Part of our leadership practice is talking through how and what our identity and the intersectionality of our identity shows up, but that’s not where it ends. Part of our leadership practice is also bringing that into the conversation around power, and that’s not where it ends, where it also sits is in our own diversity, equity and inclusion work.
Our own anti-racism work. These are not pieces for me in my experience that all sort of sit alone and sit in their own conversations. So, for example, when I start to talk about my identity, I start to list out what that looks like. Right? A white Canadian woman, life partner, lover, friend, daughter, matriarch, entrepreneur.
There’s a number of ways that I start to define my identity. Great, so what? Well, that allows me to then get curious about how do other people identify. And what does that mean when we come into relationship when we come into conversation. Okay. But then I lift that and I say to myself, okay, these identities that I have, how do they intersect? Intersectionality.
Maybe some of you have heard of this term and they’re people way smarter than me who start to play in the depth of this term and all that it means. But for me in my leadership practice, just in this moment, the different forms of my identity. What is the intersectionality of those identities in this context and why?
So I am a white Canadian woman pulled over by a police officer. I feel safe. Hmm. Well, there are some people who identify differently that actually in that same situation, don’t feel safe. So when I do my own identity work and I start to understand the intersectionality of that identity, I start to see that my experience is different than that person’s experience.
What it also starts to tell me is how that can start to sit in a conversation around power, empowerment, privilege. How do my various identities and how they intersect in this context, wherever that might be. How does that enable my power and my sense of power. So if I’m a 28 year old woman, who’s introverted.
And I show up in a boardroom filled with 50 year old, white males, all who do strategy consulting work. I might not feel, and this is not a for sure, but I might not feel like I have the power to speak up. Okay. What does that tell me? What does that tell me about the systems that I live in of course, but what does that tell me about my own inner work, where I thrive, how I thrive.
The same idea around my different identities and how they intersect and how I show up or curate an experience where are my blind spots or just, where am I reflecting on how that shows up in a way for other people to rise in their power or feel oppressed in their power? Right? Here we are in a conversation about empathy and curiosity and deep democracy.
That’s the leadership practice here. And when we’re doing our own work around these things, of course, we start to attach it to diversity, creating spaces that are composed of diversity. And in terms of race, geography, ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ communities, right? Like how do I curate a space knowing that I identify this way, but not everybody else does, but I’m trying to create a space where there’s diversity of thought, of expression, of identities. How do I create that space? How do I create equitable access? Equity. How do I create equitable access for many people to come in, especially those who may have a sense of historically being systematically excluded or marginalized by oppressive structures.
Maybe not by me personally, but by the structures that I might represent or just by my white skin right? But how do I take responsibility of my leadership practice to identify equitable access for many, not just people who identify as I do. And then the next step, of course when I’m playing with this is the word inclusion and being able to create space of inclusivity, what does that mean?
Inclusion, where when you show up, there are different voices, perspectives, lived experiences that all belong here. That may not be in agreement with one another, but they matter.
So what I’ve been playing with all is not having these conversations in silos, but part of the leadership practice is how all of this fits together around identity, intersectionality, power, diversity, equity, inclusion. To get to the point, which is creating spaces of belonging. Belonging does not mean that I like you. Belonging isn’t synonymous with, oh, we all agree. Happy roses. No, belonging means that we can come into a space and have differing opinion, differing voices, differing experiences, and they all matter. And we can all connect from that diversity in this space.
Leadership is a practice. You’re figuring out what your practice is and is not. I dare say that a requirement in your agency and your leadership practice is to play with these different concepts. And hey, use Abby VanMuijen’s emotion wheel to see what shame comes up, what joy comes up, where the different emotions come up.
But a lot of us get scared to even talk about some of this stuff for a variety of reasons. Find your brave spaces, that might be just on your own. But again, I dare say it’s a requirement to do this work, however the work works for you to do the work so that we can create spaces of diversity with equitable access so that people have a sense of inclusion, discourse, and relationship at the centre of some really tough conversations.
And isn’t that what leadership practice is supposed to enable? To help us have tough conversations. Stay in the practice all.
