Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

Here’s the main problem with not doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to promote inclusion: failing to act in the presence of bias is demoralizing and inhumane. Once you’ve identified systemic barriers to the contributions of your fellow human beings, delays can be interpreted as comfort with their inequity and unrealized potential. Imagine saying something like this to your colleagues: “Look, it’s come to our attention that we’re only empowering the straight, white men on the team, but we have a lot on our plate right now, so we’re going to wait until later to deal with it.” That’s essentially what you’re communicating when you move slowly in response to unveiled bias. There will always be people telling you to slow down and do less. Always, always, always. They often have long institutional memories, care deeply about the organization, and worry most about the good things that may be lost in a transformative change process. When we took on gender inequalities at Harvard Business School (more on this in chapter 6), well-meaning colleagues who believed they were acting in the school’s best interest advised us to wait a year. One year didn’t seem like much to ask for a hundred-year-old institution.