This is the fourth article in a leadership series exploring the six practices that create exceptional leaders. Read the introductory article here: The Future Of Work Has Outgrown โGood Enoughโ Leadership. Your 6-Part Playbook To Become An Exceptional Leader Starts Hereย
Most organizations have a long list of inclusion initiatives: employee resource groups, listening sessions, DEI dashboards, training modules. These are worth doing, and I have helped design many of them. None of them determine whether your people actually feel like they belong.
What determines a feeling of belonging is something much smaller, and it happens in three-minute moments most leaders barely notice. Who gets heard in the meeting. Whose idea gets credit, and who walks out of the room thinking their perspective mattered.
When we partnered with The Harris Poll to survey 2,206 employed Americans on what separates exceptional leaders from good ones, โcreates a culture where employees want to come to work and be at their bestโ came in third among the top differentiators. Exceptional leaders were 2.24 times stronger on this than good leaders.ย
The pattern underneath that number is consistent. Culture gets built in what people experience moment to moment, not in the annual survey response.
The specific gap in the research
One finding keeps coming back in our data. Under simply โgoodโ leaders, just 35% of employees felt valued and appreciated, and only 16% felt that what is important to them is valued. That 19-point gap is where inclusion actually lives. Feeling appreciated for your output is the baseline.ย
The harder thing, and the thing exceptional leaders do, is make people feel that the perspective they bring and the background that shaped their approach to work are genuinely valued.
The consequences show up in retention numbers. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates that turnover driven by a toxic workplace culture cost U.S. employers roughly $223 billion over a five-year period. Seventy-six percent of employees in that research said their manager sets the culture. Fifty-eight percent of those who left a job because of culture cited their manager as the reason.
Culture is a leadership output. Most good leaders do not realize how strong of a role they play in defining the culture.
A moment most leaders would miss
Jean Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer for Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, has a story about her own LinkedIn presence that says more about inclusive culture than most mission statements.
She was trying to strengthen her profile. She mentioned it, and a very junior team member in social media gave her direct feedback. She told Lawrence she sounded too much like a corporate mouthpiece. She recommended mixing in content that reflected Lawrenceโs real thinking as a leader, not just company news.
Lawrence took the advice. She wrote a post about a nonprofit she cared about. Engagement was far higher than anything she had posted before.
Here is the part I want leaders to pay attention to. At her next all-hands meeting, Lawrence publicly recognized that junior team member by name and told the whole organization what had happened. The message was that candid feedback was welcome regardless of seniority.
That is a three-minute moment. No policy, no program, no training module. But if you work at Nokia in that division, you now have information you did not have before. You know what happens when you tell the CMO something candid and truthful, and you feel encouraged to be more transparent with your leadership.
Why good leaders miss this
Good leaders usually care about inclusion. They do the training, show up at the ERG events, and use the right language. What they often miss is that their day-to-day behavior is what matters most.
For more than three decades, I have watched the same pattern. Good leaders were trained to project authority, have answers, and be the expert in the room. That training may have made sense in a more stable era. Yet in the world we are in now, it quietly undermines inclusion.
When a leader always has the answer, people stop offering theirs. When a leader treats questions from junior staff as interruptions, those questions stop coming. Everyone else in the room is getting information about where they sit in the hierarchy, whether the leader means to send that information or not. Inclusion is mostly about what a leader stops doing: stops filling silence, stops restating what someone else said as if they had thought of it, and stops going to the same people first.
What to do starting Monday
Three practices close the gap faster than any initiative.
1. Change who speaks first.
Most meetings have a predictable hierarchy. The most senior person opens. The most confident voice jumps in second. The pattern repeats, meeting after meeting, year after year. So change it. Ask someone who rarely speaks first to open a discussion. Ask the newest person on the team what they are seeing that the rest of you might be missing because you have been there too long. You will get better information, and the people in the room will get information about you.
2. Credit the source out loud.
When you repeat an idea someone else raised, name them. โBuilding on what Priya said earlier about the customer angle…โ It takes three seconds and it changes what people believe about whether their contributions are seen. The reason most leaders do not do this is that they do not notice they are doing the opposite, which is taking credit by omission.
3. Ask what you are missing.
Once a week, in a 1:1 with someone different from you in background or tenure, ask some version of this question: โWhat is a perspective on how this team operates that I would be unlikely to have?โ Then listen without defending. Most leaders will be uncomfortable with the answers the first few times, but your team will feel so much more valued and engaged in solving challenges together.
Why this matters right now
The workplace is being rebuilt in real time, with five generations working together for the first time in history. Hybrid arrangements have redrawn who is visible and who is not, while artificial intelligence is changing which skills carry weight. In that environment, the leaders who can pull useful information out of a genuinely different set of voices will outperform the leaders who avoid this.
Inclusion is not just a nice gesture; itโs a performance practice. Teams where people feel safe enough to disagree make better decisions, move faster when conditions change, and stay intact through hard transitions. Our research pointed to this differentiator third because it sits on top of gratitude and listening. A leader who does not show up consistently on those two cannot build belonging.
Next article: Communicating with context, and why the instinct to wait until you have all the answers is the exact instinct that erodes trust.
