Drax - Inclusive Leadership

Working in partnership with renewable power generation company Drax to create a global intervention for their top 200 leaders focusing on Diversity & Inclusion.

Diversity and Inclusion is a business priority for Drax and one of their 5 enablers for their business strategy, and their next step was to look at achieving positive action from this positive intent. The Inclusive Leadership programme was closely designed and linked with their 5 values to help cement the journey of making Diversity and Inclusion a part of their organisation. From the outset, we had discussions with the most senior people from the D&I Steering Committee, Head of People Development, and the D&I team managers to help identify the Learning objectives for the workshop and how to measure the success of the programme.

The programme was designed to explore the role of Senior Leaders in championing and driving change to create a truly diverse and inclusive culture. The main aims of the session were to ignite the belief that inclusion must live within the fabric of organisation, creating a shared understanding and helping the leaders see their role in inspiring and living within a more inclusive culture.

So successful was this programme that we were asked to design and deliver a scalable Inclusive Management programme for Front Line Managers.  We have also designed a version of this programme for Drax Managers in North America.

Diagnostic & Design

We worked with Drax on an in-depth diagnostic phase, to ensure that the session was designed in a way that focused on the key areas of Inclusion. Based on the findings, we created a programme that consisted of two drama-based scenarios to facilitate discussion and help participants to explore the characteristics of in/out groups and increase understanding of those in underrepresented groups. Theory to frame the session and help them identify the behavioural traits and skills of an inclusive leader that supports conscious inclusion and a section for participants to reflect on their own inclusive leadership capabilities and their own personal inclusion action.

Pre-Work and Embedding

To further help engage participants, we collaborated with Drax to create a framework around the programme consisting of pre-work, where we asked the participants to rate themselves on the six traits of an inclusive leader from the Inclusive Leadership model by Harvard Business Review, these scores were then explored and discussed during the session. The pre-work also included selection of articles, reports, and videos to help enhance the learning around Leadership and Diversity and Inclusion. To embed the learning, Action Learning Sets were implemented following the session – so that participants could share progress on their personal inclusion action that they set in the session, agree their business unit diversity goal, and receive support for further planning to enhance Drax’s goal of making Diversity and Inclusion a key pillar of their organisation.

Feedback

Feedback from participants has been exceedingly positive, with many relaying that the drama-based scenarios brought to life how diversity and inclusion plays a part in everyday life. We have also received positive outcomes through action – from leaders reaching out to their teams to get feedback (and putting that feedback into action) to leaders engaging in conversation that they might not have had before with their teams around their culture and making changes that benefit those individuals.

The action and commitment from leaders that has begun to take place at this early stage highlights the success of this programme and the strength of the partnership we have built with Drax. We look forward to receiving and reviewing further feedback from the sessions, to see that Senior Leaders at Drax have been given the tools to create a truly diverse and inclusive culture through positive action.