Through Geffrye DE&I consultancy practice, The Inclusion Imperative, Geffrye helps commercial organisations to build leadership capabilities and harness the power of inclusion as a key strategy for well-being, organisational learning, and superior business outcomes. Widely regarded as a thought leader and driver of positive change for workplace inclusion, Geff promotes a holistic, intersectional approach. He challenges received wisdom and practices to facilitate a culture shift and encourage business learning, drawing on 35 years of experience in front office executive roles, based in the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands, with leading international financial and professional services organisations. Geff is a respected writer, speaker, and facilitator, having worked with organisations in the fields of financial services, media, energy, law, advertising, publishing, logistics, government agencies, and others, spoken at multiple conferences globally, hosted a regular podcast series, and provided published content for multiple publications and online channels.
An inclusive workplace culture is an absolute business imperative.
Without inclusive practices, any organisation misses out on the innovation, creativity, superior risk identification and management, and better-quality decision-making, that a psychologically safe workplace environment facilitates.
Indeed, history is littered with once-dominant companies that lost their commercial relevance by failing to embrace this principle.
In short, inclusion is the pathway to current commercial success and future robustness. And workplace inclusion requires the intentional development of culture, organisations and leaders.
In recent years, this has typically been approached by initiatives under the umbrella term of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). But the delivery has often focused excessively on diversity as an input (e.g. in hiring and promoting), whereas in fact it should be seen as an output – generated by the purposeful following of inclusive practices and equitable principles.
This (perhaps understandable, but misguided) focus – often manifested in quotas and affirmative action, for example – has tended to undermine the positive impact of well-intentioned initiatives, as well as sometimes giving the paradoxical appearance of unfairness and prejudice against majority groups. And this relative failure is often cited to justify the current backlash against DEI by many organisations.
Treating diversity as an input is fundamentally inappropriate because, in fact, diversity does NOT create inclusion. Contrarily, it is inclusion and equity which foster and empower the diversity which, in turn, encourages the innovation needed to future-proof any commercial organisation.
Such innovation is rooted in elevating points of difference (importantly, both demographic and acquired) – of skills, knowledge, perspective, characteristics, lived experience and heuristics. This empowerment encourages the essential disruption of received wisdom and the status quo which mitigates the risk of stagnation and, ultimately, commercial irrelevance.
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction”. And, in that spirit, DEI should now be (or actually should always have been) depicted as:
Disruption + Elevation = Innovation.
And to bring this to life, commercial organisations (and teams within them) should focus on developing a culture which welcomes (indeed, celebrates) points of difference, and on developing the competencies of their leaders (at all levels) to behave inclusively.
In practice, this means not ringfencing efforts in this context solely within support functions, like HR and DEI teams, but instead applying joined-up thinking – by ensuring that those efforts are aligned with (and indeed seen as a contributory driver of), and embedded within, commercial business strategy.
This principle is not limited to those working within organisations; it extends to those working with them. External practitioners should prioritise the inclusion-oriented development of organisations, and their cultures and leaders, in order to help create workplaces which are more productive, effective and robust. (Indeed, my own consultancy practised is named The Inclusion Imperative – intentionally to highlight the critical business importance of inclusion.)
In this context, delivery usually involves a marriage of tactical and strategic work with commercial organisations, e.g.:
- cohort-targeted tactical ‘nudges’ designed to promote a better awareness and understanding of key matters like psychological safety, inclusive leadership, unconscious bias (and conscious inclusion), talent management, teamwork, imposter syndrome, allyship and advocacy, mental health and wellbeing at work, the needs of specific minorities, and cross-characteristic intersectionality; and
- ensuring that such tactical efforts are both (a) an integral part of a coordinated broader programme aimed at culture change and leadership development, and (b) actively supported and stewarded by executive leaders, and seen and respected by them as a critical pollinator of business direction and strategy.
The commercial advantages of an inclusive workplace culture have been demonstrated unequivocally by multiple research studies; they are substantial, not marginal. The superior innovation and creativity, enhanced ability to identify and manage risks, and better-quality decision-making offered by creating a psychologically safe environment, in which the voices encouraging creative destruction are elevated, are self-evident and make common sense. Added to those are the more prosaic everyday benefits of a more engaged workforce: better motivation, loyalty, productivity and retention.
These advantages are why many forward-looking organisations (like CostCo, JP Morgan and – despite misleading clickbait headlines – McDonald’s) are rightly resisting the current backlash against DEI, and instead maturing their work in this context, to better align it to business strategy. As a core driver of success and future robustness, that is, after all, where it really belongs.