DAI Leadership Training Series

This series provides a step-by-step guide for the personal and emotional journey leaders must undertake to create an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. When everyone feels like they belong their human potential is unleashed. That’s why inclusive workplaces experience higher engagement, performance, and profits. Unfortunately, many employees still feel unable to bring their true selves to work. In a world where the workforce is becoming increasingly diverse, it’s more important than ever to truly understand how to support inclusion. This series consists of four sessions.

Session 1: DEI Beyond Compliance (Unaware)

In this stage, participants begin to understand the reality of racial inequalities in the workplace, and the role every inclusive leader should play in making a difference.

Session 2: Understanding the Roots of Privilege and Oppression (Aware)

This stage is for deep self-reflection and internal dialogue about how one’s perceived experiences do not align with others’ world reality. This stage addresses the inner discomforts and the experiences that led participants to experience them. Through this process, participants may realize that they have been making work decisions based solely on their own experiences without considering other perspectives. Participants may come to understand their colleagues’ advantages and disadvantages, and what has made their lives and career progressions relatively easier or harder. This stage awakens leaders to their own limitations and advantages in order to make changes for themselves and their workplace. These insights will give leaders clues for action.

Session 3: Putting DEI Into Action (Active)

Knowledge is of no benefit if it is not applied. The choice to become active is the essential moment for anyone aspiring to be an inclusive leader. This is the phase where leaders step up to do more. In this phase inclusive leaders allow themselves to be put in places of discomfort and assume new responsibility as a friend, colleague, and especially as a leader. In this stage, the inclusive leader begins to shed unproductive behaviors, mindsets, and resistance points that have prevented them from taking action in the past, or that continue to distract and slow them down. Leaders also learn how to prepare for others that might not like their new actions and how they are communicating their values. Humility and resilience are key traits needed in the Active phase.

Session 4: DEI Allyship

In this stage, inclusive leaders not only focus on who needs support but also on how systems need to evolve to interrupt harmful practices that perpetuate an unequal playing field. In other words, the inclusive leader is committed in word and deed to making the workplace truly inclusive. In this stage, inclusive leaders may find themselves more public with their efforts to be bolder, more challenging, and questioning systems that so many people have taken for granted. This inclusive stance becomes the new normal. Finally, in this stage, the inclusive leader knows the language of inclusion, is comfortable in knowing that they will make mistakes, and others begin to follow along and gain inspiration form the inclusive leader.