A Way of Being: My Reflections on 'Inclusive Leadership: Navigating Organisational Complexity' by Sile Walsh

Book Review

I was lucky to have spoken to the wonderful Sile Walsh nearly 2 years before her book was released, so had some ideas about her thoughts and perspectives - but I still wasn’t expecting the book to be about this!

I was expecting the book to list all of the different ways we can improve equality, diversity and inclusion practices in our workplaces across the 9 protected characteristics of the Equality Act, 2010 (UK). But it doesn’t. Instead, it goes right back to the definition of inclusion and describes, guides and supports you to ‘be’ inclusive every moment of every day. Instead of fixing the symptoms, it focuses more constructively on fixing the cause.

Early on in the book, Sile talks about authenticity and I was both delighted and relived to find someone else talking about authenticity the way I do. Authenticity with wild abandon is careless and potentially career limiting. Authenticity needs to be more thoughts through, considered and fundaments…

“I am suggesting that if you are using your values, morals and authenticity as an expectation of how others should be, you will have an issue in the workplace… Currently, I see an increase in the expectation of a workplace to meet every need a person may have. An idea that work is where I should be able to to be everything I am. However, that is not the case.”

As Dr Sarah Ratekins said in a recent podcast episode, that equality, diversity and inclusion has been getting a black eye of late, so I was pleased to read a book that stepped back from the ‘doing’ activities and focused on the ‘being’ activities that help to really shift an organisation from doing things on checkboxes to ‘being’ the kind of inclusive entity that makes a real difference to individuals.

I would encourage team and organisational leaders to read it to understand what inclusion is and how to be more inclusive, rather than simply doing inclusion to tick the box.

Looking forward to having you on my learning journey!

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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk.  She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a Director in a Children’s Charity.

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