The Unwelcome Perspective; Four myths that get in the way of creating inclusive leadership teams
Diversity and inclusion often appear on the leadership agenda when it’s too late: employees have filed complains about the toxic work culture in their team, team managers are accused of discriminatory remarks, or an incident spiraled out of control and got picked up by the media. Time for damage control. At Jonathan Warner, we work with leaders at all levels - including Boards - and often bring up the topic ourselves. Is your current leadership of the right caliber to give direction to the new generations that quickly take over our workplaces? Is future talent in your company identified based on past performance, or on future potential? Is sufficient cognitive diversity involved when making strategic and operational decisions?
Not the first perspective advisors generally take when offering their services. But we prefer to not shy away from an unwelcome perspective. Frank Garten’s book The Unwelcome Perspective - How Everyday Conversations Make Workplaces Inclusive is published this month. This article describes the 4 myths about DEI that confuse managers and leaders, and send them in the wrong direction when it gets to defining culture change in their teams. A subsequent article will deal with the leadership mindset required to make workplaces psychologically safe and inviting to all flavors of the diversity spectrum. And a final article will deal with conversation techniques to ensure we don’t talk about DEI, but that we talk about our businesses: in a way that all contribute and feel included.
Myth 1
“It’s a sensitive topic. We should be careful.”
“We should not need to walk on eggshells in the presence of human differences. It is better to teach ourselves to love the discomfort of a sensitive conversation and use our differences to make progress.”
DEI often is preached by activists, who direct the public’s attention to problems they identify. But a strong company culture does not stem from walking on eggshells, and avoiding to say “the wrong thing.” Taking offense has become a societal default, often forcing leaders to take measures to ensure we talk in the correct way about minorities. We became obsessed with saying “the right things.” Legal and communication teams get involved in checking corporate communication to ensure that nobody can take offence of what we say and write. But overprotective cultures are seldom high-performance cultures.
Offence is an emotion. And often, people are not offended but take offence on behalf of others. This virtue signalling (“I am ok, as I am pointing out what others do wrong.”) paradoxically does not contribute to an inclusive culture. When we constantly take offence on behalf of others, we create cultures of conflict and separation, instead of connection. We need dialogue, not blame, if we are to construct more inclusive workplaces.
Myth 2
“Building diverse teams is a first step toward inclusive cultures”
“We have come to see diversity as something to be ‘achieved’ rather than as a reflection of how inclusive we truly are. But diversity without inclusion is just a numbers game.”
The obvious first step in DEI is to ensure our teams are diverse. We are not against that. But we should be aware that humans often go for the easy way out: it is much easier to count the diversity numbers than it is to change the underlying culture, that made the diversity numbers what they are. Diversity easily becomes the lightning rod that provides an excuse for not touching the underlying team or company culture.
We naturally escape into superficial diversity metrics. The gender balance is the first one, helped by an obvious target of 50%/50%. And other optical characteristics (religion, skin color, race) follow swiftly. We find false justification in the research that tells us that “diverse teams do better”. But correlation is not the same as causality. And the nuance that further should be added is that cognitively diverse teams only do better if the underlying team culture is inclusive.
Organisational success hinges not on diversity quotas, but on creating inclusive environments where quotas are not needed to give everybody an equal chance to contribute.
Myth 3
“Once aware of our biases, we can control them”
“The biggest threat to inclusion isn’t explicit prejudice - it’s the illusion of objectivity. The moment you believe you’re immune to bias is the moment it controls you the most.”
The human brain is biased by design. Our brains are wired to be fast, not flawless. Faced with millions of stimuli each day, we rely on shortcuts - heuristics - that help us make snap decisions. We associate, we generalize, we jump to conclusions. Not because we’re lazy or malicious, but because our brain simplifies complexity into familiar patterns. And these patterns come at a cost: they make us biased. So bias is the by-product of a brain that favors speed over accuracy, familiarity over novelty, and coherence over contradiction.
If we do not admit we are biased, we will never question our filters, and we will keep appointing people who look like us, think like us, and act like us. Inclusion, then, is not about being flawless - it is about being honest. Pretending we are not biased only perpetuates the exclusion that bias creates. The inclusive culture we seek to create is one in which we no longer pretend we are objective, but admit we have not been objective, and open a dialogue about this.
Good leadership is a team effort. Leaders in inclusive cultures know that admitting bias is not a sign of weakness but a prerequisite for fairness.
Myth 4
“Inclusion iswhat we want. Exclusion is the result of bad intentions.”
“Inclusion isn’t about making space for others - it’s about challenging our instinct to keep them out in the first place.”
Humans are wired to exclude. Not because we are evil or ill-intentioned, but because our brains evolved in small groups where safety meant sticking with those we knew. We instinctively form in-groups with those who look, think, or act like us, and we strengthen our position in that group by excluding the outliers. This tribal behavior boosts our self-esteem and sense of safety. We don’t mean harm, but we do exclude. We don’t need bad intentions to violate inclusion: acting like humans is enough.
Inclusive cultures don’t arise by accident. They must be designed to override our defaultsetting. Inclusion demands deliberate effort: noticing who’s left out, challenging our comfort zones, and reshaping group norms. We cannot eliminate the human tendency to exclude, but we can expose it, talk about it, and design workplaces where it no longer dominates. Inclusive cultures are not born from good intentions or policies alone - they are built by people willing to confront the exclusion default.
An honest conversation
These four myths represent a rough reality for inclusion to flourish. In spite of our intention to create inclusive cultures where all voices are heard and respected, our human nature makes us work against the very thing we aim to achieve. We take offence on behalf of others, and act to restore the diversity imbalance, rather than look deeper into the underlying culture. We pretend to be inclusive and objectively unbiased, while our nature is to be biased and exclude.
An honest conversation about these inconvenient truths is the only thing that can make workplaces more inclusive. When we no longer rely on our corporate processes that pretend to be inclusive, we can start human conversation about our differences. In those conversations, we find the potential for innovation, we identify talent that we never spotted before, and we connect - rather than divide - over differences.
In The Unwelcome Perspective, Frank Garten explores why it’s so challenging to genuinely embrace people who are unlike ourselves. He shares real-world stories, insights from psychological research, and practical tools to help you recognize — and overcome — your unconscious biases. In his next article, Frank will drill down into the mindset that is required to be an inclusive leader.
Can't wait? You can preorder your copy of the book right here.
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