To continue building the competencies of your leader and ensuring they are supporting your organization, training and development are critical.
Training and development helps to upskill leaders with various identities and increases your employer brand reputation amongst competitors.
It is important to consider ways you can support your leaders, their growth, and ultimately, their success.
Training includes resources provided directly by your organization or externally procured to support your talent in learning new skills and developing new competencies.
In addition to training, there are several other ways your organization can support the growth and development of your leaders.
The ocean sector is lagging behind in attracting a diverse labour force as opportunities in this industry are not highly visible due to their niche, technical training and hiring processes.
To improve inclusion of women and/or non-binary individuals within the sector, consider the following:
According to a report from Osler, in 2021, only 15% of Executive Officers and 17% of Board Members identified as a woman in the Life Sciences Industry, ranking as the smallest percentage from 13 industries.
Diversity in healthcare is important to ensure equitable healthcare outcomes for staff and patients as well.
Consider the following:
A leader in an organization is someone who manages a team or several teams, and/or has an important stake in the organization and a role in making decisions that push for change. The following are some questions that you can ask the employees you lead and manage:
When starting the conversation, creating a safe space by setting ground rules is important. Safe spaces allow individuals to feel comfortable having brave and honest conversations, where one can openly express themselves and their ideas to others on a team without risk of punishment, humiliation, or rejection.
Let individuals know the following:
Small or non-profit organizations tend to lack the resources that are readily available in larger or for-profit organizations – time, human resources capacity or budget, etc. – to help them along their Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) journey. The following are some considerations to help these organizations to begin and continue on their EDI journey:
Provide training opportunities to familiarize newcomers to Canadian industries and operations
Elders in Residence is a program that can be developed where Indigenous leaders can provide counsel to employees from a holistic Indigenous perspective
HP Canada recognized the opportunity to increase visibility and promotion of female and underrepresented talent in technical and leadership roles.
The organization launched its Catalyst@HP program, where senior-level executives serve as Sponsors and commit to the growth and career advancement of their mentees. Each mentee is enrolled in an 18-month program focused on learning and development to gain key skills to succeed in leadership roles.
Since the first launch of the program, HP Canada has seen 78% of mentees from the program be promoted to new roles in the organization.
As part of LHSC’s Healthy Equity Strategy, the organization established a partnership with Atlohsa Family Healing Services in 2020. This partnership enables LHSC to offer an Indigenous Healing Services Advisor and provide a Sacred Space for Traditional Health Practices, Ceremony and Traditional Teaching.
This initiative was launched in response to two of the Truth and Reconciliations Commission’s Calls to action under healthcare.
As you advance through your EDI journey, continuous education means enhanced people and data analytics.
The type of data being collected is critical to understand the depth of systemic barriers within organizations. This includes information on the nuances and complex layers of specific roles and responsibilities at the workplace and how it differs for women and/or non-binary people, Racialized, Black, and/or People of Colour, People with disabilities (including invisible and episodic disabilities), 2SLGBTQ+ and/or gender and sexually diverse individuals, and “Aboriginal” and/or Indigenous Peoples.
A collection of comprehensive data will give direction and provide greater equity in approaching solutions. Ask questions such as:
Microaggression is defined as: “A comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group” – Source: Merriam Webster
Unlearning is defined as: “To make an effort to forget your usual way of doing something so that you can learn a new and sometimes better way” – Source: Cambridge Dictionary
Intersectionality is defined as: A framework for understanding how different aspects of a person’s social and political identities (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, physical appearance, etc.) combine to create unique modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies advantages and disadvantages that are felt by people due to this combination of factors – Source: Kimberlé Crenshaw, TIME
Privilege is defined as: “The unfair and unearned advantages individuals are granted for having, or being perceived to have, social identities that align with those deemed to be superior according to societal rules and norms. It is often experienced as an absence of barriers related to a particular social identity (e.g., White privilege, straight privilege)” – Source: Egale
Safe Space is defined as: “A place intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism, or potentially threatening actions, ideas, or conversations” – Source: Merriam-Webster
Safe spaces allow individuals to feel comfortable having brave and honest conversations.
Emotional Tax is defined as: “The combination of feeling different from peers at work because of gender, race, and/or ethnicity, being on guard against experiences of bias, and experiencing the associated effects on health, well-being, and ability to thrive at work” – Source: Catalyst
Tokenism is defined as: “Performative policies that ostensibly promote diversity or equality (placing women or diverse groups in leadership positions), but do not truly have a positive impact on the workplace. Tokenism isn’t progressive, and it especially causes harm to tokenized individuals, causing extra pressure to succeed due to being perceived as representative of a group and often leaving them in an alienating work environment” – Source: Catalyst
Psychological Safety is defined as: “An environment that encourages, recognizes and rewards individuals for their contributions and ideas by making individuals feel safe when taking interpersonal risks. A lack of psychological safety at work can inhibit team learning and lead to in-groups, groupthink and blind spots” – Source: Gartner
