Most organizations that think they’re doing inclusion well aren’t. And the gap between believing you’re an inclusive leader and actually being one doesn’t show up on the good days. It shows up the moment things get hard.
You may have seen this pattern in places that have visible markers of DEI commitment: a committee, pronouns in email signatures, land acknowledgements before every public event. The checkboxes were checked. The optics were good. But inclusive leadership as a daily practice? That was a different story entirely.
If the version of inclusion that you can see in an organization is filled visible supports, but people aren’t feeling included, or don’t feel a sense of belonging.
That’s probably performative inclusion. It looks like listening. It functions like the opposite. And honestly? Performative inclusive leadership is probably more harmful than non-inclusive leadership, because not only is the leadership non-inclusive, but staff are also being tricked into believing that inclusive leadership exists.
What pressure actually reveals
Here’s the pattern I’ve notice and it’s worth naming directly: leaders who are genuinely trying to be inclusive, you know the ones who connect with their staff, ask for feedback, appreciate contributions, communicate transparently, often drop all of that the moment things get complicated.
Not because they stopped caring, but because inclusive leadership involves talking to people, and talking to people takes time and can surface uncomfortable information, and when there’s pressure to just get things done, the inclusive part starts to feel like a luxury.
So decisions get made in silos. Input gets skipped. Transparency gets quietly shelved. And the reasoning, usually unspoken, is something like: we’ll go back to doing it properly once things calm down.
Things rarely calm down.
What this reveals is that for many leaders, inclusive practices are an add-on rather than the core operating system. They work fine in stable conditions and get dropped under load. Which means they were never really embedded in the first place.
Let me be blunt here, these actions were a performance of inclusion rather than inclusion itself.
The real cost of dropping it under pressure
When leaders pull back from inclusive practices under pressure, staff notice immediately. They notice the shift in communication tone. They notice when they stop being consulted. They notice when decisions that affect their work get made without their input, especially when those decisions turn out to be worse for having been made without them.
What follows isn’t just morale damage (although that definitely happens too). It’s the quiet erosion of the trust that makes a team functional. Staff start protecting themselves. They stop bringing problems forward because they’ve learned that problems get managed rather than solved. They stop providing honest feedback. They start looking for other jobs.
The pressure that caused the leader to pull back from inclusive practices creates more pressure, because now the team is disengaged, information is not flowing freely, and the leader is even more isolated from what’s actually happening on the ground.
Dropping inclusion under pressure doesn’t reduce the complexity. It compounds it.
What it actually looks like when it works
Here’s a story from an inclusive leader (that gave me permission to share their anonymized story) who I really admire. When they first became a manager, they inherited a team with low morale and a history of having their feedback shut down. Their team felt as though their feedback wasn’t welcome anymore.
This leader chose a different approach. They consistently asked for feedback from their team and actually did what they could to make changes. They even worked on a survey that provided their team the opportunity to provide feedback in an anonymous fashion (as anonymously as a survey with a small team could be). They shared the results of those surveys with their team and they shared what they were doing in response to the survey results too.
Was it more work than just managing the team without a feedback mechanism? Yes. Were other leaders happy with the approach? Not always, some were threatened, but some adopted something similar for their teams. Did it work? In 2 years, only two people left their team (one for a promotion, one for a planned move). No resignations, no quiet quitting, no disengagement spiral.
Eventually, that team stopped using the anonymous survey channel to provide new information over time. Not because the mechanism disappeared, but because they trusted that they could bring feedback directly without consequences. That trust was built through consistent inclusive practice, including when it was inconvenient, including when it created more complexity in the short term, including when the leader didn’t have all the answers yet (which honestly, was probably 99.99% of the time, because having all of the answers is basically impossible).
That’s the thing about inclusive leadership that the workshop version doesn’t teach: it’s not a set of practices you implement when conditions are favourable. It’s the way you operate when conditions are difficult, because that’s when it matters most and when your team is watching most closely.
The question worth asking
If you consider yourself an inclusive leader, the useful question isn’t “do I have inclusive practices in place?” Most leaders who’ve thought about this at all do. The question is: “which of those practices do I drop when things get hard, and what does that tell me?”
The answer to that question is usually more diagnostic than any survey or workshop outcome.
If you want to understand your own leadership patterns more clearly — including where your natural strengths are and where the pressure points tend to show up — the Elemental Leadership Quiz is a good starting point. It takes about five minutes and gives you a framework for understanding how your particular leadership style intersects with the kind of high-pressure, values-testing environments this post is describing.
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