Why Your Inclusion Strategy Needs a Beliefs Upgrade Before a Behavior Makeover
Here's what I've learned after years of watching well-intentioned inclusion initiatives crumble: You cannot build sustainable inclusion on shaky belief systems.
A majority of the HR, OD, L&D, and inclusion and culture leadership I work and engage with find themselves in a conundrum.
They've invested in training, updated policies, tracked metrics, and still—still—the culture isn't shifting. Inclusion and it’s associated skills are not helping the organization create the conditions for everyone to thrive and for the organization to create value in, above, and beyond the bottom line. To what Dave Ulrich calls the people and culture ROI: “Return on Intangibles”.
So, especially over the past five years, where what we have called DEI has been on trial (as plaintiff and defendant), people go through the motions, but the underlying patterns persist.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn't just a few reticent people and their attitudes. The problem is that we've been building inclusion programs on top of unexamined paradigms—the fundamental belief systems that shape how individuals and organizations understand and approach equity, diversity, and inclusion.
I frequently observe organizations moving into conversations about beliefs, but they usually talk about it through behavior. But beliefs drive behavior. The Center for Creative Leadership agrees: if you want best practices, you need best beliefs. Best beliefs drive best practices.
This is why I developed The Mettle Mindset Maker™—the first component of my Emergent Inclusion Framework™.
Think of Mettle as:
The strength to endure.
The spirit to rise.
The capacity to not just weather storms, but to steer the ship through rough seas and emerge more fit as a result of the struggle.
The Problem: Inclusion Has Become a Multidirectional Beliefs Tug-of-War
What I've seen is that inclusion and diversity have devolved into a four-way or more tug-of-war. Nonetheless, it is more recently (maybe not so recently in some cases because the race and gender dichotomy has been held onto like dog and bone since the inception of “diversity” policies in organizations) framed as a simple dichotomies.
Here’s a sample of a few. Check those that you have heard most (kind of like you would mark a bingo card):
DEI or anti-DEI
Trans-positive or Transphobic
BLM or All Lives Matter
Women’s Equality or Everyone is Equal
Meritocracy or Positive Action
Free Speech or Free Reign to Say and Do Whatever I choose
Non-Nuanced etc. or Silly etc. (Well, this is not exactly a dichotomy, but you get the point.)
The above binaries emanate from those who have chosen to sit on their perch peering at “others” they think to be wrong, woke, sleep, taking the “blue pill”, Communist, bigoted, -ist, -phobic, anti-, the list goes on.
Some people believe that diversity is only for the group(s) with which they or people they get on with have the most affinity—that can be multiple groups.
So it could be three groups: one around [a particular] “race” and/or ethnicity, another supporting LGBTQ+, and a third supporting neurodiversity. We can go down the line of single-group identities tugging against each other, sometimes even for organizational resources.
The other pull, on the fourth side/direction of the rope, are people who totally don't believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion at all because they have a belief that it's harmful, that it's divisive, “cultural Marxism,” and more drivel they’ve heard on X or Substack.
And here's the challenge: that perception is not completely off the mark. However, this is only the case if the beliefs fail to be philosophically and intrinsically aligned in practice as being for everyone.
That it is accessible to everyone (for all people, in their uniqueness and similarities), actionable (prioritized unambiguously based on organizational actions), and aligned (with the organizational mission and purpose).
So if the beliefs are not in alignment with intentions, the behaviors will follow. If you have garbage-in beliefs and behaviors, you will likely experience dynamics of distrust. People will be distracted by any culture development or diversity and inclusion efforts.
In some cases, when beliefs are misaligned, the result is separation between or ostracism of colleagues who don’t agree with a particular narrative. This is not about diversity and inclusion, here per se, I am talking about any ideological position of those with instrumental influence who can be pro or anti-human thriving.
If the narrative is not their preference or is inconvenient for their agenda, and they wield coercive, referent, or informational power, they can sow seeds of vitriol, which can result in negative consequences for how things get done within a company.
Incivility is one negative consequence, and we know what that can do to creativity, engagement, and your bottom line. And if you don’t know, read this.
All of it can leave your culture “biting the dust.”
Skin in the game is marginal
The Solution: The 3 Ps Architecture
The Mettle Mindset Maker operates through what I call the 3 Ps—Paradigms, Principles, and Pathways. Together, they offer a coherent architecture for shifting beliefs, aligning values, and practicing inclusion as a lived system.
Here's the metaphor that helps leadership teams grasp this: If Paradigms are the roots, Principles are the trunk, and Pathways are the branches of an inclusion tree—then your outcomes (thriving people, generative culture, shared value) are the fruit.
Most organizations are trying to grow fruit without tending to the roots.
As Bob Marley says, “Some are leaf, Some are branches, I and I are the roots.”
Paradigms: Your Operating System (the roots)
Paradigms are preferences, traditions, and conveniences of individuals and the organization. These are the ways people think and the frames through which they think about inclusion, diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is their mindset in relation to it.
Through a model about diversity & inclusion paradigms that originated with Drs. Roosevelt Thomas and Elizabeth Holmes that we use, people can identify, examine, and assess their dominant inclusion beliefs. More importantly, we illuminate the tradeoffs and consequences associated with those beliefs across past, present, and potential future actions.
For people and organizational leadership, this means: Before you can change behavior, you need to understand the belief systems that drive that behavior.
Are your managers operating from a "minorities thrive" paradigm? A "morality thrives" paradigm? Or, An "inclusion for all" paradigm? Each carries different implications for how they'll interpret your initiatives.
Principles: Your Organizational Values in Action
Principles are the expression of our organizational values. So, if inclusion is a value, what does it look like? What are the things that kind of hold it together? What are the things that tell us we're moving in the right direction? What are the things that indicate that we might not be, and how can our organization correct it?
Core principles that we focus on include:
Accessible (for everyone)
Actionable (prioritized and measurable)
Aligned (with organizational purpose and culture)
Interdependence/Ubuntu (I am, because We are) (we succeed together with one another, not just alongside of or in competition with each other)
For HR leadership, this means: Your inclusion efforts need to be grounded in principles that everyone can understand and apply, not just the "converted."
Pathways: Your Dynamic Skills and Capabilities
Pathways are an ever-evolving set of skills and capabilities that we want people to have in their organization. They're not static skills. They're dynamic ones. They're emerging. We're learning what we need to do and what actions need to be put into place so that organizations can adapt and identify what's needed at any point in time—what inputs yield the outputs of individuals and teams thriving, and co-creating the culture you want consistently.
For HR leadership, this means: Organizations need dynamic, iterative approaches that are uniquely shaped by their organizational purpose, context, and relational readiness—not cookie-cutter solutions co-opted based on popularity of a so-called influencer in the space.
Exploring and Filling in the Blanks of Incomplete Paradigms
Let me share a story that illustrates why this matters.
I worked with a financial services company—mostly algorithmic trading, a heavily male-dominated sector. They faced what they saw as a long-term talent challenge: 85% of their workforce consisted of males. Now, it's a heavily male-dominated industry with quants and engineers, but 85% signaled the need to examine what was happening in their talent attraction processes.
They decided they wanted to do something about it, and their leadership decided to start hiring more women, very qualified and at times hard to attract female quants and engineers. As you can imagine, many firms with bigger brands than theirs were doing the same thing.
The problem they encountered was that the employees (both male and female) didn't receive the message that the women were at least as qualified, if not more so, as the male candidates. It didn't matter how many times they told people, because their framing, the patterns of belief, were inconsistent with what they heard.
We conducted an assessment and discovered that many of them believed that "minorities thrive because of inclusion and diversity." Others felt that "morality thrives"—it means we do the right thing, following the golden rule: do unto others. There's nothing wrong with either of these beliefs.
However, a likely incomplete belief that arises from the "minority thrives" paradigm is that for some, this idea is perceived as a zero-sum game. Minorities (i.e., any single group identity less represented in the organization) get significant additional support to thrive, and the signal sent (even though unintended and explicitly stated otherwise) is that everybody else kind of has to tag along while the minorities get to advance.
The morality framing can signal “you don’t get the struggles of [fill in the blank] and if you don't agree with what I think is right, you're wrong.” The Golden Rule aka do unto others as you would have them do unto you poses a challenge. It can assume that everyone from a particular group identity wants similar conditions and can fail to account for individual uniqueness. Thus, failing to make clear that we are more than the box(es) ascribed to us.
Such a framing can hinder people's understanding that inclusion is about everyone thriving and everyone creating the conditions for that to be an evergreen, ultimate goal.
Here's what we discovered: We had people in the organization who believed that this work was about everyone thriving, which was around 40-50%. So it was a fairly large number.
Thus, we started to delve deeper into understanding that inclusion is about everybody, that everybody can make their best contribution to the organization. And we're all here to do that. And if we do that, the business thrives because people feel like inclusion creates business capability, enables the company to get things done in a more dynamic way. They were right.
We examined these perspectives and began to align and build a system. And this is the business-driving part: to build a system around recruitment that wasn't just about getting more women.
Subsequently, they did, and they kept their numbers of women hires up consistently, but it was because they built it into the system of talent acquisition. They built it to recruit in lesser know networks, in places, to dive into deeper networks where they could find women, to build relationships over time, where people knew their brand as a workplace that everyone can go and do their best work and thrive and grow.
That was a systematic approach to ensuring that everybody could adopt and, at a minimum, reasonably consider particular patterns of belief as they related to inclusion. The results showed that the organization benefited from it and continued to grow, expanding into different parts of Asia and the U.S. as a result.
What This Means for Your Organization
For Learning & Development leaders: Before designing your next inclusion training, understand the belief systems your learners bring into the room. How might those paradigms support or limit their ability to practice inclusive leadership?
For Organizational Development professionals: The 3 Ps and principles including accessible to everyone (for everyone), actionable (prioritized unambiguously based on organizational doing), and aligned (with organizational mission and purpose) give you a diagnostic reference for understanding why certain inclusion initiatives succeed while others fail. Are you trying to implement new pathways on top of misaligned principles? Are your principles disconnected from dominant paradigms?
For HR Business Partners: The Mettle Mindset Maker™ provides a framework for having more sophisticated conversations with business leaders about inclusion. Instead of defending DEI, you can explore what belief systems would best support their business objectives.
Moving from Defense to System Building
There is no need to defend DEI when your principles, paradigms, and practices are clear for the majority of the organization. The intention is for everyone to see how inclusion benefits them.
I am not trying to, nor have I ever tried to defend DEI. I have been committed to promoting the wise practice and principles of our work. I have been writing and speaking to bring broader perspectives on what DEI is and what it is not. I have been sharing it with those willing to be influenced toward a perspective that sees the work beyond the reductionist lens that both pro and anti-DEI people can perpetuate.
The question for you as a people and culture leader is this: Are you building inclusion programs, trainings, or initiatives, or are you building inclusion systems? How do you make the distinctions?
Programs, trainings, and initiatives can be dismantled with the next budget cycle or leadership change. Systems—grounded in examined beliefs, clear principles, and adaptive pathways—become part of how your organization grows and thrives.
What we do in the Mettle Mindset Maker™, as one integrated set of elements within the Emergent Inclusion Framework™, is ensure that people start moving forward in a principle-centered way. We build what I call a mettle-minded, principled inclusion foundation that gets your people pulling together when you have your biggest challenges.
The Mettle Mindset Maker™ isn't about convincing anyone of the right answer. It's about making our existing beliefs visible and building clarity about which beliefs, principles, and actions best support us and our organizations in thriving.
What's emerging for you now that you've read this? What shift in your mindset, behavior, or language feels ready to launch?
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the five components of the Emergent Inclusion Framework™.
Ready to transform inclusion from concept to action to being a cultural superpower?
When inclusion becomes "the way we do things around here," it transforms from initiative to being a key part of organizational identity.
Want to be part of this transformation? Don't miss our upcoming free virtual event on the Emergent Inclusion Framework! Whether you're a skeptic or champion, your voice matters in this conversation.
I hope to see you there! Tell a friend 😊
I hope this was helpful. . . Make it a great day! ✌🏿
It's interesting because you need inclusivity movements when you bring in broad diversity. We've been told broad diversity is a strength and yet, they require a lot of work to manage that many different value systems and cultural paradigms. Instead of broad inclusivity, why don't we focus on clustering group affinities? Hell, we do this already with college degrees and company departments. We don't toss a smattering of all disciplines in a single group. We break them down into Engineers, Accountants, etc. So why don't we allow similar grouping under what we typically call diversity?