Leading Inclusively When Official Programs Have Been Erased

Written By Lexi Gibson

Key Takeaways

  • Formal DEIB programs set the tone, but individual managers determine whether it’s part of employees’ real, lived, daily experience.

  • BCG research found that direct manager behavior accounts for two-thirds of employees' overall sense of inclusion. 

  • Inclusive leadership is what good leadership looks like when applied consistently and equitably.

  • When formal programs disappear, the gap they leave is filled by the daily choices of individual managers.

  • The data on inclusion is consistent: employees who feel they belong are more engaged, more productive, and significantly more likely to stay. 

What Formal DEIB Programs Can and Can't Do

A lot of organizations spent years investing in formal DEIB programs by creating dedicated roles, structured training, supplier diversity commitments, and explicit representation targets. And in many cases, those programs made a meaningful impact on things that might not have moved otherwise. They created accountability, identified gaps, and gave people language for conversations that had previously been avoided.

But even the best programs have a limitation that rarely gets acknowledged: they can’t address or influence an individual leader’s behavior in day-to-day contexts.

This matters because the landscape for formal DEIB programs has shifted significantly. Across industries, organizations are scaling back dedicated programs, eliminating roles, and pulling back on structured initiatives. Some of that is political. Some is budget pressure. Some is a genuine reckoning with what actually produces results and what was primarily performative.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same: the question of whether inclusion happens now falls more directly to individual managers than it has at any point in the last decade. And that's not entirely bad news because it was always mostly true anyway.

What the Data Actually Shows

BCG research found that senior leadership behavior and direct manager behavior together account for two-thirds of employees' overall sense of inclusion. Programs, policies, and employee resource groups account for the rest. That finding has significant implications for how organizations think about inclusion and for what individual managers should understand about the weight they carry.

The downstream effects of that two-thirds share are measurable. Research by BetterUp found that employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are 18 times more likely to stay with their employer. Ennova's 2025 engagement data found that among employees who score low on inclusion, 70% also report low intent to stay. The cost of replacing a single employee runs between 1.5 and 2 times their annual salary, and the less-visible costs, in lost institutional knowledge and reduced team morale, compound on top of that.

McKinsey's research on diverse executive teams has consistently shown a profitability advantage for organizations that get this right. But the advantage doesn’t come from a diversity program. It comes from the decision-making quality and range of perspective that inclusive leadership produces at every level of the organization.

The business case for inclusion isn't that programs deliver it. It's that managers do. Programs can create conditions and accountability. Managers create the actual experience.

Where Inclusion Resides In Your Team

Inclusion is largely experienced in small, recurring interactions. Here are a few places where it either happens or doesn't:

Who gets put on the high-visibility work. Stretch assignments are one of the most powerful career development tools available to a manager. They're also one of the places where bias, often unconscious, shows up most consistently. Who gets offered the project that involves senior exposure? Who gets the safe assignment instead? Over time, these decisions determine who develops and advances and who doesn't.

Whose opinion gets sought in a meeting. In most meetings, a small number of people do most of the talking. Some of that is personality, but a significant portion of it is who the manager has implicitly signaled it's safe for. Whose ideas get built on, whose get acknowledged and moved past, and who the manager turns to when they want a different perspective accumulate into a team's understanding of whose voice counts.

Who gets useful feedback. Research consistently shows that direct, developmental feedback is distributed inequitably across teams. Managers tend to give more detailed, actionable feedback to people who are more like them, and softer or more vague feedback to those who aren't. People who don't receive honest feedback can't develop, and eventually they stop trying or leave.

Who gets the benefit of the doubt. When a team member makes a mistake, pushes back on a decision, or takes an approach that's unfamiliar, the manager's first response matters. That response tells the team member how much latitude they have, and whether the relationship can hold a real conversation. The pattern of who gets the benefit of the doubt and who doesn't shapes the experience of inclusion more than most managers realize.

Who gets sponsored. Sponsorship is different from mentorship. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor uses their social capital to open a door. In most organizations, sponsorship happens informally and it flows most naturally along lines of similarity and comfort. Managers who sponsor deliberately, with attention to who is and isn't getting that kind of advocacy, directly affect the trajectory of the people on their team.

Why This Is Harder Without the Program

Formal programs do something useful beyond their stated purpose: they create external accountability. When there's a training requirement, a representation target, or a structured review process, the question of whether inclusion is happening gets asked regularly and someone is responsible for answering it.

Without that structure, the accountability often disappears. The daily decisions that determine whether someone feels like they belong rarely feel like "inclusion decisions" in the moment. They feel like talent decisions, meeting decisions, feedback decisions. The DEIB framing isn't there to flag them as something to examine.

This is where the self-awareness gap becomes most consequential. A manager who believes they lead inclusively but hasn't examined the distribution of their stretch assignments, the pattern of who they ask first in meetings, or the quality differential in the feedback they give different people is operating on assumption rather than evidence.

And as I write in When to Decide Before You're Sure, this is precisely the kind of decision that compounds. Each individual choice is small and reversible, but the pattern they form is neither.

What Inclusive Leadership Looks Like in Practice

Inclusive leadership is what consistent, equitable leadership looks like when applied without exception. Here is how to practice inclusivity on your own team:

  • Audit your own distribution. On a regular basis, look at who has received stretch assignments, meaningful feedback, and visible sponsorship from you. Not to hit a number, but to see if the pattern reflects your actual assessment of the team's potential, or your level of comfort with different people.

  • Make space before filling it. In meetings and one-on-ones, notice whose voice you naturally amplify and whose you have to make deliberate effort to invite. The Three-Second Pause discussed in Leading From the Inside Out applies here: waiting before responding creates space for people who don't self-select into the conversation to enter it.

  • Give feedback that's actually useful. Check the quality and specificity of the developmental feedback you're giving across your team. Vague positive feedback given to some people and direct critical feedback given to others isn't equitable, even if it's well-intentioned. People deserve honest input on their performance regardless of how comfortable that conversation is for you.

  • Name what you're trying to do. Teams notice when their manager starts asking for different perspectives, or checking in more deliberately with certain people. You don't have to frame it as an inclusion initiative, but being straightforward about what you're paying attention to and why removes ambiguity and signals that it's intentional, not arbitrary.

  • Build psychological safety as the foundation. All of the above is contingent on team members believing it's safe to speak honestly. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety makes this clear: inclusion without psychological safety is surface-level. People will participate when invited, but they won't bring their actual thinking until they trust the response.

The Compounding Effect

The decisions above are all individually small, but they compound in the same way that any repeated behavior does. They develop into a team's experience of what this organization actually values, and whether people like them have a real place in it.

This is the through-line in Trust Is Built in Small Moments, Not Big Announcements. An inclusive team culture isn't declared into existence. It's built through the accumulation of small, consistent moments that tell people they belong and that their perspective matters. Formal programs can create the conditions for that to happen. They can't make it happen.

That responsibility has always been the manager's. What's changed is that in many organizations, there's no longer a program to share it.

 Common Questions

Does this mean DEIB programs don't matter? 

No. Programs that create accountability, surface gaps, and build skills matter, especially for identifying systemic issues that individual managers can't see from where they're standing. The argument here isn't that programs are unnecessary. It's that when programs aren't present, the work doesn't stop being essential. It transfers to managers, whether they realize it or not.

What if I'm leading in an organization that's actively hostile to DEIB framing? 

The behaviors this post describes don't require the DEIB label. Giving equitable feedback, asking for diverse perspectives, distributing stretch assignments based on potential rather than comfort are simply good management. You don't need a program or a policy to do them. In environments where the framing is politically charged, the practice can be separated from the terminology.

How do I know if I'm actually doing this well? 

The same way you check any leadership behavior: look at the outcomes. Is feedback distributed consistently and specifically across your team? Are stretch assignments going to people based on their development needs, or based on your familiarity? Are the people who are harder for you to read staying and growing, or leaving? If you're not sure, a 360° assessment gives you the external view that self-assessment can't.

What if I have biases I'm not aware of? 

Everyone does. The goal isn't to eliminate bias. Research suggests that's not fully possible. The goal is to build decision-making habits that don't let bias determine outcomes unchecked. That means auditing distributions, asking who's missing from the conversation, and being willing to examine patterns rather than just intentions.

Reflection: Think about the last 90 days on your team. Who received stretch assignments, meaningful feedback, and active sponsorship from you? Does that pattern reflect your assessment of potential — or your level of comfort with different people?

Explore More

If this resonated, a few related posts:

And if you want to examine your own patterns with more structure, including the ones that shape how your team experiences inclusion, executive coaching can help. Schedule a 30-minute call to see if it's a good fit.

Lexi Gibson
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Deciding Before You’re Sure