Inclusive leaders and good managers: Same or No?
Sunday morning question.
Think of the best manager you have ever worked with.
Not the charismatic CEO whose quotes appeared on office walls.
Your actual manager.
- The person who approved leave without creating a constitutional crisis.
- Who knew what the team was supposed to deliver.
- Who did not schedule meetings merely because Outlook contained empty space.
- Who gave useful feedback.
- Who defended the team when somebody from another department suddenly discovered the word “urgent”.
- Who kept promises.
Good manager? Absolutely.
Now another question.
- Who grew under that manager?
- Who received the difficult assignment?
- Whose ideas travelled upwards?
- Who got forgiven after making a mistake?
- Who was encouraged to speak?
- Who became more confident?
- Who got introduced to senior leaders?
- Who was considered for promotion?
- Who eventually became a manager too?
And, perhaps more interestingly: Was it always the same kind of person?
That is where the difference between Inclusive Leaders and Good Managers begins to appear.
A good manager can run an excellent team. An inclusive leader changes what becomes possible inside that team.
The distinction matters much more than another management framework might suggest. Because workplaces increasingly know how to train people to manage tasks.
Managing power is harder.
The manager everyone likes
Let us call her Maya.
Maya manages twelve people. She is organised. Reviews happen on time. The team meets targets. Nobody receives midnight WhatsApp messages demanding a spreadsheet for 8 am. When somebody performs well, Maya says thank you. When somebody makes a mistake, she corrects it without public humiliation. People stay in her team. Employee-engagement scores are good.
Maya is precisely the manager many of us would be grateful to have. Then a new regional project appears. It is visible. Complex. A little risky.
Who gets it? Arjun. Again. Maya trusts him. He has done something similar.
- A client presentation comes up. Arjun presents.
- A strategy meeting needs one representative. Arjun goes.
- A senior vice-president asks Maya who could handle a larger role next year. Arjun’s name arrives quickly.
None of this feels discriminatory. Maya may not even have thought about gender. She simply kept choosing the person who felt safest. And safety has a funny way of becoming self-reinforcing.
Arjun gets the project because he has experience. He gains more experience because he gets the project. He becomes more visible because he now has more consequential experience. Then his visibility becomes evidence that he deserves another consequential project.
2 years later, everybody agrees: “He is clearly ready.”
Meanwhile, another employee may have been doing excellent work throughout. She simply never acquired the same evidence.
Maya is still a good manager. But she may not yet be an inclusive leader.
Good management asks: Is the team performing?
Inclusive leadership adds another question:
Who gets to perform in ways that create a future?
That is a substantial difference.
Good managers organise. Prioritise. Delegate. Give feedback. Solve problems. Manage performance. Create reasonable working conditions.
Inclusive leaders need all of that too. But they become interested in the distribution underneath it.
- Who speaks?
- Who gets interrupted?
- Who receives information early?
- Whose mistakes get contextualised?
- Who is assumed to have potential?
- Who does the invisible work?
- Who gets introduced to important people?
- Who receives stretch assignments?
- Who has to ask?
- Who gets asked?
- And who keeps becoming the obvious choice because they were the obvious choice last time?
Deloitte’s long-running research into inclusive leadership identified six interconnected traits: commitment, courage, cognisance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration. The framework grew out of research involving more than 1,000 global leaders, interviews with leaders and specialists, and employee perceptions of inclusion.
There is nothing particularly fluffy in that list. The difficult word may actually be: cognisance.
Because an inclusive leader has to consider the possibility that their own judgement, however well-intentioned, is occasionally wrong.
Managers are paid to trust their judgement. Inclusive leadership requires them to interrogate it. That can be uncomfortable.
The difference often appears in ordinary meetings
Imagine a meeting with 8 people. The manager presents a problem.
- 3 people begin speaking quickly.
- One speaks extremely confidently.
- 2 remain quiet.
- Someone interrupts another person twice.
- One team member contributes an idea.
10 minutes later somebody else presents a slightly modified version, and everybody becomes unusually excited. The meeting ends.
A good manager may think: Useful discussion. Decision made.
An inclusive leader notices something else.
- Who dominated?
- Who had to fight for airtime?
- Did silence mean lack of ideas?
- Was someone thinking before speaking?
- Did remote participants get the same opportunity as people in the room?
- Who received credit?
- Did seniority determine which idea sounded intelligent?
- Was disagreement actually welcome or merely advertised as welcome?
Deloitte describes curiosity as a leader’s willingness to understand how other people experience the world, and collaboration as deliberately creating environments in which different thinking influences decisions.
That moves inclusion well beyond: “Would anybody else like to say something?”
Sometimes the leader has to redesign the room.
An inclusive leader is willing to become slightly less comfortable
This may be the characteristic I find most interesting.
Good managers often become good because they develop reliable patterns. They know:
- who delivers quickly;
- who handles pressure;
- who communicates well;
- who understands the client;
- who can rescue something at short notice.
Patterns make management efficient. But patterns also become shortcuts.
An inclusive leader occasionally interrupts the shortcut.
- Instead of: “Who can do this fastest?”, they may ask: “Who needs this experience next?”
- Instead of: “Who has done this before?”, they may ask: “Who is ready to do this for the first time?”
- Instead of: “Who do I trust with the client?”, they may wonder: “Have I given everybody enough opportunity to earn that trust?”
That tiny shift can alter careers.
It is one reason our previous work on the leadership gap has kept coming back to access rather than capability. Women can remain underrepresented at the top even while performing strongly throughout the pipeline. And it explains why a seemingly neutral manager can inadvertently reproduce an unequal organisation.
Nobody consciously blocked anyone. Opportunity simply kept flowing along familiar routes.
Good managers give feedback. Inclusive leaders notice who receives which feedback.
Here is another familiar scene.
Employee A: “You have tremendous potential. I want to give you broader exposure.”
Employee B: “You are doing excellent work. Keep it up.”
Both sound positive. Only one contains a career.
Feedback is not distributed equally.
Some people hear: be more strategic. Others: be more confident.
Some: you should lead a business someday. Others: you are incredibly dependable.
Dependable is a lovely word. Unless everybody else keeps becoming the boss.
This becomes particularly relevant for women because workplace research continues to show differences in how leadership is experienced. Change in Content’s recent examination of the leadership experience for men and women found that senior men and women can describe the same promotion and evaluation systems very differently.
An inclusive leader therefore asks:
- Am I giving everybody sufficiently specific developmental feedback?
- Do I tell one employee how to become promotable while merely telling another they are valued?
- Am I describing behaviour differently depending on who displays it?
- Is “assertive” becoming “abrasive”?
- Is “confident” becoming “difficult”?
- Is “needs more experience” being applied consistently?
None of this requires lowering standards. It requires making standards visible enough to inspect.
Good managers support flexibility. Inclusive leaders protect careers from the flexibility penalty.
This difference is enormous.
A manager says: “Of course. Work from home tomorrow. Take care of your mother.” Wonderful. Inclusive management begins there.
Then the employee misses the informal discussion after a meeting. Another person gets the client account. The next quarter she uses flexibility again.
Eventually people begin describing her as: “Excellent, but perhaps not suited to something more demanding right now.”
Nobody withdrew flexibility. Nobody violated policy. But flexibility quietly acquired a career price.
Inclusive leaders watch for that. They understand that a benefit available on paper can become unusable when employees suspect that using it changes how ambition is perceived.
This matters disproportionately for women because care responsibilities still shape working lives. Our analysis of the hidden time gap affecting women at work has examined how unequal access to discretionary time can influence visibility, networking and career progression.
A good manager accommodates somebody today. An inclusive leader asks whether accommodation quietly damages their tomorrow.
Good managers have open doors. Inclusive leaders ask who feels able to walk through them.
I have always found “my door is always open” a slightly strange management achievement.
The door has done most of the work. Employees still have to decide whether entering it is safe.
- Consider a 24-year-old employee challenging her 52-year-old manager.
- Or someone on probation reporting inappropriate behaviour by a high performer.
- Or the only woman in a team saying the late-night culture is creating a problem.
- Or an employee admitting they do not understand something everybody else seems to understand.
Technically, they can speak. But psychologically? Different question.
Inclusive leadership is heavily connected to voice.
Deloitte’s framework defines inclusion around people experiencing fairness, belonging, value for their uniqueness and a genuine voice in decision-making.
The manager’s intention therefore matters less than the employee’s experience.
You can believe you are approachable. Your team gets the deciding vote.
Then there is courage
This one is frequently omitted from the warm-and-friendly version of inclusive leadership.
Inclusive leadership does not mean becoming the nicest person in the building. Sometimes it means making somebody uncomfortable.
- A high performer makes a sexist joke. Do you respond?
- A client repeatedly interrupts the youngest woman in the room. Do you intervene?
- A promotion panel describes a woman as “not quite leadership material”, but nobody can identify the missing capability. Do you challenge it?
Your own favourite employee receives feedback that you initially disagree with. Do you examine whether your judgement is biased?
Somebody tells you that your behaviour made them feel excluded. Do you explain your intention for fifteen minutes? Or listen?
Deloitte deliberately includes courage in its framework because inclusive leaders need to challenge prevailing assumptions and acknowledge their own imperfections.
That may be the point at which inclusion becomes leadership.
Listening when everybody agrees with you is pleasant. Leadership appears when they do not.
An inclusive leader does something else good managers sometimes forget: They distribute power
This is the centre of it for me. Management can become paternalistic surprisingly easily.
The good manager:
- protects the team,
- solves the problem,
- speaks for employees,
- makes the decision,
- removes the obstacle.
Helpful. But what happens when the manager leaves? Does everybody wait for the next good manager?
Inclusive leaders build more capability into the people around them.
- They invite employees into decisions.
- Give ownership.
- Share information.
- Let people represent the team.
- Allow disagreement.
- Create successors.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study of inclusive leadership in Danish public organisations found a positive association between inclusive leadership and broader employee participation in leadership activities. In other words, inclusive managers can help distribute leadership itself rather than keeping leadership concentrated in the formal manager.
That is fascinating. Because the ultimate sign of an inclusive leader may not be how many people follow them. It may be how many people learn to lead around them.
This becomes especially important for women
Women do not need managers permanently rescuing them. They need managers who ensure opportunity does not keep moving elsewhere.
There is a difference.
When Change in Content examined women losing ground in senior leadership, one finding kept surfacing across the broader evidence base: the problem becomes particularly visible closer to power, around succession, sponsorship, profit-and-loss responsibility, and enterprise decision-making.
That is where inclusive leadership earns its keep.
- A manager may happily employ women. An inclusive leader notices whether women are accumulating the experiences required to run the business.
- A manager celebrates excellent female performers. An inclusive leader sponsors them.
- A manager says: “She is invaluable.”
- An inclusive leader eventually asks: “Then why isn’t she advancing?”
Those are very different sentences.
Can someone be inclusive and still make hard decisions?
Obviously. This misconception needs retiring.
Inclusion does not mean:
- everyone gets promoted;
- every idea gets implemented;
- performance stops mattering;
- poor behaviour is tolerated;
- every decision requires unanimous approval;
- meetings become three-hour democracies.
Please, no. Inclusive leaders still say: No.
- This is not good enough.
- You are not ready.
- We cannot fund this.
- The business requires something different.
- Your performance needs to improve.
- I disagree.
But they make those decisions using understandable standards.
- They allow challenge.
- They check assumptions.
- They distinguish familiarity from merit.
And when somebody loses an opportunity, the employee should ideally understand why.
Fairness does not require every outcome to feel good. It requires people to trust the process by which the outcome was reached.
The six things I would watch in a manager
Deloitte calls them commitment, courage, cognisance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration.
I would translate them into six Sunday-morning questions.
- Who gets your attention?
- The loudest?
- The most senior?
- The people physically near you?
- The people who think like you?
- Who gets opportunity? Not workload. But opportunity. They are very different things.
- Can your team disagree with you? And survive? Important second half.
- When were you last wrong about someone? If the answer is never, congratulations on becoming statistically fascinating.
- Who became bigger because they worked for you?
- Better role.
- More confidence.
- More authority.
- More skill.
- More visibility.
- What happens to the people who are unlike you? That may be the best inclusion test of all. Because leaders naturally understand people who remind them of themselves.
Leadership gets interesting when they do not.
The manager audit nobody puts into appraisal forms
Most manager reviews ask something like:
- Did the team meet objectives?
- Was attrition acceptable?
- Were budgets managed?
- Were employees engaged?
- Was compliance maintained?
Reasonable questions. I would add:
- Who got promoted under this manager?
- Who received stretch assignments?
- Who left, and why?
- Whose careers accelerated?
- Does the manager produce successors?
- Are opportunity patterns unusually concentrated?
- Do women, caregivers, quieter employees or people outside informal networks progress?
- Do people challenge this manager openly?
That would tell us far more about inclusive leadership than attendance at a DEI workshop.
India’s own leadership conversation is moving in this direction. The AIMA-KPMG Women Leadership in Corporate India 2026 study says organisations increasingly view inclusion, diversity and equal opportunity as a leadership competency, while its broader findings still show uneven experiences around advancement and leadership support.
That shift is overdue. If inclusion matters to organisational performance, managers should eventually be assessed on whether they create it.
Here is the awkward truth: Many of us became managers before anybody taught us to lead people
Some managers learnt finance. Marketing. Technology. Medicine. Engineering. Operations. Journalism. Law.
Then one afternoon somebody said: “You now have six people reporting to you.”
Congratulations. No instruction manual. Suddenly you are expected to understand motivation, bias, conflict, mental health, career development, cultural difference, feedback, disability, caregiving, harassment, generational differences, ambition, burnout, and why two adults who previously got along now refuse to be copied on the same email.
Management is absurdly difficult. That deserves sympathy. It also deserves development.
Our earlier piece on inclusive leadership in 2026 argued that inclusion is moving away from being a separate DEI exercise and towards becoming part of leadership quality itself.
I believe that more strongly now. Because the manager is where corporate values become personal.
The company writes the policy. Your manager decides how Tuesday feels.
The Sunday question: When people leave your team, are they larger than they were when they joined?
Forget the management frameworks for a minute. Maybe leadership can be tested through something simpler.
Someone works for you for four years. At the end of those four years:
- Are they better?
- More confident?
- Better paid?
- More skilled?
- More visible?
- Closer to what they wanted professionally?
- Did they learn to disagree?
- Did they get opportunities they had not imagined?
- Did you understand something about them that you did not understand when they arrived?
- Did they understand themselves better?
And did all kinds of people grow?
- Not only the ones you found easy.
- Not only the people who worked like you.
- Not only the extroverts.
- Not only the people with uncomplicated lives.
- Not only the employees available after 8 pm.
- Not only the people who knew how corporate power works before entering your team.
That, to me, is where the distinction finally becomes clear.
A good manager can make work better. An inclusive leader makes people’s possibilities bigger.
The best leaders, of course, do both.
The Change in Content Perspective: Please Don’t Stop at Being a Good Boss
Good managers matter enormously. Anyone who has survived a terrible one knows this.
They bring clarity. Predictability. Decency. Performance. Trust.
They make Mondays less ridiculous. We need more of them.
But workplaces in 2026 need something beyond competent management.
- They need leaders who notice how opportunity moves.
- Who receives it.
- Who misses it.
- Who keeps being heard.
- Who is becoming invisible.
- Who is doing excellent work without accumulating power.
- Who needs a first chance rather than another person receiving a fifth.
- Who has something to say but has learnt that speaking carries a price.
- Who can become larger than the role they occupy today.
That is the difference between Inclusive Leaders and Good Managers that interests me.
Perhaps the best test is not: “Does your team like working for you?” It is: “Who became possible because they worked for you?”
I would love more managers to ask themselves that question. Especially the good ones. They are already halfway there.
FAQs
Q: What is the difference between inclusive leaders and good managers?
A: Good managers organise work, develop employees, manage performance and create dependable teams. Inclusive leaders add another layer: they actively examine who receives voice, opportunity, sponsorship and influence, and whether different employees can participate and progress fairly.
Q: Can a good manager also be an inclusive leader?
A: Yes, and ideally they should be. Inclusive leadership builds upon core management capability rather than replacing it. The difference lies in deliberately understanding bias, distributing opportunity, welcoming different perspectives and creating conditions where more people can contribute fully.
Q: What are the six traits of inclusive leadership?
A: Deloitte identifies commitment, courage, cognisance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration. The traits combine mindset with observable behaviour and were developed through leadership research, interviews and employee assessments.
Q: Why is inclusive leadership particularly important for women?
A: Women can perform strongly while receiving less access to sponsorship, consequential assignments, leadership pathways and decision-making power. Inclusive leadership helps managers assess whether opportunities are distributed fairly, rather than relying solely on familiar or historically successful pathways.
Q: How can organisations measure inclusive leadership?
A: Alongside engagement scores, organisations can examine promotions, stretch assignments, succession pipelines, exits, sponsorship, employee voice and differences in progression across groups. Inclusion becomes more measurable when organisations track who receives consequential opportunities.
Editorial Note
This Sunday Read reflects Saransh’s editorial interpretation of management and inclusive leadership, supported by Deloitte’s inclusive leadership research, the AIMA-KPMG Women Leadership in Corporate India 2026 study, and peer-reviewed research on inclusive and distributed leadership. Examples involving employees and managers are illustrative composites rather than accounts of identifiable individuals.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for editorial and educational purposes and does not constitute individual HR, management or employment advice.
Primary Sources
- Deloitte Insights — The Six Signature Traits of Inclusive Leadership. Deloitte’s framework identifies commitment, courage, cognisance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration.
- AIMA-KPMG — Women Leadership in Corporate India 2026. The report identifies inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity as increasingly recognised leadership competencies in Indian organisations.
- Public Management Review — Dispersion of Distributed Leadership in Public Organisations. The 2025 peer-reviewed study found inclusive leadership positively associated with broader employee participation in leadership activities.
