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Melony Gibson: Effective/Successful Leadership through Diverse and Inclusive Strategies (Ep. #23)

The BetterManager Team
Building Better Managers Podcast Episode 23 - Melony Gibson

Building Better Managers Podcast Episode #23: Effective/Successful Leadership through Diverse and Inclusive Strategies

Modern leadership embraces effective diverse & inclusive strategies. Our guest, Melony Gibson, has great advice for what leaders need to be doing right now, including hiring & recruitment ideas, succession planning & the ROI of successful implementation.

In this episode:

Meet Speaker:

  • Background
  • Her current doctoral project is on performance improvement leadership, focusing on succession planning in organizations, how to identify potential, and especially how to leverage diversity and inclusion to identify future leaders.

Having a Plan & Strategy for Diversity Inclusion

  • Leaders cannot be effective without a plan or strategy for diversity inclusion.
  • It must be intentional, not just from the top down, but from the bottom up and from left to right.
  • Diversity and Inclusion enriches and builds engagement on teams. And we know that engagement leads to retention, which leads to the sustainability of an organization.

How Leaders Take D&I Journey In Their Day-to-Day Roles

  • This can't be just theoretical, it's practical. We need leaders to be able to take the theory, and all the great resource research that's been done, and make it practical.
  • When out in public, and you have a reaction, when you see a large group of people, you clearly have biases, and those biases may be very deep seated and very unconscious, but it's a bias. So you have to acknowledge that you have that bias, you have to own that bias, and then you have to find ways to strategize, to address it in your day to day and to use it to leverage that to be more effective for your employees.
  • You have to be bold enough to actively listen to what your team is telling you. That means you're listening to learn, you're not listening to solve yet, you're just listening to learn. So you've addressed the knowledge, your bias, and now you're listening to your team, because you need to hear where they are coming from.

The Importance of Transparency

  • Avoiding "Checkoff Box Syndrome"
  • You don't implement D&I  just because a crisis occurs or a tragedy occurs, because then it doesn't feel authentic.

Considerations for Recruiting and Hiring

  • When thinking about recruitment and hiring, we need to make sure that we put a diverse foot forward to make sure that we put people out there, materials out there, resources and information out there so that everyone feels like they could be a part of this organization - a successful contributing member of your organization.

Succession Planning

  • As leaders we have to be able to identify potential. And that is difficult when you have unconscious bias - it's difficult to identify potential in somebody that doesn't look like you, that may not be as polished, that may not be as articulate, that may not be as ready right now.
  • But people that have the drive that have the passion that have the vision, that have the willingness to commit and are committed to your organization, those are people that we want to grow!

Downloads & Resources

Follow Melony on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

Check out our blog articles on Leadership here.

About Melony Gibson

Melony is a performance improvement and leadership professional focusing on training related to leadership development, employee engagement, succession planning, and diversity and inclusion programming. She is currently a doctoral candidate specializing in Performance Improvement Leadership.

Episode Transcript
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