The Hybrid Leader with Bruce Owen (Part 1)

We welcome another insightful leader to this fascinating series around ‘Leading into the Future, Bruce Owen (Vice President – Employee & Community Impact at Equinix) in partnership with The Business Transformation Netwoork (The BTN)

Within this session, Bruce looks at what leadership behaviours employees need to truly believe in an inclusive culture. Bruce believes it’s all about…

“remembering the type of leaders that made us feel included whether that be teachers, sports coach, or manager that you worked for.”

5 factors you need to truly have an inclusive culture:

1. Accountability – where you are holding people accountable for inclusive behaviour. 
2. Vulnerability – watching leaders discuss real topics such as admitting their weaknesses, being able to demonstrate that they do not have it all together.
3. Empathy – taking the time to truly listen and understand what someone is trying to say despite their wording being different.
4. Helping conflict – diversity of thought and diversity of experience is about injecting difference into an equation. This results in conflict. Conflict is seen as necessary and healthy to have greater innovation and outcomes. This is only that is done on a foundation of trust, it is an important behaviour to be able to model as a leader. 
5. Collaboration – diversity is a core ingredient to innovation and business progress. Leaders need to ensure that they lead collaboratively. Leaders do not always need to always have an answer, but to simply be able to work together as part of a collaboration team and help one another.  

4 ways organisations should start their Diversity & Inclusion Journey:

1. Being Clear on the why… If an organisation is looking at every data point that leads to greater innovation, agility, higher performance and financial targets, you have to be precise on why you’re doing this. 
2. The positioning of acknowledging you are unaware of what you don’t know. It is vital to listen to your employees and require help. 
3. Ensuring that the majority of groups take active roles in leading and co-leading. 
4. Establish a set of guiding principles right at the start about how you want to embark on a diversity and inclusion journey.