.
• The single biggest difference between an optimist and an inclusifier: publicly stating that you care.
• Many leaders discuss inclusion privately — with friends, at church — but never at work, fearing backlash or alienating majority-group members.
• Direct reports of silent leaders often say: "They might care — they just never talk about it."

Making the commitment visible

• State your commitment explicitly and repeatedly, not just once.
• Performative diversity — saying you care without acting — is easily spotted; words must be followed by action.
• In meetings, actively invite quieter voices: name the person, signal genuine interest, return to them.
• Senior leaders can embed inclusion into mission, values, and performance appraisals; managers lower in the org can inclusify their immediate team.
• Being an ally means concrete acts: ensuring someone is invited into important rooms, championing their work, preventing them being talked over.

Starting points for leaders who haven't begun

• Start with empathy: individual conversations where you ask about someone's experiences, not just their outputs.
• Use structured conversation tools — Johnson created a free card deck at drstefjohnson.com — to lower the barrier to meaningful dialogue.
• Use current context (a shared event, an organisational moment) as the entry point rather than announcing "we're going to talk about inclusion."
• Avoid singling out the one underrepresented person in the room to represent their entire group.
• Do your own learning before asking a marginalised colleague to educate you — arrive as a prepared ally, not a blank slate.

The case for metrics

• "What's measured matters" applies to inclusion exactly as it does to revenue or market share.
• Without numbers you can't know where you are, what's working, or where to invest.
• Goal-setting around diversity is the single most effective inclusion intervention — more than training or awareness campaigns.
• Setting goals does not mean hiring the worst person to fill a quota; it means recruiting broadly enough that the best person is actually reachable.
• Most hiring is already not purely meritocratic: referrals get an edge, legacies get preference, golf buddies get internships.
• Limiting your search to a narrow demographic means you are already not finding the best person.
• Leaders doing well on inclusion often don't realise it because they have no numbers to show progress.

Redesigning systems to reduce bias

• Bias persists even in organisations with good intentions and stated values — system design is the lever.
• The Hubble Space Telescope time-allocation committee had a persistent, small disparity: women consistently received slightly less telescope time.
• Removing applicants' names from proposals flipped the outcome: women's acceptance rate exceeded men's for the first time in 15 years.
• The result suggests men and women are more equally talented than implicit assumptions reflect; consistent disparities signal a broken process, not a talent gap.
• Blind review doesn't fix every structural inequality, but it removes one bias trigger at each decision point.
• Audit your internal promotion criteria: requirements that disproportionately filter one group (e.g. mandatory expat assignments) should be scrutinised for necessity.
• Systems produce the results they are designed to produce; changing the output requires changing the system.