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HRO Today Forum Europe Preview The Road Not Well Traveled Executives will have to shift their thinking to be inclusive. Some advice. By Shirley Engelmeier Hierarchical leadership has been tradition within the workforce since the industrial era. However, a confluence of factors has created a tipping point for a new leadership style that will be integral to business growth in the decades to come. Inclusive leadership is characterised by leading through seeking and integrating the voices of all employees. The new business normal incorporates three key trends that should pull today's managers away from hierarchal to inclusive leadership. Seismic demographic shifts. Business leaders who recognise the complexity of the new workforce have realised that simply complying with the representation metrics of diversity is not enough and are embracing inclusion as a business strategy that mobilises the diverse workforce to generate business benefits. This requires a new form of leadership. Workforce 2.0. Social media has changed the psyche of today's workforce by changing its expectations around participation. By its very definition, social media is participatory, collaborative, responsive, validating, and equitable—everyone has an opinion and everyone feels they have the right to voice it. Organisations have seen a new generation of workers whose external world is continuously a product of the sum of everyone's input. Today's leaders will have to learn how to do more listening and less talking because the workforce is expecting to have a voice. Gen Y. By 2025, Gen Y will make up 75 per cent of the global workforce. Their influx into the workforce is a major catalyst for leadership change. They bring a number of skills to the workplace including their agility with technology, their ability to multitask, and their tendency to be hyper-creative. Their talents are best leveraged if organisational leadership accepts the way they want to be managed—through collaboration and integration of their voices. This new workforce requires the skills and behaviours of an inclusive leader. What makes up an inclusive leader? How are they different in their DNA? For starters, inclusive leaders [16] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | AUTUMN 2013 are comfortable listening and managing their egos. They also recognise the enormous value of inclusion to the success of the business, internally to produce better innovation, engagement, and retention; and externally to penetrate emerging and new markets. The inclusive leader also relies on key demographics required for growth and creates a hiring culture based on the organisation's future business needs. Here are a few traits of effective inclusive leaders: They are open to a wide range of input by listening, asking, including and welcoming new ideas, opinions, and insights from all employees. They manage their egos by being self-aware and recognising the right time to be center stage and the right time to step back and listen. They are intellectually curious by demonstrating a willingness to learn from others, which in turn enables them to engage more with those around them. They exhibit cultural agility and can interact with different cultures to gain the best insights. They are accessible to employees, not just those on their immediate team, but to everyone within the organisation that can make a positive impact on the business objectives for which they are responsible. Because inclusive leadership is a road not yet well traveled, business leaders have their work cut out for them adapting. Though it's a challenge, it's one that will yield significant results for any organisation's ability to embrace its most important assets—its employees—and sell more goods and services to external stakeholders. Shirley Engelmeier has been an inclusion and diversity strategist and consultant for more than 19 years and will present at the HRO Today Forum Europe, 12 – 14 November in London.