Leaders today are grappling with very real and pressing challenges: keeping their workforce safe, balancing the need for business results with the need for compassion, staying ahead of new laws and regulations, grappling with whether or not to reopen and how to do it safely. As they put their hearts and minds into how to improve their work cultures on a very fundamental level, two factors to keep in mind: resilience — the ability to weather changes and struggles and bounce back intact, and diversity.
Forward thinking leadership means taking a clear stance on diversity that is effective and relevant. It’s one critical way to increase the resilience of your organization and your work culture. If you don’t address the problems that make your work culture brittle, it snaps under pressure. If you don’t aim to expand your workforce to represent as many diverse points of view as possible, you lose that ability to make the best decisions based on seeing all the possible angles. But if as a leader you don’t have a well-developed sense of emotional intelligence, you won’t practice the empathy and the clarity to understand the dynamics at work in your organizational culture, and steer your workforce through a crisis — any crisis. And you likely won’t be able to keep your best talent for very long.
Today I’m welcoming Melissa Lamson, CEO of Lamson Consulting to talk about the new imperative for leaders — to bring resilience as well as diversity to their organizations, and why the two go hand in hand.