Chapter 17: Dialogic Change and the Practice of Inclusive Leadership

Ours is a story of inclusive leadership of people cocreating and leading from wherever they are in an organization. We are two leadership educators. Inclusive leadership approaches and practices guide how we work with colleagues and students as well as our teaching of leadership. This chapter examines the theoretical underpinnings of inclusive leadership, and the role of social construction and dialogic change in creating an inclusive organizational culture. We also describe four key principles based on inclusion and dialogic processes that provide a foundation for our practice of inclusive leadership.

Several years ago, faculty and staff at the School of Leadership Studies embarked on a series of facilitated dialogues that aimed to bring us together as a team and to find the commonalities in our perspectives on leadership (Harris & Agger-Gupta, 2015). While inclusive leadership approaches have long been part of our practice, this process identified the inclusive leadership values and practices we held in common, and the robustness of the approach to build relationships, mediate divisive forces, and increase our capacity to serve our students. Our leadership journey from theory to practice is of interest to leadership educators, scholars, and practitioners seeking to better understand and apply the concept of inclusive leadership in their particular settings. While the setting is Canadian, the theoretical discussion and principles have application beyond Canada, as study on inclusion in organizations in Australia, China, India, Mexico, and the United States demonstrated (Prime & Salib, 2014).