DIFFERENCE + SAMENESS: Whole Leader Development and Diversity, Equity, + Inclusion
TIFFANY POWELL:
The conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has taken on different shapes over the years. The language associated with navigating differences includes but is not limited to:
Multiculturalism
Cultural Competence
Cultural Responsiveness
Cultural Sensitivity
& Even Tolerance
Regardless of the terminology and its attempt to be more progressive and inclusive of perspectives, there is an underlying pull toward creating spaces where people can safely unpack and dialogue around the reality of differences.
Some are drawn to the space because they are hopeful that with just some dialogue we might reach common ground, while others are perplexed because the task of unpacking differences seems daunting, lacking a window of hope for improvement.
As a professional woman who has worked in the DEI space for more than a decade, I have seen my share of ebbs and flows through terminology and programming attempting to bridge the “diversity” gaps. As an African American woman, I have had to bite my tongue and grit my teeth while politely pushing against microaggressions and marginalizations directed toward me personally and/or those whom I champion. Even as a champion, I have also found myself victimized - needing or desiring to both hug the person who is unaware of their jab, while also nursing my own wound from the blow.
This paradoxical experience has been both emotionally and psychologically exhausting.
A little over a year ago I was invited to begin using a tool called the WiLD Toolkit that was developed by Dr. Rob McKenna and his team at WiLD Leaders, Inc. as part of our work with students and in our efforts to develop their capacity as leaders.
WiLD stands for whole and intentional leader development and the WiLD Toolkit is designed to take decades of research on the developmental journey of leaders and use that base to provide developmental scaffolding for a leader’s journey that increases intention, purpose, effectiveness, and even openness to change.
As I got to know Rob and the rest of the WiLD Leaders team and began to more deeply invest in my own development as a leader in order to understand the impact of these tools, something else occurred to me.
While these whole leader development tools provide intentional scaffolding for the leaders journey, they also provided an invitation to something more broad within the scope of my work in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Diving into the specifics of the WiLD Toolkit provided a ray of light that I have yet to experience in traditional leader development tools or systems.
From a personal perspective, I felt this was a system and community that understood and invited my intricacies and idiosyncrasies while celebrating the dynamics of the roles in which I serve. The sophistication of the questions and the intentionality of their focus deeply impacted me. Not only is the content and validity of the toolkit quantitatively sound, but it spoke to my personal journey in a way no other “psychological” tool has ever done.
With each tool in the process, I found myself making a plethora of connections to my personal and professional realities. I wondered if the toolkit itself was intended to highlight and break barriers, and I wondered what it would mean for organizations to dive into these tools through the lens of DEI as a way to bridge gaps and break down those long standing barriers between and within each of us.
Over the past months, Rob and I have become friends and have learned so much from one another. So, as we sought to write something together regarding the relevance of whole leader development, we decided to write it as a dialogue - a conversation between us designed to explain the intentions behind the toolkit in reference to our own personal journey of inclusion and exclusion, and as a way to project where the conversation regarding differences and similarities across our contexts may be going next.
