Diversity Beyond Lip Service: A Coaching Guide for Challenging Bias

Discover how to build a sustainable culture of inclusion with a coaching method that shows people that sharing power isn’t the same as losing it.

The elephant in the room with diversity work is that people with privilege must use it to allow others equal access to power. This is often why diversity efforts falter—people believe in diversity until they feel that they must give something up. How do we talk them through this shift?

La’Wana Harris introduces Inclusion Coaching, a new tool based on cutting-edge research that identifies the stages of preparation, implementation, and “self-work” necessary to help individuals, teams, and organizations build a sustainable culture of inclusion. Harris’s six-stage COMMIT model—Commit to courageous action, Open your eyes and ears, Move beyond lip service, Make room for controversy and conflict, Invite new perspectives, and Tell the truth even when it hurts—provides a proven process for making people aware of their own conscious and unconscious biases and concrete steps to make inclusion an embedded reality.

Harris offers managers and diversity coaches new models to empower everyone from employees to CEOs to “do” inclusion and address deep-rooted biases that are often invisible. She addresses the growing need to challenge bias and build authentic cultures where everyone can feel a sense of belonging.

“A good read for all concerned with the question of human training, leadership development, and organizational change. It challenges us to think about diversity in more concrete ways to ensure transformative change in organizational leadership and within institutional structures…. The book’s major strength is the focus on concrete and actionable practices to realize the hopes and dreams of genuine inclusion and diversity.” —George J. Sefa Dei, Professor of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Fellow, Royal Society of Canada

“A clear, powerful guide through what a growing number of us in the coaching profession believe is imperative to our survival and relevance as a profession…. Through many powerful examples, and with a very calm, incontrovertible voice, La’Wana Harris has made the intersection between coaching and inclusion work crystal clear. Bravo!” —Halli MacNab, PCC, President, Association of Coach Training Organizations, and C.O.O., Accomplishment Coaching

La'Wana Harris is a Consulting Partner for The Ken Blanchard Companies, Certified Diversity Executive, and ICF Credentialed Coach. She has created diversity and inclusion awareness programs, cultural competence programs, and overall integrated management solutions. La'Wana has conducted trainings around the world, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South Africa.