Inclusive leadership isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the foundation of thriving, innovative teams. In this episode, Minette Norman, speaker, consultant, and author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader, shares her powerful insights on creating work cultures where every voice is heard and valued. Drawing from her decades of experience in Silicon Valley, Minette explores how embracing diverse perspectives, fostering psychological safety, and showing up as a consistent, empathetic leader can unlock the full potential of your team. Whether you’re leading a small group or a global organization, this conversation is packed with actionable strategies to help you lead with authenticity and drive lasting change.

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Minette Norman – Inclusive Leadership Unleashed: Fostering Teams That Deliver Their Best Work

Welcome to the show where we’re diving deep into the heart of inclusive leadership with Minette Norman, a seasoned consultant, speaker, and author dedicated to fostering environments where every voice is heard and valued. With over three decades of experience in Silicon Valley, Minette has transformed tech environments by prioritizing diversity and psychological safety, ensuring that teams are not only succeed but also excel in delivering groundbreaking work.

Minette will be sharing insights from her latest books, The Boldly Inclusive Leader and The Psychological Safety Playbook equipping you with the tools to create a culture where diversity drives innovation and team members can thrive in that environment. Recognized for her profound impact on business through inclusive practices, Minette’s strategies are essential for anyone looking to lead with empathy and effectiveness. Join us as we explore how to unlock the potential for every team member and we build workplaces that mirror the world we live in.

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Welcome, Minette.

Thank you. It’s good to be here, Sam.

It’s so nice to have you on the show. Now, as we kick things off here, Minette, one of the big things I like to do is just dive a little bit into your background, your history. How did you get into this field? How did your career take off?

Minette Norman’s Journey To Inclusive Leadership

The field I’m in now as a speaker and a consultant is recent. I’ll go with the full backstory as quickly as I can. As you said, I spent three decades in the tech industry. I got started back in the early days of Silicon Valley in 1989. It was my first tech job working at Adobe as a technical writer, working on Photoshop 1.0. The way I came into that work is I didn’t have a technical background. I studied drama in French in school and wanted to be an actor and then realized just how hard it is to break into acting and how brutal it is to hear no at every audition.

I decided to pursue my second degree, which was French. I was working in New York City at the time for the French Trade Commission when they introduced PCs. That was when I started working with technology and realizing I was good with it and that led me into Silicon Valley. I spent the first ten years as an individual contributor as a technical writer, writing help systems and manuals then I got into management. I didn’t even think I wanted to be a manager. That was an interesting thing. My arm was twisted and my manager said, “I need you to manage a team. You’ll be really good at it.”

First of all, I loved it. Second of all, I had underestimated how impactful and important the role of managing even a small team is and the outsized influence that managers and leaders have on not only the employee experience at work, but also their well-being and what they take home with them. As you and I know, when you have a great manager, life is good, but when you have a bad manager, that permeates your entire life. I started to take the responsibility very seriously, and I took on larger leadership roles.

My last five years, I was leading engineering at a big tech company. I had 1,000 people on my org chart, and I had another 2,500 people or so, that I had to influence. First of all, I realized what a huge responsibility this is but what I was hired to do in that role was change. I was a change leader. They wanted to modernize how we develop software in the era of cloud computing instead of desktop software. The way I interpreted it was, this is about technology change.

 

I had people on my team who were deeply technical and who were getting us on a new tech stack and new tools. What I realized, though, was that this is a culture problem. How do we change the culture of a company that is now 30 years old? How do we change behavior? How do we get people to collaborate? How do we get different perspectives heard and respected? I realized this is the work that energizes me. Honestly, way more than the technology. I spent five years in that role and made some progress on culture change.

We could talk more about that if you’re interested. In 2019, many years after I started my first job in tech, I left, and it was for a variety of reasons that were not great, honestly. We had a leadership change, and I was forced out of my role. I left the industry, but I thought before I was ready, but in some ways, it was the kick in the pants I needed because I realized what I wanted to do was not work for one company. I wasn’t going to go work in another tech job.

What I wanted to do is take that accumulated learning over all those decades and help leaders do better and create workplaces that I thought what we all aspire to, a workplace where everyone has a voice, can thrive and do great work, and everyone is respected for their unique perspective and background and life experience. That’s why I started my own business in 2020. Now, I’ve written a couple of books. I do speaking, workshops, and consulting with teams who want to dive into how do we create a great culture.

The Impact Of DEI On Innovation And Success

One thing that leaders have found over the recent years is that the amount of great innovation and new thoughts that comes out of diverse thought. People coming from diverse backgrounds and also the different ways that people think overall. Now, one of the things, we have a new president and so forth. I think that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion has gotten very politicized. How should leaders still move forward with embracing that diversity, getting that thought, getting that important background and making sure that people are included so that they can move forward in the environment? How should that be placed?

That is the number one question as we’re doing this and as these executive orders come down. I’ll give you an example of how this is playing out. It’s something that just happened with me, and then we can talk more broadly about it. I was invited by a conference organizer who’s putting on a conference for women in education. She asked me to give a talk. My signature keynote on boldly inclusive leadership. We were talking about it and she said, “You don’t have to change the content of the talk. This is the heartbeat of what we do. However, as I work on the contract, I’m going to be very careful in the language I use because I do not want the contract to be rejected.”

She’s not using the term inclusion or inclusivity in the contract. It’s going to be something like leading, thriving workplaces. That’s one example where language is changing because the work is still important. I am not a legal expert and I would say you have to consult with your legal team on what you can and cannot do. However, what I’m seeing is that companies and organizations still care about having a great working environment where they can not only attract but also retain talent.

People in the workforce care about the organizations they work for and the cultures they work in. Can they bring themselves to work? Can they do their best work? Can they share divergent perspectives? All of this is about diversity. You don’t have to use the word diversity. I think the word that’s going to continue is inclusion because inclusion is such a fundamental human need. It’s not political. It is biological. The way we have evolved as a species is to be part of groups, tribes, and teams.

One of the things that comes out of neuroscience, you cannot argue with this from a political perspective, is that when we are excluded, when we experience being excluded from a group, we experience pain. Our brains register pain. When you think about this. If you do not create an environment where everyone feels that they can participate, they are suffering. Do you want probably a large percentage of your workforce to be suffering every day? I don’t think any leader or any team member wants that.

If you do not create an environment where everyone feels that they can participate, that is probably why a large percentage of your workforce is suffering every day. Share on X

We’re going to have to figure out ways to focus on creating great cultures and creating fair systems for everybody. Whether you use the word equity or not, we still want to be fair. We still care about civil rights. We care about these things. I know that that’s not going to go away. I think that some of the ineffective DEI programs are going to evolve, which they need to. Anyone who was checking a box by saying, “We did it.” For example, an unconscious bias training was done. They were not committed to change.

I think any organization and any leader committed to change is going to find ways to evolve this work, hopefully, in more impactful ways, and maybe we have to change the language or how we measure everything, but I don’t think it’s going to go away. I will say, though, it’s also important to acknowledge how painful it is to hear that we are outlawing DEI and that these words are now being stricken from official, for example, websites of the US government. That’s a sad day for many of us.

I do think that a lot of this is just a blip in time. I do think that if we’re focusing on the results that we want from our workforces, we want everybody to be happy. We want to make sure that people are doing their best work, not only for themselves to know that they’re being valued but also valued by the organization. The products and services that are created as a result of their engagement. If we focus on the results, that’s what counts. We need to go to that level. In working with organizations in your practice, how have you witnessed your techniques taking hold and driving change?

Driving Change: The Power Of Small, Consistent Actions

It varies, because sometimes I go in and I do one workshop and I don’t pretend that one workshop is going to change a culture. When I’ve had time to work with teams on a longer basis, this is where you see real change because change does not happen with a flip of the switch or one talk or one book. What I have seen, for example, I was working with a new leader who had taken on a big team and a big responsibility. He wanted to focus on making sure that people could innovate. This was a very risk-averse team.

He had to start with his own behavior as the new leader and making it clear that he wanted to hear from everyone and it was okay to experiment and fail. That all the ideas were truly welcome. It was interesting because we talked a year later after we had started the work and he said, “In the beginning, people don’t believe it.” If a leader says, “I want to hear all the ideas. Anything is okay. Ask me anything.” People don’t believe it until they have seen proof that you’re open to it, that you’re not going to shut them down or you’re not going to make them feel bad for a wild idea.

He said, “Over time, they started to realize I meant it. There would be no negative ramifications if someone proposed something that didn’t ultimately work. I’m starting to see people speak up, offer new ideas, and be willing to try things. It’s taking hold, but it’s taken a lot of work.” One of the things that I say is it takes small behavior changes done consistently over time. That’s what he said. He’s like, “I had to keep showing up. I had to make time in my calendar to go around and chat with people informally to this open-door policy thing. I had to have my door open and be willing to have people walk in and have conversations.”

He said, “Over this past year, I’ve seen a remarkable change.” One of the things that was amazing for him was that there was a person in his organization who was later in her career and who had thought about leaving and retiring. She said, “After I saw what you’ve been doing and the changes that you’ve been making, I feel like I am doing my best work of my whole career.” That’s interesting. That’s telling that you can impact someone who’s checked out and ready to leave and say like, “No, I’m all in now because this culture has changed you as our leader and has made a difference.”

That’s what I’ve seen, is that it is possible like small changes. Another group that I was working with couldn’t talk openly about things. Especially if something went badly. You could talk about the good stuff, but you couldn’t talk about anything that maybe didn’t go badly. Their leader changed the way she responded. This one guy thought he was going to lose his job because he had messed up on something. The leader who’s very senior in a large organization response is, “It’s okay. We’re still learning to work together.” That diffuses the tension so incredibly, and that person was like, “This is possible now.”

Much of it is just this consistent leadership behavior. That’s why when I work with teams, I say, “Let’s start with our own behavior. How do we show up every day? How do we listen? How do we respond?” We expand into how do we interact in groups. Ultimately, what are the systems we put in place? That’s not where I start. I start with leadership behavior and how we show up in simple things like listening.

 

I like how you’re using the word consistency because that is one of the big things in human nature. If we see something that’s erratic, especially when we’re dealing with a person or apprehensive. I remember something as simple as being a little kid and asking your mom for a cookie. It’s like going, “Is she’s going to be receptive or are we too close to dinner?” It’s like you’re overthinking it. You’re almost too afraid to ask.

I think that holds back a lot of our younger workforce from bringing new ideas to the table. We’re going to be sitting around the table with senior leaders and senior professionals that have been there for 20 to 30 years and putting their ideas on the table. Making sure that leaders can ensure that everybody has a voice I think is critical for innovation and to understand those new ideas and embrace them.

Overcoming Fear And Embracing Cognitive Diversity

What you said is so important about, that fear. When we’re operating out of fear, our brains are not firing on all cylinders because that fear is the primitive mechanism. When we think in any moment we’re going to get shut down or embarrassed or ridiculed or ignored, we’re going to go into that mode of survival, and none of us are at our best. That’s why I feel like repairing the damage after you’ve done something like yelled at someone or made them feel bad is hard. You’ve set back all the work you’ve been doing.

I always stress that we have to become self-aware because in every single interaction, if you’re a leader, people are watching you. They’re watching your facial expressions, your body language, and how you respond. If you respond inconsistently like you reward someone for a tough question and then you punish someone else for a tough question. What signals are you giving? As you said, the people are not going to believe that you mean it, so they’re not going to speak up. The other research that is interesting about is cognitive diversity which you alluded to in the beginning and all the ideas.

There’s lots of research showing that when we can get people who think differently on the same team. We are going to be more innovative, and we’re going to solve the more tricky problems. However, that work is not easy because we certainly know this in our bodies and in our hearts that we like to be with people who are like us. That’s our natural affinity bias. We like to be with people who think like us. It’s easier. We are challenged when we are with people who don’t think like us. The work is initially harder.

You don’t put together a diverse team of people and think it’s going to be easy. You have to work through that hard work of like, how do we get to know each other? How do we understand that we think differently? We have different backgrounds, minds, and bodies. How do we work together constructively? That takes work. It’s not something that comes easily.

I think a lot of mistakes that have been made, especially in the DEI space, is like, “We’re going to focus on diversity hiring. We’re not going to work on the culture of how teams interact. We’re not going to work on the systems to make sure that we treat everyone fairly.” There’s some work that needs to be undone in a way and focus on how do we create these conditions where not only are all voices heard, but they’re welcome and respected. We can solve the incredible challenges we all have ahead of us.

As I said before, focusing on those results, not the inputs, and designing a new way forward. The other piece that I found interesting in my career is how not just people but industries as a whole can become blinded. I was in the financial industry for the beginning of my career. I was telling you before my dad died, I’m a compensation consultant in my day job, and I’m not podcasting.

It takes small behavior changes done consistently over time. Share on X

At that time, I was looking for a sales compensation consultant to come in and help us put together a plan for some financial analysts and so forth, in the organization. I called it this major highly respected sales consultant that I was familiar with. He says, “I’m not even going to bother pitching to that industry because they don’t listen to us.” He already had the defeatist attitude of that industry or that particular environment was not going to listen because of the different techniques of sales comp in that industry versus others.

I found it super interesting that even in some situations, industries as a whole can feel that bias and choose not to participate or sometimes don’t listen. One other thing that I often find, and I love when I’m thinking about motivating employees and designing programs that motivate employees. One thing I love to look into is the teaching profession.

If you’re trying to motivate people to sit in their chair and to take information in, but they have no understanding of how it’s going to benefit them in the future yet. That’s the epitome of trying to motivate people. I always look outside to try to get new ideas. I think that some leaders and some industries has minded to that. Have you seen that in your practice?

Yes. What I saw a lot of is, and I talk about this in my work and I felt it, which is that there’s this inner circle. I’m not even thinking outside industry but within an organization. There’s an inner circle of people, for example, the executive staff, always goes to for advice, information, and ideas. They’re missing a huge part of their organization. In fact, the bias is often like what I saw initially, I was working with a very global team. No one outside the headquarters could have a new idea that was going to be implemented.

It was always even like geographical proximity meant that you got the CEO’s attention. I remember this even. Since you’re a calm person, you’ll appreciate this. We would be doing annual review cycle where we would do review people and talk about them in the leadership team. If there was anyone that the leaders hadn’t heard of because they were not in the US, for example, or they were not in the headquarters office. They were disregarded.

If I were putting someone forward and say, “I think this person has great leadership potential. They’re this. They’ve done this. They’re innovative, but they’re based in another office outside the US.” It would be like, “No, we’re not going to look at that.” That was like just narrow-minded blinders. Now, that changed over time, but it made me crazy angry that people were being disregarded because they were off the radar. They were not in this inner circle where we pay attention to people.

I want to dive into that a little bit more because one of the things that I’m having a lot of conversations with is you pay transparency directive, which is basically trying to make sure that men and women are paid within the same range. One of the things when we’re talking about inclusion is when we’re trying to make a difference in our business and onboarding, let’s say, in a situation where we’re bringing on a woman in an all-male type of environment.

There’s got to be that first one that starts. How hard that’s got to be for that person and brave? That person has to come into that environment. What can leaders do to help a person who feels like an outsider, would be part of that inner circle to be successful in that new environment when they have this uphill battle?

I certainly know that. When I took on that VP of engineering role, I was the first woman in that role, and all the other engineering leaders in the company were men. Certainly, that feeling only is real and it can feel lonely. It can feel like you don’t belong and don’t fit in. It is an uphill battle. What leaders can do, I think it’s important to acknowledge, first of all. Call out the elephant in the room, like you’re the first woman or a person of color or a disabled person. Whatever it is. We want to make sure that you’re set up for success and the pay transparency like if we’re going to pay you as equitably as everybody else.

 

First of all, there are no inequities from the get-go. What I always say to leaders is, you have to get to know your team members and you need to know how do they like to communicate, what are their strengths, and what do they need help with and get your team to know one another so they can support one another. You cannot expect someone to just come in and know how to work here. You have to make sure that they are set up to be successful, and pair them with people who are going to help them. Maybe give them a buddy or a support person.

Make sure that the others also acknowledge like, “This is going to be hard.” It is not easy to be the only person in the world. We have to treat people incredibly fairly. If anything doesn’t feel right to any of you, you are all empowered to speak up. This new person, if it’s the woman or whoever it is, that person has to be able to say like, “This doesn’t feel right. We have to listen. We have to make sure that we are adjusting our behavior if we’re doing something that isn’t inclusive here.”

It’s often hard to call it out when it’s happening to you. That’s why I think allyship is important, like someone else is looking out for this new person and saying, “You’re not hearing them. You’re not listening to them. You’re interrupting or disregarding them. Whatever it is.” Let other people help on their behalf too. That’s powerful.

The Importance Of A Wider Net In Hiring

Thank you for that. Now, the other piece I would like to jump into is, we’re trying to attract and break people out of the marketplace. In this new environment, in all ways, we want to make sure we’re bringing in the best person for the job and so forth. In some of the marketplaces, there’s inherent bias, meaning that there’s not a whole lot of different genders and so forth in certain professions. Is there a way that leadership frame that in thinking or acknowledging some of the bias in the marketplace? How can they make way for more opportunity there for a diverse thought?

You’re asking a couple of different things there. I’m not a hiring expert, so you probably know a lot about this. What I will say is this. Often, we have to cast a wider net than we normally do. I remember this when I was working for this company, and we were looking and, like, “Why does everyone look the same? Why are we always getting similar candidates?” For example, we’re always going to the same universities for recruiting, whether it’s the Ivy League or whatever it is.

For example, are we going to a broader set of universities to look for recent grads or for our interns? That will change the makeup right there. It’s not like there are no women or people of color in engineering, for example, which is what I was doing. You’re going to have to be creative in where do you find people. Again, back to your initial question about the new landscape. This is not about illegally going out and looking for quotas if we’re going to get this many women and this many people of color

To say like, “We appreciate the fact that we are going to be a stronger organization if we have more diverse backgrounds and cultures and ways of thinking and seeing the world. Therefore, we want to cast a wider net.” Make sure your recruiters know that we are not just going to go to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford to find our new hires from universities. We have to think differently. You’ve certainly heard about interviewing practices and job descriptions to make sure that we are not turning off certain segments of the population.

One of the things that’s interesting in research is that when you write a job description and you say, “These are the requirements for the job.” This is what the research shows that women will only apply if they check off 100% of the requirements. Whereas, men will apply if they have 50% or 70%. Make sure that the requirements are real requirements and not just nice to have because you want to make sure you’re attracting everyone to apply for the job. Those are just a couple of things.

We appreciate the fact that we are going to be a stronger organization if we have more diverse backgrounds, cultures, and ways of thinking. Share on X

I love that discussion around the job description because I’ve found that a lot myself. One thing, with the onset of artificial intelligence, job descriptions have somewhat gotten a new sign on life. It’s like, “Finally, we can write these things, and it’s not so difficult.” It’s helping it a lot. It’s giving good attention to that description and ensuring that it has that inclusive language so it can reflect everybody and attract that wider net so that you bring in the best talent. That’s another thing that’s relating to what I was saying before.

The end result is we want to get the best person for the job. We want the language to bring in or cast that net to where we can find that best person out of that population of people. I love how you brought that to life there. The next thing would be great is, how can an inclusive leader can use techniques to motivate their people to get them more engaged and get them more involved in the conversation and deliver their best work overall?

Motivating And Engaging Employees Through Inclusivity

First of all, every human being wants to feel that they’re heard, seen, and respected for who they are. A large part of the leader’s job is to make sure every single member of their team knows that. The first place to start is, how do you create the conditions so everyone can share those ideas? To motivate people, they have to feel invested. They have to feel like I’m engaged in this work and my contributions are appreciated. I always use this as an example. It’s like, how do you run your meetings?

Meetings in so many ways reflect and embody the culture that you have created, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, people have asked me, “How do you know if it’s a safe and inclusive environment?” Without running a survey. You can certainly run surveys. If you don’t run a survey, you just observe what happens in your meetings, who speaks, and who remains silent. That’s a clue. The people who generally speak in meetings are the people who feel empowered, feel engaged, and feel respected, and are heard. They may be like 2 out of 10 people.

Again, what research shows about meetings is that in most meetings, there’s a very small percentage of people who contribute. You as the leader now, how do you hear from those other ten? What techniques are you going to use? It can be very practical. We are going to discuss this topic and I need everyone’s input. I’m going to give you the topic in advance because people with different cognitive styles may need more time to process. When we come to the meeting, we’re going to talk about it and I’m going to hear from every one of you.

I love to do time bound or time box turn taking. Everyone’s going to speak for a minute or 30 seconds, and we’re going to hear from everyone. Maybe we’re going to use an online whiteboard because we’re in a virtual meeting, and everyone’s going to put their ideas on Post-its on or stickies on this virtual whiteboard and do a lightning round to hear from everybody.

There are ways to run an inclusive meeting. That will trickle down into your culture because now people will feel like, “My ideas matter.” We’re listening, debating them, and talking about them. We’re getting to the best solution together. I believe in the collective genius of a team, but you don’t tap into that by just running meetings with the loudest person speaking.

I love what you said as far as relating this to the new work environment. Whereas, some people may be in person and some people may be remote in finding ways to find inclusiveness to bring those voices that are remote into the conversation. That sticky note idea was great in that whiteboard.

 

I use that all the time with virtual teams. Honestly, I think that this is where technology is helping us be more inclusive. It’s not working against us if we use it well and if we use the chat or online whiteboards or polling, and all of those types of things. We can bring in all the voices.

Is that another skill leaders need to harness becoming a technical expert and running meetings? There is also the element of ensuring that you have a designated technical expert involved that is helping do polls and things like this. Is there a thing that one-way works better than another in an organization that you’re experienced with?

I think we all have to get at least familiar with these tools. They’re not hard, honestly. Learn to use them and make sure someone in your team does. What I don’t like is when it always falls on the same person to be in charge of the technology because if they’re one of the staff members, you’re running the polls and doing all of that. You cannot fully participate. I like to have someone rotate those roles or rotate a facilitator role. We don’t have to be professional facilitators because that’s a whole skill, but how do we do the turn-taking? How do we run the tools? If everyone can get to this basic level of proficiency, and then everyone can have a chance to fully participate.

Measuring Outcomes And Promoting Equity

Great advice. As we’re going along here and we’re thinking about implementing these inclusive policies. What is typically the first step that our leader can take going about implementing a policy or understanding how they want to improve the environment to where they’re getting people to do their best work? How can they use your techniques? What are the first steps?

If you’re talking about systems and things like that, we need to measure outcomes. If you’re starting at zero, you have to get a baseline of where are we, and maybe that’s for survey data. People do survey all the time, so make sure that you have questions about inclusion, however, you want to word it about, like “My voice is welcome. I’m respected.” Those types of things, and see what your baseline as a leader. Leaders, as I said, you start with your own behavior and how are you listening?

How are you showing up? What are you rewarding? It’s important to be clear about what we’re rewarding. Often what I’ve seen is that, especially in a technical environment, the rewards go to the people who are the most technically coming up with the breakthrough ideas and not rewarding like, how are people helping one another? How are people collaborating? How are people finding solutions together? Are we rewarding behavior that is helping everyone do better? Are we rewarding these technical geniuses?

Be clear. In the world, you’re in compensation. It’s so important to look at the data at who is getting promoted, who is getting raises, and slice that and dice that across your population. What happens is we do things unconsciously based on our own worldview and our own biases. An example of this is when I was leading a large team, we had a group of engineers in China. It was about 800 engineers. There were a lot. I had a lot of data to work with. As they were getting ready to do their annual raises and promotions, I saw that the percentage of women getting promoted was like one-tenth of the men.

I asked the leader. I said, “Are you aware of that?” They weren’t because they hadn’t seen the data. They had only done it in their little pockets. I’m like, “We cannot have this. We have got to look at this systematically.” You have to not only look at your own behavior but what are we putting in place to ensure that one manager over here who may have done something inadvertent isn’t going to skew things in a way that we now pay inequity or we have promotions being done like it’s only the men are getting promoted or only the women. Whatever it is.

We have to look at the data, and we have to keep measuring it. I think we have to do pulse checks with our team like, “I am feeling like I have a voice here. I am feeling like I can do my best work.” Those kinds of things I don’t think are going to be scrutinized from a legal perspective. This is just about creating a great work culture. I think this is the stuff we have to do. The book that I wrote on inclusive leadership.

Every single manager has a huge impact on how people are experiencing work. Share on X

I have lots of tips for how do we can show up as better listeners and being fair to everyone and creating team environments where all voices are welcome, which is also about psychological safety. I have lots of tips there, but I think we have to look at how we show up and how do we see the impact of our and all of the leaders’ behaviors every day because it has a huge impact. Every single manager has a huge impact on how people are experiencing work.

I love how you brought that down to metrics. Being a metrics-driven individual in my career, that’s very important. When the traditional realm of thinking about inclusivity, we often think about gender, race, and things like this but what’s important to ensure that everything is done right is measuring the results, the performance, and elements like this to us so we can ensure that merit is taking place. We’re not biased about how we’re rewarding results there.

I think that’s a big failing that organizations have done in the past is they haven’t been measuring results effectively. They don’t know if bias is truly happening or not as a result of merit and the organization. Our leaders need to focus on measuring the results and those metrics, making sure that we’re ensuring that there’s equal opportunity, and ensuring that people can do their best work by ensuring that everybody has an inclusive voice to where we can focus on coming out with innovative ideas.

It does take everybody to come up with the best solution. If you can, the best teams I’ve been a part of are teams where we can debate things. We don’t all see things all eye to eye all the time. We disagree, but we have the best interests of the organization in mind. We are coming up with the best solution collectively. It may not be that my idea is the one that’s chosen, and that’s okay if we get to the best idea but all the ideas get out on the table.

Especially in this weird world we live in, some of the most innovative ideas are the ones that we wouldn’t consider before. It’s like, maybe that isn’t a stupid question. Maybe there’s brilliance in there. You need to think about setting the stage because it’s a new world. Some of those ideas may not have been acceptable, or those questions that may have seemed stupid before are not so funny nowadays. There’s a new reality.

You never know where the one last thing is. You never know where that brilliant idea is going to come from. That’s the thing that I discovered. It’s often the quietest voice and the most unexpected person who’s suddenly going to have the breakthrough. That’s why it’s so important to find a way to hear from everybody.

Embracing Diverse Perspectives For A Better Future

As we go to a close here, what is the most valuable piece of advice that you would give a leader that wants to move the needle in inclusivity and getting those best ideas so they can do their best work and deliver the best products and services to their people or clients?

Maybe the starting point is that we all see the world through our own lenses and our own experiences. Other people are not experiencing life and work the way you are. You have no idea what they’re experiencing until you get curious to hear from them, listen to them, or be challenged by them, and to just be open-minded that you don’t have all the answers.

 

Someone here probably can help you to be open-minded, open-hearted, and be curious to learn from this group of people that are working with you. The more you open yourself up to input and new ideas, the more people are going to want to work with you and are going to want to give their best and give their 100% plus. That showing up consistently every day with that open mind is what’s going to make all the difference.

Minette, as we coming into pieces here, I’m looking at some of the comments. I’m seeing a lot of positive comments around the conversation. Thank you, Javier, for your thoughts there. It’s great that everybody’s joining in the conversation. I appreciate that. I would love to just end this conversation. There are many leaders out there are wondering, what is the next thing that you’re doing? How can they learn more about inclusive leadership in this environment? What are the things that you’re doing to help pave the way forward?

I have my book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, so you can get my book. You can go to my website, MinetteNorman.com. I have some free resources, including a discussion guide that might be useful for you to use with your team and a one-pager and invite me for a conversation. I love to come into organizations and try to help you with whatever you need, whether it’s a workshop or a longer engagement. Let’s talk about what you’re struggling with or where you need some help. I would be delighted to engage with you.

Thank you so much, Minette, for joining us and having a great conversation around this topic. It’s been a lot of fun.

Thanks for inviting me, Sam.

For those who are reading, I will see in the next episode. Until then, take care.

 

Important Links

• Minette Norman
• Minette Norman on LinkedIn
• Minette Norman on Instagram
• The Boldly Inclusive Leader
• The Psychological Safety Playbook

 

About Minette Norman

Minette Norman is an award-winning author, speaker, and leadership consultant dedicated to fostering inclusive workplaces where diverse teams thrive. With over 30 years of experience leading global technical teams in Silicon Valley, most recently as Vice President of Engineering Practice at Autodesk, she has a proven track record in promoting collaborative and innovative cultures. Minette is the author of The Boldly Inclusive Leader and co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook. She holds degrees in Drama and French from Tufts University and studied at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Recognized among the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times and as “Business Role Model of the Year” in the Women in IT/Silicon Valley Awards, Minette continues to inspire leaders to embrace empathy and inclusivity.