When people hear the word “nice”, they often associate it with someone who is pleasant to be around and always accommodating of others. However, if you are in a leadership position and focusing on inclusion, there are many situations where being “nice” is not the best tactic.

Here’s an example of one of the challenges of inclusive leadership, let’s say a colleague comes to you upset that another colleague has said they were acting in a biased way.

The “nice” thing to do would probably be to say “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true!” and try to make them feel better.

But the right thing to do would be to say “Well, why did they say that? Maybe something you said did come across that way.”

One of the key components of unconscious bias is just that: it’s unconscious. It’s entirely possible for somebody to do or say something biased without realising it.

Let’s take another example: you’ve asked the head of HR to put together the data on employee demographics, including hiring and retention, but they miss the deadline you set.

The “nice” thing to do would be to say “That’s alright, just get it to me when you can!”

The right thing to do would be to say “Why did you miss the deadline? If there are problems with getting this data, let’s work on it together.”

It is not inherently “inclusive” to allow people to miss deadlines that they have agreed to, especially on tasks that relate directly to EDI.

Simply put: many people have the mistaken belief that a focus on equality, diversity, and inclusion is about being nice to others, which often leads to the further mistaken belief that EDI is something that is easy to work on. After all, who could object to being asked to be nice?

However, one of the challenges of inclusive leadership is creating a robust EDI strategy and following through on it, which requires many more qualities, such as:

• Determination – making progress can take a long time, so persevering even when you’re not seeing the results you want is very important.
  
  
• Analysis – one of the first things you need to do for any EDI strategy is to work out how things currently operating and where improvements can be made, which means finding and interpreting information about your staff and workplace.
  
  
• Communication – making sure that you’re keeping staff up to date and listening to their feedback is hugely important; they need to be involved and engaged for your EDI strategy to work.

Being kind matters, but if “being nice” is your only priority, poor behaviour can slip by – and that should never happen. If you want staff to trust you, focus on demonstrating ethical and inclusive leadership and show, through your actions, that discriminatory behaviour will not be tolerated.

Being inclusive isn’t always easy, and not everyone will be happy with you all the time; but it is worth it to do the work.

If you want to find out more about inclusive leadership, including the principles of inclusive leadership, we have a great training course which you can find here.