The Power of Inclusive Leadership: Courage, Communication & Change

Why do so many leaders struggle with inclusive leadership?

In this episode of The Inclusive Growth Show, Toby Mildon speaks with Sharon Amesu, a former barrister turned leadership consultant and founder of She Leads for Legacy. Sharon shares her journey from the legal profession into the world of leadership development and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Together, they discuss the key traits of modern leaders, why courageous conversations matter, and how organisations can foster psychological safety.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Why courageous conversations are essential for leaders today.
• How to build inclusive leadership skills in a rapidly changing world.
• The impact of employee disengagement and how to turn it around.
• Why cultural humility is more important than cultural competence.
• The role of communication in creating thriving workplaces.

Sharon also shares insights from her work with She Leads for Legacy, an organisation focused on empowering Black women professionals.

🔗 Find out more about Sharon and her work: She Leads for Legacy

If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Chapters

• 0:01 Creating Inclusive Workplace Communication
• 18:05 Leadership Skills for Inclusive Growth

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon. Future proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.

Toby Mildon: Hey there. Thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth podcast. I'm Toby Mildon and I am really, really excited about today's guest. Her name is Sharon Amesu and Sharon and I have been working together for quite a now. It started off where a client of ours paired us up. So Sharon and I have been working with an organization called Turley. They are a professional services consultancy within the planning and the built environment sector. And the chief people officer who we have been working with wanted to run a program within the company to really upskill leaders on becoming inclusive leaders and really boost their confidence about equity, diversity and inclusion within the company. And our client had this fantastic idea of bringing in different outside experts as a really good sort of critical friend or sounding board. And they paired Sharon and I up and I think Sharon and I make an amazing team. I love working with Sharon and finally I've got her on the podcast because we can learn so much from her. So, Sharon, it's so lovely to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Sharon Amesu: It's an absolute pleasure. Any space that you're in, Toby, is a delight to be in for me. So thank you very much for this opportunity to join you.

Toby Mildon: Oh, thank you, thank you. So could you just let us know a bit more about yourself because you actually started your career in law as a barrister before working in the space that we work in now and also creating the Impact and Influence Academy. So can you just kind of, yeah, let us know a bit more about your background and what you've done and what's led you to this point.

Sharon Amesu: Yeah, for sure. So I started in law as you mentioned, and my route into law was as a result of me being exposed to injustice, discrimination, prejudice in the black community during the 1970s and '80s when I was growing up in the UK. I'm from Manchester, hail from Manchester in the UK, born and bred. And around that time, '70s and early '80S, there were real issues as far as challenges between the criminal justice system and the education system and members of the African Caribbean community of which I am a member. And I remember my dad during that period, Toby, being a titular leader really, a leader without title, but a leader in terms of vocation, seeing the need and responding to that need and bringing together in particular within the West Indian community, the parents of children who were in the education system who were experiencing marginalization and exclusion and discrimination and bringing them together to help them find their voice. To articulate that, to bring challenge to those injustices.

Sharon Amesu: And I remember being inspired by that and also just seeing how when one was able to find their voice and use their voice, that that had power. But also that there were a whole section of people who felt very disenfranchised, very disempowered and having no voice. And so that awareness grew and I started to connect the dots between having voice and the criminal justice system and the extent to which law impacts people's lives. And I had a sense early on that I wanted to go into the law and be a voice for those who had no voice or whose voices were silenced. So that sense of justice was seeded very early in my formative years. And that continued on for 16 years. I was in practice, in particular criminal law. That was my area of focus. And then I left the bar around about 10 years ago. And that was as a result of at the time I was doing a lot of work with women who'd experienced domestic abuse.

Sharon Amesu: And I was so frustrated by the emasculation of these women in the criminal justice system that in many ways, again, the aim that I had of supporting women to find their voice and be represented, that in certain ways the criminal justice system did not enable that to happen. That my frustration grew with that. And so I decided that I wanted to go upstream, as it were. And I left the bar to seek to do development work with women. Confidence building programs in the first instance. And then in a non linear way I started working with leaders in the education sector and then leaders in organizations in the corporate sector, not for profit and so on. Because I began to understand more deeply that in order to effect change, we have to work with decision makers, those who are leading change in their organizations. And the extent to which they understand the challenges and the barriers that people are facing in the workplace, it helps them to gain insight into what to do about that. So that has led me to this point in a very non linear way, Toby, to this point now where I work with organizations in the way in which you do.

Toby Mildon: What would you say are the top three things that you spend most of your time working on? 

Sharon Amesu: Top three things are one, courageous conversations. Helping leaders in organizations to be able to hold difficult conversations about challenging topics. And that comes up a lot. Also inclusive leadership. So the extent to which leaders are able to create and cultivate an environment where everyone in their organization, irrespective of their background, can thrive because there is positive, engaged leadership and also employee engagement. That's a real challenge that I'm working on in the workplace right now. The rates of disengagement and the dates around disengagement is really quite poor. I mean, there are estimates of only 37% of employees being engaged in the workplace. And when people are disengaged, they don't feel as though their voices are valued and heard and their contributions are recognized. Then their heart is at home whilst their head is at work. And so the work that I'm doing is to help organizations improve that engagement and really get people involved and enjoying the work that they're doing.

Toby Mildon: So I know from my working with you that really communication is important, that you do a lot around communication, like you say, having courageous conversations and things like that. Why do you think that communication challenges are so common in today's workplaces? And how do these issues impact team performance? 

Sharon Amesu: So one of the things, Toby, that I feel is often lost in the workplace is the understanding that the people who operate outside of the portals of the building are the same people who come through the portals of the building. That we don't lose our experiences, we don't lose our socialization, we don't lose our connections, we don't lose our identity. When we're in the workplace we are the same people with a job title. And so all of the biases that we might have, all of the prejudgements that we might have about other people. They all exist within us when we come into the workplace. And I feel that issues in relation to communication are born out of the fact that we don't appreciate difference, that we don't appreciate that people are different, our outlook and our perspectives are different, that people see things differently. And we need to create an environment where difference is welcomed and respected and the understanding of human dynamics and human relationships are appreciated and centered.

Sharon Amesu: When I think about the relationship that I have with close members of my own family or friends, it's very much give and take. There's a respect that we have for each other. There's an understanding that just because we disagree doesn't mean we have to be disagreeable. We center the relationship relationship and we have that at the forefront above the issues that we may disagree on or that might potentially divide us. And so I think when it comes to workplace communication and the reasons why we have conflict in the workplace, division in the workplace, polarization is because of those key things. And also we, we forget that we are impacted by what's going on in national conversation and national discourse and what's going on geopolitically and politically. All of dynamics come into the workplace and having the skill to be able to navigate difference and engage difference is something that is absent in the workplace and is massively impacting workplace dynamics.

Toby Mildon: Yeah. And it's interesting because workplace dynamics are being affected by things happening outside. The polarization that we're seeing, the social disruption, the geopolitical landscape and things like that. And it does feel like when we're actually recording this episode, it does feel like we've actually had a year where there is increasingly polarized... We are living in an increasingly polarized world. And what advice would you give to leaders who are trying to bridge the divide and collaborate with colleagues who might hold different views to either themselves or the organizational culture or values? 

Sharon Amesu: So thank you, Toby. What I would say is that leaders in the first instance have to understand that they are leading by example and to ignore the real challenges that are being faced in the workplace. And almost to have your ostrich syndrome head in the sand, focus solely on the work at hand and not seek to ensure that the environment itself is one which is conducive to inclusion and psychological safety, et cetera, is to be remiss of our responsibilities. So in the first instance it's lead by example. Be the example of the leader who engages difference. Be the example of the leader who ensures that people feel safe in the workplace, psychologically safe in the workplace. Be the leader who's willing to make mistakes and own up to those mistakes and be vulnerable. I also think that leaders also have to be self aware. So what are the biases that we might have? And you know, bias often has negative connotations with it, Toby, doesn't it? Like it's been tarnished so badly and there's all sorts of commentary around efficacy in relation to training, around unconscious bias and so on.

Sharon Amesu: I say this that it's so important for us to be aware of the biases that we all have because we all have them. And indeed for the most part, they're necessary because they help us in our decision making. What we have to do is heighten our awareness about the extent to which those biases do not serve us. In fact, they are counter and anti the progression that we'd want to make as a leader in relation to our effectiveness. So raising our awareness. What are those biases that we have that sit and impact our outlook on the world and our perception of other people and our perception of other cultures? How and to what extent do they impact and impair how I engage with people and increase that self awareness? Because you can't change what you're not aware of. And that helps to mitigate some of that division and polarization that we're talking about. I also feel it's important, this might feel like it's strong language, but I feel that there has to be constructive, supportive, zero tolerance.

Sharon Amesu: All right, so what do I mean by that? Organizational cultures need to be set by the leaders, and the leaders need to make it clear about what is and isn't acceptable, what behaviors are and are not acceptable within the organization because what we accept becomes our culture. But we also have to do that in a supportive way. All right, so we can't simply lambast and have a cancel culture because we see that in society, don't we? If someone makes a misstep, if someone unwittingly or unintentionally makes a remark that's not in keeping or appropriate, then there is this literal castigation of that individual. We can't have that. It's just not conducive to human relations where we're able to make mistakes and be forgiving and have grace. So it's knowing what our non negotiables are culturally, but also providing a supportive environment that enables the learning and the development and the growth where mistakes are being made and allowing for that to happen.

Sharon Amesu: And I feel those are key, key pointers, key ingredients really for leaders to have in mind, Toby, in order to create a more inclusive environment. I also think that leaders need to be intentional about upskilling themselves on cultural... It's often described as cultural competence. I don't think that we can be culturally competent on every form of culture. I think what we need is cultural humility. That is the ability to be open minded and the willingness to learn about and from every culture. And I think those are some of the key ingredients to help us be more effective as leaders in this space.

Toby Mildon: I mean that open mindedness and willingness to learn are two ingredients of inclusive leadership. And it's something that we can actually measure using the Talogy perceptions assessment, which is a tool that I used around benchmarking inclusive leadership behaviors. But the other behavior that the Talogy team talk about is inclusive leaders have the ability to build relationships and build relationships with people who are unlike themselves or they might deem to be in the "out group" rather than within their in group.

Sharon Amesu: Absolutely. It's a key ingredient and that really touches on the impact and influence academy because it's that ability. Leadership, essentially, Toby, is about influence. It's about the extent to which you are able to engage people and have them see and buy into your vision of a preferred future and take people along with you. And so building relationships, the ability to connect across difference, to have dialogue across difference, even across the divide, is a key leadership capability, certainly for an increasingly globalized and diverse workforce, which will only accelerate as time goes on. Right. The ability to do that and have that and create that is going to be a key leadership competency for the 21st century.

Toby Mildon: Absolutely. Now, I mean, you've worked with many leaders on developing modern workplace skills. What do you think are some of the top skills that 21st century leaders need to build in order to have cohesive and engaged teams? 

Sharon Amesu: It's really interesting because we often, in the age of AI and the rapid advancement of technology, Toby, we can sometimes assume that the newest shiny object is going to be the thing that we need to aspire for in order to be effective in the future. But actually, I believe that it's the basics that are fundamental to building human relationships and to leading people. Those basics will still be in situ and will still hold water for the future. So what are those basics? Well, one of those key things for me is courage, and I talk about courage a lot. The extent to which we are able to navigate the fearful space, right. And take risks and be wrong and be vulnerable. How are we when we're facing obstacles and opposition and opponents willing to lean into our convictions and do the right thing? 

Sharon Amesu: That is going to be what every leader of the future is going to need. We're also going to need to be resilient because things won't go according to plan and there will be resistance. I remember recently sharing with someone that, you know, when you see job adverts, Toby, and they'll talk about various qualifications that you'll need and the projects that you might be leading, leading on. And they refer to those aspects of the, the leadership position. But they don't talk about character and the character elements to sustain you in that role. They don't talk about the fact that, you know, you'll need to be resilient. Because there'll be times when members of your team, they'll be antipathetic toward your agenda and toward your approach, and they won't support you. There'll be times when you step out of your comfort zone and you'll try something new and you'll seek to be innovative, but that will be rejected. There'll be times when you mess up and people are critical of your approach and your ambitions, what do you do in the heat of the battle? 

Sharon Amesu: And you have to be resilient and be willing to bounce back. I also think that empathy and emotional intelligence will be really important for now and indeed for the future. Emotional intelligence, we know that Daniel Goleman piece of work includes the self awareness, but it's also about your understanding and your ability to read the room and to read other people and really understand. What are the messages that aren't spoken and be able to respond accordingly. And empathy is a really key skill because it's the ability that it's not sympathy, it's the ability to envisage someone else's perspective and make decisions and have an outlook from someone else's shoes, from someone else's outlook and points of view. So I believe that those are some of the key ingredients that leaders will need to have as we move toward a massively accelerated changing world. I think agility as well, actually just throwing that in there, to be honest, Toby, because change is... The pace of change is only set to increase. And so the ability to have the foresight and be agile and flexible and not simply be fixed in your mindset about the way things must be is going to be a key skill as well for the future.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, absolutely. Now, the question that everybody gets asked when they come on the podcast is what does inclusive growth mean for you? 

Sharon Amesu: Inclusive growth means the expectation to move from where you are to where you want to be and carry people along with you in a way that hears everyone's voices. Now, I think it's important to differentiate inclusion from democracy. It's not that everyone's view is taken on board and implemented. It's that everyone's view is taken on board, that everyone is heard and the intention is to create an environment that supports the hearing of everyone's voice. But ultimately, leaders have to make decisions. And not abdicating that responsibility on the basis that where wanting to be inclusive is really important. It's also the expectation. The other word in that is growth. It's the expectation that we will move, we won't be stagnant. We have to take steps, we have to progress, we have to advance. Things do have to change, but that we do so in partnership.

Sharon Amesu: We do so collaboratively. We do so in a way which ensures that as many voices and as many views as possible can be taken on board. It also means for me, Toby, that it's about opportunity for all as well. Because so often when it comes to growth, it benefits some, but not others. Right. And so how do we ensure that irrespective of your background, there's no arbitrary measure that might cause for you to be excluded from that growth that we don't have? A tale of two cities where we do, you know, in certain literal cities, not just metaphorically, where have growth, we have economic growth, but there's only certain demographics that are experiencing that growth and others are left behind. So it's including people's voices and creating opportunity for all to progress from where we are to where we want to be.

Toby Mildon: Brilliant. There's one final thing that I'm really keen for the person listening to us right now to learn about... And that is your other business, which is the She Leads for Legacy. Can you tell us a bit more about that organization? Because the conference that you organize, like, honestly, I went to your conference this year, I was a panelist and it was easily the best conference I've ever been to in probably years. So, I mean, I can't wait for the next year's conference. So, yeah, can you just let us know a bit more about that? 

Sharon Amesu: Thank you so much for that, Toby. And can I say that to this day, attendees of the conference speak of your contribution and just how valuable it was and how rich in insights it was. So it was an absolute pleasure having you there and thank you for contributing. So She Leads for Legacy came about really, because myself and my daughter were both barristers. She's still in practice now. And we were talking about our experiences of being black female professionals. Well, in first of all, just being black, being barristers, not even related to our gender or indeed our color when we first started talking about it. But as time went on and we began to just talk about the extent to which there was a crossover in similarities of our experiences, we began to see some aspects of that being gendered.

Sharon Amesu: And some aspects of that having a racial tone to it. And so we began to think some more about what are those particular areas where there is interlinking, where there are aspects of our experiences where we'd prefer there not to be in some continuity over time. And we began to look at some of the data and the fact, Toby, that even right now, just reported last week, actually in Legal Week, there was an article which reported that black barristers and the legal profession barristers earn on average 16 to 18,000 pounds less per annum than our white counterparts. And that that peak 15 years post qualification experience. And by the time you get to Casey, which is the most senior of barristers, that can average £200,000 per annum. The pay gap, £200,000, that's within law. And we began to have conversations with friends of ours within the legal sector but also outside, just to hear more about their experiences.

Sharon Amesu: And anecdotally we began to see that that picture was not unique at all the bar and the legal profession. We then secured some funding to commission and work in partnership with the University of Manchester to work with some researchers. To understand some of the barriers for black women in the workplace. And you know, the stories that we heard of discrimination, of exclusion, isolation, marginalization, being held back, you know, being assigned all sorts of diminutive tropes and just the frustration that many of the women were experiencing in the workplace. And you know, that's borne out of course by the research that there's high levels of ambition, but in relation to achievement, reaching higher echelons in organizations, we're just not seeing that.

Sharon Amesu: And so one of the key recommendations that came through from the research was, one, the importance of a network and there being support for men and women who are often the only in the space that they're in, but also the importance of allyship, Toby. And working in partnership with people who are intentional to leverage and use their power and influence to close some of those gaps that we've just referred to. And so She Leads for Legacy was born out of that. It was born out of a desire and an ambition to see black women in the workplace accelerate and close those gaps, those gender pay gaps, the ethnicity pay gaps, et cetera, but also to do that in partnership with allies. And it really was attuned to the experiences that I had had and indeed a fear had had. And that is that throughout our careers we have had brilliant sponsors. The word allyship is very much sort of new in parlance. We didn't really use the word allies.

Sharon Amesu: It was just mentors and sponsors who saw potential and wanted to ensure that they would use whatever means they had, whatever resource they had or insight they had to help ensure that that potential was materialized. And we knew the power of that. And working in partnership with people who just wanted to do the right thing, right. And so She Leads for Legacy came about to enable that to happen. And the community now is a growing one, which is great. We have an annual conference this year. We had over 450 delegates attend this event where we brought together great speakers like yourself who could give us insight into how to do inclusion better? How to lead inclusively, how to work collaboratively. How do we lead courageously when in fact there may be people who may be oppositional to our agenda. And you know, I think you hit the nail on the head, Toby, when you mentioned we are in very polarized times and we saw across this year 2024, it was really quite striking how that has manifested both nationally and globally. And so for us, the need for us to have these sorts of spaces where we're able to hold courageous conversations about difficult topics in a positive way with the intention, with our face set towards solutions, I think is a very necessary in this time. And so I'm delighted that we've been able to partner with organizations and partner with collaborators like yourself to make this stuff, to center this stuff and bring visibility to it.

Toby Mildon: So before we go, Sharon, if the person listening to us right now now wants to follow your work, perhaps they could do with your help around developing inclusive leaders, helping leaders with their communication or maybe they even want to get involved with She Leads for Legacy. How should they do that? 

Sharon Amesu: Brilliant. Thank you so much. Well, we're all over social. So you can find me and you can find She Leads for Legacy on LinkedIn. We're very active there. Just I have not seen another Sharon Amesu so if you look for me, you'll find me, I'm sure. And also she needs for Legacy as well is there and on Instagram you can find us. We also have a website www.sheleadsforlegacy.com and also sharonamesu.co.uk and you can find out more about how we can support and work together with you.

Toby Mildon: Great. And just for clarity, the spelling of that is S-H-A-R-O-N A-M-E-S-U so we can easily find you. Well Sharon, thanks ever so much for joining us today. I just love catching up with you and I just, I can't wait to continue working with you because I just, yeah, I love working with you.

Sharon Amesu: Thank you so much. The feeling is entirely mutual. Toby.

Toby Mildon: Oh, thank you. Thanks and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth podcast with Sharon and my yourself. Hopefully you've taken away some new ideas or inspiration that you can start to apply in your own role or your own organisation. And as Sharon says, if you need any support around developing inclusive leaders communications, Sharon is definitely the person to speak to and also I highly recommend researching She Leads for Legacy and getting involved in their activities and conferences and things like that. So thanks ever so much for tuning in and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode which will be coming out very soon. Until then, take good care of yourself. Bye Bye.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at mildon.co.uk.