Research by MoreThanNow examining the impact of inclusive leadership training found disappointing results in relation to behaviour change.
The comprehensive research study involved 900 leaders and was designed as a randomised controlled trial, separating managers into either a control (business as usual) or treatment groups. Treatment group one attended the Inclusive Leadership programme, and treatment group two received the training plus a 6-week series of nudges designed to drive inclusive behaviour in team meetings.
While initial reactions to the training were extremely positive, 91% of participants rated the training very highly and no one gave an average rating for the training, when the researchers measured the impact on behaviour change, the results told a different story.
Measuring behaviour change
The researchers used a range of outcomes as indicators of inclusive behaviour including allyship – measured as joining an employee resource group (ERG) and openness to feedback – as measured by asking managers to share a short survey among their team to solicit ideas to improve inclusion.
The researchers found that while many leaders joined ERG groups and shared surveys with their team to solicit feedback on how to improve inclusivity, there was no difference between managers in the treatment and control groups. This means that there is no evidence that it was the training that made leaders more likely to engage in these behaviours.
The researchers draw a harsh conclusion, that inclusive leadership training didn’t change immediate behaviours around allyship, openness and advocacy.They argue that if changes in these areas were not observed, then they conclude that it is unlikely that leaders will change other relevant behaviours such as hiring more diversity in their team. Instead, more bespoke development is likely to lead to better results.
Bespoke works best
For those of us working in the inclusive leadership space, these results may seem a little bleak.
However, the lack of impact of training on behaviour change is not limited to inclusive leadership. In fact, Professor Rebecca Jones, Inclusive Leadership Company co-founder, came to a similar conclusion with her own research on the impact of coaching. She found that coaching had a much stronger impact on results outcomes than has been previously found in research with training (you can read this research here. In this paper, Rebecca argues that it is the bespoke, tailored approach that is adopted in coaching that makes the difference to behaviour change, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that is characteristic of training.
It is evidence such as this that informs the approach we adopt at Inclusive Leadership Company to developing inclusive leadership behaviour. By completing our inclusive leadership assessment, leaders work with their own assessment results, with a coach, to enable them to address their own areas of improvement, unique to them, brought to life in real work contexts where exclusion happens the most. This enables leaders to understand how the concept of inclusion is relevant to them, in their day-to-day work context, therefore making the step from learning to behaviour change much smaller.
You can read the original summary of the inclusive leader training experiment here.
