How to Be a More Inclusive Leader (Challenge 94)

Those of you who listen to this podcast at my website, kindleadershipchallenge.com, may have noticed that I have always provided transcripts for my episodes. Because this show is typically 99% scripted, it’s an easy lift to just throw it in my podcast host along with the MP3 file every weekend. I also have some OG fans who followed me back when I was a library leadership blogger and prefer to read my stuff rather than listen to it. Finally, I had a vague notion that transcripts might help my SEO without too much extra effort on my part, since really the kind leadership challenge is essentially a blog with higher production values. 

However, when I was doing one of my Social Saturday hangouts recently on Linkedin, I connected with a very cool educational leader in the DEI space. When I checked out their profile, I saw that they had a disability that would make listening to the show difficult, so when I let them know I had a podcast, I also mentioned that all episodes have transcripts available. They were happy to learn that, and said they would check out an episode or two. Now this doesn’t make me some grand hero or anything, but it did remind me how a little thoughtfulness and small choices can make big shifts in how inclusive we are for our teams and our community. So how can kind leaders identify those small opportunities that can provide a big impact to your culture and vision? That’s what we’ll be discussing today.

Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you how to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone. 

Like many things in life, the best way to make your leadership practice more inclusive is to simply pay more attention to what’s going on. And of course, as we as leaders are the people who are deciding to make our practice more inclusive, we need to turn our lenses inward onto our own biases and perspectives. One minor example—I was always a little dubious about whether certain kinds of teaching and library work could be done as well remotely as in person, even though I started my career as a distance learning librarian, and got my MLIS in an early hybrid program. Working from home every so often when a repairman was coming or you had a sick family member was great and all, but could you truly educate students and manage collections remotely? Well, like most of us, March 2020 led to a pretty rapid shift in my perspective, as we quickly learned that with a little creativity and some safeguards, almost any kind of library work could be done at home when circumstances required it. Our workplaces are different now than they were 4 years ago, and overall I think it’s been a change for the more inclusive, and for the better.

Next up is considering our systems and processes, and ways that they can be a bit more inclusive. My first library I worked at was overdue fine free since before I went to work there, though we did invoice for replacement costs on lost items. And if those items weren’t paid for, then the bursar’s office put on a transcript or diploma hold, to incentivize students to pay the bill, just like they would other outstanding charges. And for many years, like many acade3mic librarians I didn’t even think twice about that system. However, the last few years have made a lot of us much more aware of the ways that these diploma and transcript holds are contributing to a system where students are effectively prevented from accessing college credits they paid for and earned academically, simply because they can’t afford to pay to reimburse us for a decade-old library book we probably didn’t bother to replace anyway. And yes, in many of those sorts of cases I would override the hold and instruct the bursar’s office to forgive the debt, but then why were we bothering with the whole song and dance in the first place? As I record this, the Biden Administration has just released new rules that forbid or restrict colleges and universities to withhold transcripts and diplomas over small debts of this sort, and although the full implications of these rules have yet to play out, at first glance this seems like a move that will make universities a little more inclusive of the many students who had to pause during their college journey due to financial or personal challenges. 

And lastly, we need to think about how inclusive our cultures are—or aren’t-- in ways we may not realize. Long time listeners of the podcast may remember my mentioning back in episode 2 that I have what might be called an invisible disability—in my case a corrected heart defect. Now, the operative word here is corrected, because although it was a fairly big deal when I was born, after my corrective surgery when I was a toddler, I was more or less healthy in a “Slowest kid in gym class” kind of way. It’s lingering effects are mostly some ambient klutziness, a left eye that likes to go wandering off at a funky angle when I’m tired, and some huffing and puffing if I get overheated or have to climb more than a couple flights of stairs in one go. 

Long story short, once I aged out of mandatory PE classes in junior high, my circulatory system became little more than an occasional bit of personal trivia, something I had filed away as a possible story to tell if I ever made it on Jeopardy. But then I graduated college and started in the work world. I went to work for a telecommunications company, where I was quickly, and somewhat surprisingly, selected to be part of their management development program. I was thrilled. I also made the tactical decision I had pretty much always made in new environments since I was old enough to control who knew my medical history, and kept my heart defect to myself, to save myself from both coddling and tedious questions. And that was great, until the day the director of the management development program gleefully announced we were all going to be doing a high ropes course for our next team building event, with tightropes to walk and ziplines and everything! Well, given that I figured it would take about 45 seconds for anyone to figure out my utter lack of coordination, let’s just say the sales rep I worked for suddenly developed a pressing deadline for a key customer and I wouldn’t be able to make it, sorry! 
 
 And then of course there was the golf tournament where we worked the snack bar. Outside. in august. in Oklahoma. I hid in the back of the tent and chugged water while boiling hot dogs (the shade seemed the lesser of the two evils), and then at the end of the day, barely hiding the fact I was on the edge of collapse, I begged off of post tournament networking to go drive to sonic and down a route 44 iced tea and calm down my heat exhaustion. Both incidents probably prevented me from some valuable networking opportunities, but at that point they’d made it clear that corporate America circa 2000 wasn’t meant to include someone like me anyway. I could have made a fuss, but I was too young and my career was too fragile to do so. And I know there was no ill intent on the part of the person who ran the management training program, but you’d better believe I took away some leadership lessons that weren’t on the curriculum of that fancy corporate program. To this day, I never so much as take a student up a flight of stairs without asking if they’d prefer the elevator. Generally they look at me like I’m from Mars, but that’s ok. They’re not who I ask that question for.

I hope I’ve given you some examples and ideas of ways in which we can be accidentally exclusionary as leaders, and how we can think through our perspectives, our systems, and our cultures to identify ways to make our workplaces more welcoming and equitable. Which as always leads me to this week’s challenge. I want you to whip out your next steps checklist (kindleadershipchallenge.com/next) and do an inclusivity audit. Where in these three areas I’ve explored here can you find opportunities to make your organization more inclusive, and how can you take action? I really hope you share your discoveries, either in the kind leadership guild group chat if you’re a guild member, or on my linkedin page at kindleadershipchallenge.com/linkedin. 

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/94. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.