Building Inclusive Teams

Inclusive teams have a particular feel to them. The work flows. Communication is easy. People float ideas that are a little out there without bracing for impact. And when a deadline gets tight, people jump in to help each other across the line instead of guarding their own lane. That’s not luck or chemistry — it’s the visible surface of psychological safety and belonging, and you can build it on purpose.

What makes someone feel included usually comes down to three things: having access to the information and decisions that affect them, being encouraged to take risks, and feeling genuinely recognized for their work. The rest of this page is about how you create those conditions for a team you already have — and the same principles, applied to who you let in the door, are what inclusive interviewing is about.

Your role as the manager

Start by knowing each person as an individual — their goals, what they’re working toward, what actually motivates them — and then look for work that lines up with those things. That’s not a nicety; it’s how you make people’s day-to-day feel like it’s theirs.

Then model the communication you want to see:

• Share feedback, regularly and directly.
• Don’t dodge the difficult conversations.
• Ask for input before you’ve already decided.

Do all of it from empathy — seek to understand someone’s experience before you judge it or fill in the blanks with assumptions.

Set the tone (then share the responsibility)

You set the expectation, but inclusion is the whole team’s job. Make that explicit. Empower people to support one another, and challenge them to connect across the team rather than just within their cluster. Something as small as a standing 15-minute coffee chat between teammates who don’t usually work together does more than most off-sites.

Build values the team actually owns

Define your team’s values with the team, so they’re embodied by everyone instead of laminated on a wall. A useful frame (from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage) is that values come in four types:

• Core — beliefs you’ve always genuinely held as a team.
• Permission-to-play — table stakes for being on the team at all.
• Accidental — norms that hardened into “truths” over time, for better or worse.
• Aspirational — what you hope becomes true in the future.

Then ask the honest question: is inclusion a core value for this team, or an aspirational one? Be truthful. If it’s aspirational, talk together about what behaviors would have to be present for it to become table stakes — that conversation also tells you how to hold each other accountable to it.

Being this explicit can feel a little silly. It isn’t. As Brené Brown puts it, “clear is kind, unclear is unkind.” Spell it out.

Access: information and decisions

Access to information

Make sure everyone has the information they need to do their job well. Knowledge is power, and sharing it signals that someone is a valued member of the group. When we trim meetings or attendee lists for efficiency — limiting them by seniority or function — we often write exclusion all over it, however good the intentions. What feels like efficiency to you can feel like being left out to someone else.

The fix is rarely more meetings. It’s clear process: take notes in a public place, write things down where people can find them, and make it so no one feels they’ll miss out by missing a meeting. Information moves fast — what was true Monday may have changed by Tuesday — so build a reliable way for it to flow. Information drives inclusion, and inclusion keeps the information flowing back. It’s a loop.

Being part of decisions

Decision-by-committee and decision-by-a-select-few are both traps. Aim instead for everyone having the information they need and being meaningfully involved in the decisions that affect them. Bring the team along as you decide, rather than announcing the outcome after the fact — people get on board with decisions made transparently, and they quietly resent ones dropped in their lap, especially in areas where their perspective could have helped.

This doesn’t mean every decision gets vetted by every person; that just makes people afraid to decide anything without total context. The answer is to over-communicate:

• Hold team meetings to share where projects and major changes stand.
• Document how decisions get made, and when and where people can weigh in — collect feedback up front.
• Create forums where any idea can get heard.

Encourage risk-taking

Psychological safety is the foundation here. Make it comfortable for people to take risks and be a little vulnerable. Set team norms for how you disagree, debate, and give feedback — including practical things like what good, kind feedback looks like in a code review.

Reward vulnerability and make it clear it will never be used against someone. Model it yourself: share how you’re actually doing, or something you’re struggling with, and then invite others to do the same — without pushing anyone who isn’t ready.

Watch for labels and generalizations aimed at teammates. Those are an instant kill switch for safety; the moment someone gets boxed in, they stop speaking up. And keep an eye on who’s gone quiet — silence is data.

Reward the work — all of it

Bring visibility to people’s hard work with both your words and your actions. The things you spotlight are the things the whole team learns to value and want to do more of. So reframe how you talk: make sure every kind of work gets airtime. (And if something genuinely isn’t worth discussing, ask whether it should be happening at all.)

Pay particular attention to people on less visible projects. Meet with them, understand the challenges and the wins, and then name those wins in larger team meetings — so it’s unmistakable that this work matters to you, and should matter to everyone. The message to land: all of the work is critical to the team’s success.

Belonging cues

Belonging cues are the small, repeated signals that tell your team they’re part of something. A ritual you always close meetings with. A team logo. A monthly lunch. They sound trivial and they aren’t — they’re how belonging gets felt rather than just stated. Keep everyone aligned on the mission and strategy, thank people for the work they put in, and make sure they feel supported.

Motivation and purpose

You unlock motivation by helping people find their purpose. Help your team understand their “why” — both as a team and individually — and over-communicate the team’s purpose, including the reminder that setbacks and pivots are part of staying true to it, not a failure of it.

Understand what motivates each person on a personal level so you can align their work with it. And stay curious without judging: their “why” is theirs, not yours to grade.

Learn more

• A Manager’s Guide to Inclusive Teams — LinkedIn Learning, the backbone of much of this page.
• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.
• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team — the NYT write-up of Project Aristotle.
• The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.
• How great leaders inspire action — Simon Sinek’s TED talk on starting with “why.”