How to Be an Inclusive Host
If you work with any type of group, you have to master the art of being an inclusive host. Psychological safety is primordial in workplace, community, and educational settings. Therefore, I share here some essential elements of inclusive leadership.
Role: The role of an inclusive host is to make sure everyone feels welcome, including you. If people are to explore changes in their lives, organizations, or communities, they have to feel safe and appreciated. When you go somewhere for the first time, you want to be acknowledged, seen, listened to, and respected. People have to see you as a safe container of their anxieties. People have to feel safe to explore delicate aspects of their lives, avenues for empowerment, vulnerabilities and strengths.
Strategies: If you think back and reflect on a situation in which someone made you feel welcome, you will probably deduce the best strategies for being an inclusive host yourself. We can think of verbal and non-verbal strategies. Non-verbal strategies include making eye contact, shaking hands if appropriate, calling people by their first names, again, if appropriate, and adopting an attentive posture when they talk to you. This may be leaning forward when they speak or looking at them. Some aboriginal cultures consider looking people in the eye disrespectful, so you will do well to learn about the customs of your partners.
Some verbal strategies include showing interest in the people you work with. This may be in the form of asking questions about their kids, their hobbies, their jobs, if they have one, or anything they want to talk about. If you’re working with an individual, you would want to make sure the person knows that what is discussed between you two is confidential. If you’re working with a group, you need to establish rules for making sure that what is said in the group stays in the group, unless otherwise agreed. This is sometimes called Las Vegas rules: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Of course, people want to make sure that there are no negative repercussions for their participation or lack thereof in any organizational process. Creating a climate of safety requires that participants feel absolutely free to be there or not to be there, to speak or not to speak. Ideally, we would want everyone involved in a change process to participate actively in it, but at first, people have to have space and time to feel comfortable with the idea of being in a change process.
Building trust is part and parcel of being an inclusive host. Trust is gained over time. You should be prepared to stick with people for a while before they fully trust you. Why should they trust somebody they only just met? Being completely honest will facilitate trust. Transparency about the aims and methods of whatever processes you are about to embark on will serve you well, even if you don’t know with full certainty how the process will unfold. If you don’t know, say you don’t know. Share what you know and what you don’t know.
An inclusive host strives to make all members of the group as accepting of each other as possible. This requires a “reading” of where people are at during the conversation. Skillful facilitators take the pulse of the group at all times. This is quite a sophisticated ability, as it requires identification of people’s moods as individuals and as a group. In one class I taught, I took the pulse of the group and realized that some people were not feeling totally comfortable; they were quiet and somewhat marginalized. After we processed the group dynamics the quiet members thanked me for helping them feel more welcome. They felt acknowledged and valued. They appreciated the fact that I paid attention to their silence.
Common pitfalls: Most pitfalls have to do with over-doing or under-doing a role. Over-doing the inclusive host means being so solicitous that people feel invaded. There is an optimal space, physical and psychological, that people wish to protect. Another way of over-doing the inclusive host is artificial demonstrations of interest or exaggerations. Some of these behaviors come across as disingenuous. Examples include telling your partner that he or she is the most interesting person in the world, or that you never met somebody so smart or handsome. You get the point. The prototype of the phony inclusive host is the waiter or waitress who wants to be so nice to you that they can’t stop smiling at you.
Part of over-doing it is over-identifying with the person. If a person has experienced illness or death in the family, the over-identifier can’t stop saying that it must be “terrible” for you.
What about under-doing it? It’s easy to identify the non-inclusive host. We all had experiences of feeling ignored. If you haven’t, you’re lucky. I have been in situations where people have so dominated the conversation that they didn’t care to ask me what I do, where I come from, nothing. It has happened to me in my family, in work situations, and in cocktail parties.
Checklist: This is a partial list of questions you can ask yourself about being an inclusive host:
1. Is everyone feeling comfortable?
2. Is someone dominating the discussion in the group?
3. Have I made an effort to hear from all people in the group?
4. Are people feeling valued?
5. Do they all have an opportunity to add value?
Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky is an award-winning academic and author. He is also a coach, consultant and a researcher. His latest book, co-authored with his wife, Dr. Ora Prilleltensky, is How People Matter: Why it Affects Health, Happiness, Love, Work, and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Press here to pre-order.