Your Culture Is Only as Strong as Your Last Conversation

How many things in your life are truly for a lifetime? Not many, however, learning is one of them, and I’ll go further and say that learning about anti-racism and equity is a lifetime activity because the reflection and reflexive practices and the behaviour change that equity work asks of us does not have an end point. Lately I have been getting calls from leaders who want to re-engage their staff or bring new board members up to speed and into conversations about the inclusive practices and values their organizations are committed to. These conversations are a good reminder for all of us. In my experience organizations that treat this as ongoing work are the ones with high employee engagement, high retention rates and a healthy workplace culture.

Let’s get explicit about the ongoing nature of this work, here are five reasons to create a consistent practice around inclusion and belonging:

1. Skills fade without practice. We are building skills here, and like any skill, the ones we do not use we slowly lose. We already understand this in other parts of our organizations. We schedule health and safety refreshers and renew our first aid every couple of years without question. Are you giving your inclusion and belonging learning the same priority and time on the calendar? The cost of letting these skills lapse shows up in unrealized outcomes, decreased staff participation, and in the ideas people stopped bringing forward.

2. People are always coming and going. Employees move on and new people arrive, board members finish their terms and others step in, and each time that happens the shared understanding you built needs to be reinforced. The common language and thinking your team developed two years ago is not automatically passed along to the people who join next year, so unless you keep bringing everyone into that understanding, you are slowly losing the ground you gained. 

3. Language, concepts and frameworks keep evolving. The words and ideas we use to talk about equity and inclusion are not fixed, and what felt current a few years ago may land very differently today. That evolution is healthy, but it means your team needs ongoing space to make sense of it together and to answer the question: what does this mean for me and for the work I do every day?

4. We are creatures of comfort. Left to our own devices, most of us drift back toward what is easy, familiar and the way it has always been done, because our defaults are comfortable and they ask nothing new of us. Ongoing conversations about inclusion and belonging are what gently shake us out of those defaults and keep us paying attention to the choices we might otherwise make on autopilot. Autopilot is where the costly mistakes live. It is the promotion that goes to the familiar candidate, the meeting where the same three voices decide everything, and the feedback that never gets said.

5. There is always something more to learn. No single workshop and no series of learning sessions can cover everything because the issues shift, the contexts change and there is always another layer to explore. This is the nature of the work and no matter where you are, early stage, started and now stuck, or ready to dive deeper, there is always something to learn and a place to start.

I often use the metaphor that learning is like keeping the kettle hot: take it off the burner and you start losing heat. What would change if you stopped asking when will this work be done, and started asking how will we keep it going?

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Good work cultures don't happen by accident. Chanel Grenaway & Associates Inc. works with leaders, staff teams, and boards to design cultures of belonging, equity, and contribution. Let’s chat.