Hayley Barnard

Future Proofing Leadership Skills

Developing leaders to be more inclusive in their leadership and management style is essential for any organisation that wants to see significant progress in diversity and inclusion (D&I). Yet many leaders have D&I fatigue, they either see it as not their problem or that it is simply concerned with positive discrimination, specifically around gender and ethnicity. They don’t have a good understanding of why inclusion is good for them and good for business or what they should do about it.

This session aims to address that. Using inspiring ‘best practice’ stories combined with the latest research including:

• How D&I can help drive innovation and business results;
• Why megatrends in a diversity of markets, talent, customers, risk and ideas require a collaborative and inclusive response.
• How inclusion and collaboration can be a fundamental driver of one’s leadership style;
• What does inclusive leadership look like? How to future-proof your leadership.
• What the barriers to inclusion are (such as unconscious bias) and what you as a leader can do to mitigate their impact.
• How you can shape, take ownership of, and be a role model for your organisation’s D&I strategy.

Practical Inclusive Leadership

Suitable for senior executives and people managers, this session helps leaders appreciate the solid business case for a more collaborative and inclusive style of leadership. Leaders explore ‘what’s it like to be on the other side of you?’ Traits of an inclusive leader are shared and used to inform what actions or small changes need to be made in a leadership style that could have a significant impact on inclusion and drive diversity.

• Diversity is a reality but inclusion is a choice and therefore requires action.
• An updated model of leadership – leading from the centre tapping into the wisdom of the crowd.
• Traits of an inclusive leader: Collaboration/Cognizant of Bias/Curious.
• Various exercises to help delegates to explore current leadership style in relation to inclusion.
• Small changes, big impact to build inclusion via delegates’ communication style / recruitment practices / how meetings are run / mentoring / sponsorship / innovation / customer & supplier interaction.

Biased, Who me?

A light-hearted introduction to unconscious bias which works well for general sessions in a full company conference as it appeals to all levels of employees.

• What is unconscious bias?
• Why and how we all have them.
• How they can conflict with who we are and how we want to be.
• How we can catch ourselves being unconsciously biased.
• Actions we can take to outsmart bias.