Inclusivity and coaching is a heavy topic.

On one hand, I see a lot of potential for a coaching mindset and a coaching approach to working with your team to contribute to making your workplace more inclusive.

This comes to mind pretty frequently on LinkedIn, where I follow several people who talk about making workplaces more inclusive with regard to neurodiversity and disabilities, parts of DEIA work that I was less informed on until the past couple of years.

Last week, I engaged with a post that discussed the ways that managers and colleagues can misunderstand the things they learned in neuroinclusivity trainings, leading to actions that have the effect of making the workplace less inclusive. This tends to happen when a manager hears “many autistic people … “, and generalizes that to all autistic people, and then implements accommodations that have unintended negative effects.

Now, if you know much of anything about neurodiversity, you know that’s a huge umbrella term that encompasses many different ways a brain can be wired differently from what’s considered neurotypical – from ADHD to OCD to ASD.

Focusing only on ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, how that shows up differs from person to person. A lot of people hear that “Spectrum” part and think that we’re talking about a continuum or likert scale stretching from “not at all” autistic to “a little bit” autistic to “very” autistic, but that’s not at all accurate.

I find it more useful to think of the Autism Spectrum like the color spectrum – you’re either on it or you’re not, but if you’re on it, where you stand might look very different from where someone else on the same spectrum is standing. So the accommodations that work well for someone who is in the green part of the spectrum might do more harm than good for someone who is in the purple area. And even the folks who are all in the purple area can have as many different needs as there are different shades of purple.

If you know that someone on your team is autistic, then it’s crucial to talk to them and ask questions about what will best support them. Sure, if you’ve had a training in neuroinclusivity, then you’ve been introduced to some of the generalizations about the needs that are most common in this group, but the most important take-away should be that you need to be flexible in listening to them instead of imposing your own way of working onto every member of your team.

And so, developing a coaching approach to leadership, which centers asking questions and actively listening, makes it easier to not only create an environment that is more inclusive of the employees that you know are neurodiverse, but also to create a more inclusive environment for all. As you get more accustomed to working with different needs and interaction styles, that will benefit members of your team who maybe are not yet diagnosed or don’t feel safe disclosing at work.

And extending that approach to your whole team enables you to be more inclusive of other sorts of differences. Pausing to be curious and genuinely listen and try to understand another person’s perspective, instead of judging something as wrong because it’s not how you would have done it, gives you a chance to learn and helps your team feel more of a sense of belonging.

But.

And you knew there had to be a “but” there, right? 😂

Simply developing a coaching approach is not enough.

In the last meeting of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership, the issue of inclusivity and privilege came up. We were discussing The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, one of the most highly recommended books on managerial coaching.

Michael Bungay Stanier is a big name in professional coaching, and there’s a lot that I find valuable in this book. But, it’s very clearly written from a white male perspective.

This position of privilege comes across in the way he phrases things, including the questions he proposes you try using. The premise of the book is that all you need is the set of seven questions listed in this book to become an effective managerial coach. Of course, I think there’s more to it than that, but even if we were to agree on the premise, the particulars of some of the questions reflect the reality that he has never had to navigate these interactions as a Black woman in a predominantly white institution, and has never had to deal with the misogynoir that comes with that position.

Simply being a great coach in your own niche does not inherently make you aware of the effects of your own privileges.

In my experience, I believe that the core tenets of a coaching approach – staying curious, embracing the not-knowing, embracing the joy of learning new things, embracing mistakes as things to learn from without defending the intentions that led to the mistake – all of these elements of a coaching mindset make it easier to stay open to learning about systems of oppression.

But to actually learn, you do have to make the effort to go out and learn about those topics. Hearing individual anecdotes alone is not the same as learning to understand the systems that contextualize those anecdotes. That’s one of the several layers of the scorn toward people who talk about having a Black friend. Even if they are as good of a friend as that person believes, if all of your information is coming from your good friend Candace Owens, then how would you even know how unpopular her opinions are within the larger Black community?

That’s not to disregard the value of getting to know individuals – the whole first half of this letter was about the importance of listening to individuals!

But we have to learn to look at both the forest AND the trees, to appreciate the individual differences AND understand how everyone fits together. Extending the forest metaphor, if we just listen to the tall tree’s intention of reaching for the sunlight, we may not notice how many seedlings suffer from being shaded out by that tall tree – intentions don’t negate harmful effects.

As people, it’s our responsibility to pay attention to learn about what systems may be harming others, regardless of whether anyone intends to do harm, and take actions to mitigate that harm and search for solutions that help everyone thrive.

So I do see developing a coaching mindset as a way to make it easier to develop a more inclusive workplace, in part by making it easier for you to be open to learning without the defensiveness that so many of us have learned to jump to in difficult conversations.

But that work has to be combined with taking action to learn about the systems we work within.

So I hope you’ll continue learning about developing a coaching approach to leadership, but also keep doing the work to learn more about building more equitable, inclusive teams. Follow folks who discuss inclusivity on your favorite social platforms, sign up for classes and workshops, and keep reading on your own.