Registration open until February 8 for Inclusive Leadership Series: Taking Your Leadership To The Next Level

This twelve-month series will enable you to join the forefront of current leaders and organizations that are leveraging inclusivity as a strategic best practice that creates a strong culture and gets results. In today's technology-driven world, understanding the power of inclusivity enables leaders to address workplace and personal challenges such as unconscious bias and miscommunication while strengthening personal and employee engagement.

What will it take to be a great leader in the future? These highly interactive sessions will assist leaders to be ahead in their field. 

Everyone’s talking about inclusion but what are we doing about it? How are we being inclusive in our personal and professional lives? Many studies show that sharing stories and building connections lead to quantitative and qualitative results.  The series provides leaders at every level with an in-depth and practical guide that goes beyond competencies and skill-building. It is an interactive journey that focuses on building awareness, appreciation, action, and accountability regarding inclusion. Leaders develop a road map to successfully live, work, and lead inclusively in an environment that promotes the exchange of ideas and shared experiences among leaders. Within this group, you will have access to individuals with whom you can exchange ideas and share strategies to achieve personal and professional growth and success. You will learn with and from others how you can integrate ethics, spirituality and integrity into your day-to-day work life while balancing work, family, service, and self from a values-based perspective. 

Leaders will:

• Recognize and experience personal development and inclusive leadership at every level as a significant foundation for their leadership development.

• Better connect with their inner selves and the life experience of others – recognizing their commonality with others and realizing that they are not alone in dealing with human struggles.

• Become more vital, energized, and proactive from monitoring their conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and biases and learning ways to become healthier from the inside out.

• Develop a stronger sense of meaning and purpose to their work and overall lives.

• Become more effective as a leader in dealing with and coaching others to deal with workplace challenges – including stress, miscommunication, interpersonal relationships, and work-life imbalance.

• See themselves as more confident, able to be an authentic and effective leader. 

Organizations will:

• Strengthen employee engagement and improve the culture of the organization through leaders who are more aware and inclusive.

• Develop employees who have a stronger sense of being valued and appreciated and a greater commitment to the workforce, workplace, and marketplace.

• Benefit from assisting employees, especially leaders, in the ways they deal with diversity, change, and uncertainty.

• Be better equipped, beforehand, to deal with employee dissatisfaction and thereby avoid turnover or the loss of time, energy, and other resources.

Overall Program Goals:

• Introduce leaders to foundational concepts that guide their recognition of the dimensions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both personally and professionally.

• Provide opportunities for leaders to reflect, renew, and connect with others, as they focus on personal growth as an inclusive leaders

• Support leaders in their ongoing development to become more self-aware, authentic, purposeful, ethical, caring, balanced, and proactive

• Foster and expand thinking about how to promote DEI in the workplace

• Determine practical action steps and develop action plans to leverage DEI to become more effective leaders.

Key Content:

• Define diversity and inclusion and relate both concepts to our everyday lives.

• Shared storytelling to understanding and valuing others.

• The fundamental attributes of effective and inclusive leaders.

• The call for leaders to look within and strengthen their inner life.

• How to relate well and strengthen relationships with others.

• Insights and practices for becoming an effective and inclusive leader who coaches well.

• What to do in an ongoing way to grow as a person and as an inclusive leader.

• Reflective evaluation of each person’s growth through the series.

• Personal Diversity Maturity Index (PDMI), a scenario-based tool from SDMS 360 that introduces the importance of responding to diversity challenges with sound judgment and clarity.

• Readings and reflections from the book “How to Be an Inclusive Leader” by Jennifer Brown.

Topics Covered: 

• Session 1: Opening Retreat – Preparing for the Journey
• Session 2: Telling Our Stories, Strengthening Our Connections
• Session 3: Communicating Across Differences
• Session 4: The Business Case for Diversity and Inclusion
• Session 5: Becoming and Inclusive Leader
• Session 6: Understanding Diversity Maturity: Identify the Inclusive Leader Model
• Session 7: Leading Through Synergy and Service: Group service activity
• Session 8: Stronger Together, Fighting Bias
• Session 9: Understanding Privilege
• Session 10: The Power of Inclusion
• Session 11: Walking the DEI Talk
• Session 12: Closing Retreat: Celebration, program evaluation