Exploring Reflective Conversations with Leaders on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) have become essential topics in leadership conversations today. Have you considered how a professional dialogue session that blends training with coaching could be helpful to you as a leader? Such conversations can be very useful in helping you to assess your current level of effectiveness, help you to become aware of blindspots, help to challenge any assumptions you are making and can help you think through in practical terms how you can contribute effectively to building stronger, more inclusive teams and organisations. These conversations go beyond surface-level commitments and invite deep thinking about how to create environments where everyone feels valued and supported.

This post explores how reflective conversations with leaders can advance EDI efforts, offering practical insights and examples to help leaders foster meaningful change.

A leader engaged in a reflective conversation on equity, diversity, and inclusion

Choosing a level for the conversation

Depending on your role, a good place to start can be considering what you already know about your employee's experience of working in your organisation. For example, the outcomes from particular questions in employee engagement surveys, insights into why people may leave from exit interviews, data relating to recruitment (who is applying and who is hired), tracking promotion data, talking to specific groups of employees.

As a leader, you can consider where you are by plotting three points: 1) What is your level of buy-in / commitment and interest to knowing about employees experience of working in the organisation; 2) How much data do you have available (quality, quantity, robustness, usefulness), 3) How much use do you make of the data - do you act? This moves you from positions such as casual observer to the strategic performer. If you were to move along one axis, which would have the biggest impact and why?

What would you have to do to make this shift? What would it take for you to be motivated to take this action? How would you measure success? What time frame could you expect this change to happen? What would you need?

Depending on what insights and questions arose from discussing the graph, the following questions show how conversations can help leaders to dig deeper.

• What are the top three pieces of data (e.g., from engagement surveys, turnover reports, exit interviews, or performance reviews) that genuinely surprised you about the employee experience in the last year?

• What 'verbatim' quotes from recent employee feedback (surveys, town halls, exit interviews) do you find yourself dismissing or rationalising? What is the uncomfortable truth behind that feedback?

• Beyond the data you are given, what specific questions have you proactively asked employees this year to understand their day-to-day experience?

• What questions might you be actively avoiding asking? 

• How often do you attribute an employee's struggles to their personal characteristics (e.g., 'they lack confidence,' 'they aren't motivated') versus systemic or environmental factors (e.g., unclear direction, insufficient resources, toxic culture)? What is your default attribution?

How might a blend of coaching and professional dialogue support leaders at an executive level who are seeking to explore how their leadership identity, beliefs, values, behaviours and actions influence EDI data collection and data usage?

Policy level considerations and coaching

Knowing the current levels of employee satisfaction can help inform an action plan, and help you to consider the suite of current policies you have in place for EDI. For larger organisations, there may be one or more top level leaders devoted to EDI offering knowledge, expertise, capacity and drive, compared to smaller organisations where this may be lacking and as a result may reduce the quality and impact and focus of policies. With the rise of Agent AI, it may be possible in the future for even small organisations to have continuous access to expertise, which may lend a hand in formulating and writing policy. This is not a 'quick fix - copy and paste' exercise, but more that the agent could create the thinking prompts, advice, suggestions and options to help organisations build effective policies right for the specific organisation whilst also using AI to help benchmark and challenge. Some organisations are turning to freelance HR experts to help create the policies.

What is clear from some highly effective policies is that they have heavily drawn on employee voice (or voices beyond the organisation that fit that employee profile) to really drill down and understand very specific challenges, e.g. for employees with children this may stem from financial support to engage in fertility treatment, considering solutions for morning sickness during pregnancy (paid leave, staggered start and finish), access to different types of childcare support including when children are ill, or different types of flexibility in where someone works at specific points in a parenting journey.

These questions focus on the substance of the policies and how they address real-world employee needs.

• On a scale of 0-10, how important are policies to you in creating the optimal conditions for EDI? (...work through intended and unintended consequences if appropriate and related to the coachee's level of leadership, goals and areas of responsibility - think dominoes). In what ways are policies helping or hindering this situation for you right now? In what ways might you react if you were in their shoes? What makes you say that? What can you learn from considering these tension points?

• When I am hearing you talk about the issue, it is making me think about how the policies in your organisation work. Can you give examples of specific, tangible daily challenges that a policy (like paid leave for morning sickness) aims to solve?

• I am wondering if it is a policy issue, an access issue or something else? If an employee came to you tomorrow, would they know exactly how to access that specific solution, e.g. requesting reduced hours?

• In what ways does the unwritten culture impact on people using the policies?

• Beyond the protected characteristics, which specific employee groups (e.g., working parents, caregivers, neurodiverse employees, long-tenured staff) have you actively consulted to understand their unique friction points with your current policies?

• In what ways is x in your team helped or hindered by current EDI policies? What do you see as your role in resolving this?

• If we benchmarked your EDI policies against industry leaders, which one of your policies would be considered the most bare minimum (compliance only), and which one is genuinely innovative or employee-centric?

• If your organisation doesn't have a dedicated EDI leader, who is the single person ultimately accountable for the impact of EDI initiatives, and how is their performance measured against this goal?

• If you were to use an external resource (freelance expert or AI), what is the single most critical piece of knowledge, expertise, or advice you would want it to provide?

How might a blend of coaching and professional dialogue support leaders at an executive level who are seeking to explore how their leadership identity, beliefs, values, behaviours and actions influence policy creation and policy application?

Why Reflective Conversations Matter for EDI

Great data, fantastic policies, robust action plans and clear intent take you so far. On a day-to-day basis the managers who are likely to be interacting with their team on a daily basis create the culture. How much are policies followed? Are leaders good role models for EDI? Is EDI a performance metric? How are leaders trained and supported to embody best practices?

Reflective conversations encourage leaders to pause and examine their own beliefs, biases, and behaviors. These discussions create space for honest self-assessment and learning, which is critical for genuine progress in equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Many organisations struggle with EDI because leaders focus on policies or metrics without addressing underlying attitudes or culture. Reflective conversations help uncover:

• Unconscious biases that influence decision-making

• Systemic barriers that limit opportunities for underrepresented groups

• Personal experiences that shape leaders’ perspectives on inclusion

  
  

By reflecting on these areas, leaders can develop empathy and a clearer understanding of what needs to change.

At a middle leader level, conversations which include reflections against models can help to broaden and deepen reflection, e.g. Jacob's model of eight intrinsic drivers of trust (belong and connect, voice and recognition, significance and position, learn and challenge, choice and autonomy, security and certainty, purpose); Amy Edmonson's four steps to creating psychological safety, or organisation led aims such as those of New South Wales 6 Cs (Committed, Courageous, Conscious of bias, Culturally aware, Curios, Collaborative).

How might a blend of coaching and professional dialogue support leaders at an executive level who are seeking to explore how their leadership identity, beliefs, values, behaviours and actions influence team culture and how colleagues thrive at work?

This approach can be applied to many leadership challenges.

Linking elements of coaching with training and a focus on specific topics can bring about important insights, can help leaders set personal goals, can build organisational awareness. Completing online training modules followed by group or individual sessions can help to move from training to action and move from action to impact.

Coaching and EDI

Coaching puts at the centre of the process a belief in the coacehee's own resources and empowers them to search internally for the answers, and helps them to identify where they need external support and resources. Coaching can help leaders to work out how to use the training they have completed - which can sometimes mean changing their own mindset, altering their own perceptions of leadership, and changing their own habits and behaviours. This can be challenging. Being open and curious about the effectiveness of their own leadership helps coachees gain the most from coaching. Being able to see issues from a range of perspectives and walk through events can bring new and useful insights.

Generally across coaching conversations, not just those specifically about EDI, my knowledge and understanding of how EDI can applied across different strands (Investment, Accountability, Buy-In, Operational level, Managerial responsibilities) will allow me to be tuned into leadership conversations and be more aware of when questions related to EDI may be useful to the coachee. It will help me to offer challenge, support coachees to bring awareness to blindspots and enable me to provide a safe space for sandboxing with complex issues. In addition, I can bring models to coaching conversations that are useful in reflective exercises, e.g. Jacob's model of eight intrinsic drivers, Amy Edmonson's four steps to creating psychological safety, and even my own model of Happiness at Work.  Completing insight training has provided me with some benchmarking tools, such as examples of policies, and an understanding of the processes used to create these policies which will undoubtedly be useful in helping leaders explore issues related to planning. It will help me to spot times when I need to be courageous during coaching conversations to challenge, e.g. signals of unconscious bias, actions and interactions which are not favourable to EDI, times when insensitivity or communication issues have been a clear factor in relationship issues, or when leaders have incorrectly attributed fault. And in addition, it helps me be more aware of EDI in ensuring my coaching supports everyone effectively. Bringing a wide range of leadership knowledge to different coaching scenarios enables me to be flexible and responsive to the demands and challenges leaders face every day in their roles.

Coaching / development programms with a unique flavour can be designed to meet the needs of your organisation and coaching can provide a lens on a specific challenge. To find out more about how a particular topic can be unpacked in your organisation, get in touch to arrange an exploratory meeting.