The Inclusive Leadership Project

Striving Toward a Multi-Cultural, Anti-Racist Organization

A workshop and coaching series for Business Leaders

In a Multi-Cultural, Anti-Racist Organization, you’ll experience increased business performance, a culture of belonging and a strengthened community.

Changing the way your culture operates begins with looking at the way you think and make decisions. It requires adopting a shift from “what we think we already know,” to thinking guided by inquiry, curiosity and humility. When we trade our ingrained stories, assumptions and opinions for a more objective, open mind, we’ll more easily recognize and confront our beliefs around individual and organizational privilege, bias, and our own racial identity.

As we gain the knowledge, tools and strategies required to discover Individual, Institutional and Structural racism in all its forms, we can then seek out and replace inequitable policies and practices within our organization.

This process is an ongoing commitment to changing the way we behave and interact with our people and our customers. It’s about creating a culture where everyone contributes because they know they belong. And it begins and is driven by individual leaders. Being successful in this work requires leaders to show up every day as role models and advocates for a more diverse, equitable and inclusive culture.

How it works.

The process combines a series of interactive workshops and individual and team coaching sessions aimed at securing measurable, sustainable outcomes tied to a continuous accountability system. Workshop content includes:

Developing equitable Ground Rules that encourage brave dialogue and blank slate thinking
Define and Validate What Brought Us Here… and where we are now (Historical context and common language)
Developing a Positive White Identity toward Allyship - To understand how ending racism serves all of us
Initiating an Institutional Racism Assessment to examine and assess equity, impartiality, and fairness in all company policies, processes and services
Develop ongoing Personal and Organizational Action Plans

Each module in the series is modified according to where you and your organization fit on our Multi-Cultural, Anti-Oppressive, Continuum, which assists us in measuring and determining the length and depth of every engagement.

To do this work, I am grateful to have a team of facilitators, certified coaches, consultants and assessors bring extensive leadership and organizational development/change experience in diverse private, public and non-profit organizations… with a foundational passion for Racial Justice.

Racial Identity

White Racial Identity Development

Having a Positive White Identity leads to the acceptance that White People must take responsibility for ending racism. To assume their responsibility, White People must become aware of how racism hurts White People and how ending it serves the interests of all People. And this awareness must be accompanied by the enhanced ability to recognize the many faces of racism along with the discovery of options to replace it.

White People seem to be the only racial group that spends more time and effort wondering about the implications of race for other groups than it does for itself. They find it hard to accept that they have a race and therefore are threatened by groups who have no such difficulties.

White individuals need to develop a sense of themselves as racial beings, acknowledge the realities of structural racism and White Privilege, and come to accept race as a healthy aspect of themselves and others.

Take a look at Janet E. Helms’ White Identity Development Model below.

White Identity Development Model:

—White People, Stage 1, Contact:

Colorblind model
See racial differences but not salient - may feel racism propagated by just discussion and acknowledging it as an issue
No conscious demonstration of racism at this stage
Seems non-racist on surface (to possibly cover racist beliefs)
If they experience real-world experience or knowledge that validates their privilege, they may move to next stage, Disintegraion

White People, Stage 2, Disintegration:

Due to new experiences and information confronting Privilege prior conceptions, guilt and shame manifest
The emotions can be modified if they are channeled positively
If they continue to dominate, the person may move into Reintegration (stage)

White People, Stage 3, Reintegration:

Blame the victim attitude prevails - more so than in initial Contact stage
They feel they are privileged, but its probably because they deserve them because they are in some ways superior to POC
If the person can combat these feelings, they may move to the Pseudo-Independence stage

White People, Stage 4, Pseudo-Independence:

—First stage of positive racial identification

They do not feel that they (whites) deserve privilege, but they look to POC, not themselves to confront and uncover racism
Their approval of this realization at this stage comforts them - it validates their desire to be non-racist
Although this is positive White Racial Identity, the person doesn’t have a sense of how to be White and non-racist together

White People, Stage 5, Immersion/Emersion:

The person genuinely attempts to connect to his/her own White identity and to be anti-racist
Usually accompanied by a deep concern with understanding and connecting to other Whites who are or have been dealing with issues of racism

White People, Stage 6, Autonomy:

Achieved when an individual has a clear understanding of and positive connection to their White racial identity while also actively pursuing social justice.

NOTE: Helms’ stages are as much about finding a positive racial identification with being White and becoming an anti-racist.

The Inclusive Blog

Social Justice and Secular Buddhist Wisdom

November 26, 2022 · 1

It’s a known maxim that in most circles, certainly in your professional life, “Don’t talk about...

Joel Kampf:

Executive Coach/Consultant, Anti-Oppression Advocate

Why I do this "White Work".

I’ve worked in a variety of organizations and all of the people I’ve met would benefit from learning to work and live together more effectively. I see struggles that don’t need to exist - struggles that diverse, equitable and inclusive led cultures do not suffer.

Leaders share their fears and doubts with me - their uncertainty around what they should or shouldn’t do around Social Justice. They have good intentions, yet feel at a loss over what to do and where to start. So we talk. We share why we want to do this work.

I share that I do this work to develop more allies. I do it because I grew up in and still live a life of privilege, while others suffer, and I do this work because as a White person it’s my responsibility to dismantle Racism.

These times find us more divided than ever so we must operate from the perspective that we’re more alike than different - which requires all of us to let go of our opinions and assumptions about ourselves and others. It begins by each of us becoming more curious… to seek to understand versus seeking to be understood. And I do this work to help others to adopt these behaviors and build more trusting, interdependent relationships.

For me, the most successful and satisfying personal relationships happen when both parties support each other on their growth journeys - that they believe our differences are positive and a learning opportunity.

I adhere to the proven knowledge that leadership effectiveness results in improved overall performance - and that the most effective leaders are those working to further develop themselves so that they may assist in the development of others.

They learn to think more objectively and hold multiple perspectives at the same time, while still holding on to their own… without judgement. It requires persistence, patience and presence. I know. Because I’m working on it too.