What Is Inclusive Excellence?

00:06 Now, we're going to move into the part of the series that covers inclusive excellence.

00:10 What is it? Well, it's when you synthesize and operationalize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in ways that it's a parent within a system so it becomes a part of the fabric of an institution or an organization and again, it's going to be continuous work. So, just remember that you will never have arrived completely so it requires evaluation, it requires doing climate analysis and just making sure that you're always on top of what people are feeling and what people need and depending on what organization that is, for instance in academia. You're going to get different cohorts of students from different backgrounds so you need to do reassessments as the people within the organization change as well as just like maybe a biannual organizations for people who remain in the organization and you need to make it an environment where people feel like they are able to come to you about anything and know that it's not going to be a lot of lip service that they're being heard. They know that you heard them when they see actions change and organizational behavioral change happen. What inclusive excellence is not is performative. I just mentioned that word. What is performance? You put all these words on a paper, we create all these vision and mission statements, we advertise things on the internet to attract people to our organizations and then we don't do anything that we say. Our actions are incongruent with our words. So that's definitely not inclusive excellence. And then it's not based on interest convergence.

01:47 So, the concept of interest convergence was created by Derrick Bell who is a Harvard professor and this was from a long time ago. So you also have to think when we talk about reverting back to that cultural intelligence piece. When I said a lot of this is contextual, so back then what he meant that interest convergence was is that when it's in a world of when we're talking about race why people do things that are in the best interest of them not necessarily the cause so it might come across as performance. So it's like I may be hiring people from diverse backgrounds but I'm hiring them because that's what's trending and that's what's going to get me more business, not necessarily because I'm interested in inclusive excellence and promoting that. It's also not about checking boxes and I mentioned already it's not about words and it's not exclusively about metrics. Because who wants to feel like they weren’t hired into a space or admitted into a university based on their qualifications and that has absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnicity or any characteristics except your intellectual ability and whatever your professional goals are. So, every human, let's go back to the human because that's what that's about. When you're a human and you want to feel like you belong, you want to feel like you're in that space because you're being accepted not tolerated or not checking a box for metrics. So, getting into a little more detail about Bell's theory of interest convergence, I gave you an overview of what that is, but I want to make sure everybody understands what we're talking about. Back in the day, it meant that the rights of black people advance when they converge with the interest of white people. However, I like to revise and adapt definitions to make them more inclusive and relevant and contextual. So, an alternative for that is that in the space of DEIB, which is diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, interest convergence is when the rights of underrepresented and marginalized people only advance when they converge with the interest of people in positions of power.

03:54 So see there, I didn't mention race or ethnicity at all. Now, I'm introducing that in the space of power. So think about power dynamics and how those impact relationships and can negatively impact inclusive excellence when we misuse power.

04:11 So, in terms of institutions that have DEIB officers, we hire those. Again, we want to be, and you can be an advocate for that regardless of what your disciplinary role is but you want to advocate for advancing strategic plans for people who are in these dominant positions and try to advocate for not allowing comfort and fear to obstruct that transformative change process. And we'll talk about being an upstander later on in the series but this is kind of where it starts. So, in terms of leadership, you may not be in a formal leadership position but when you're in healthcare you're a leader regardless of the discipline. So thinking about how you can respectfully approach that to be a part of the change. And then a lesson until people are willing to allow reformative change to happen that transition to inclusive excellence can happen. So just remember, it feels so good to be a part of positive change.