Diversity and Inclusion Training Resources

Join global workforce management expert Dr. Shirley Davis as she shares how to create and lead an organization that leverages the diverse talents of all contributors. Dr. Davis reveals the benefits of inclusive leadership, including the positive impacts it can have on employee engagement, innovation, and creativity. She then outlines a best practice framework for developing inclusive leaders in an organization, and shares tips for avoiding common leadership pitfalls. Upon wrapping up this course, you'll be equipped with practical strategies you can use to cultivate a more inclusive workforce.

High-performing teams are comprised of employees who feel empowered, valued, and accepted. By taking steps to establish an inclusive team dynamic, you can positively impact both your team's morale and your bottom line. In this course, learn how to create a shared understanding of why inclusion is important for your team, as well as revamp your own leadership and communication practices to ensure that your diverse team continues to thrive. Instructor Daisy Lovelace shows how to give everyone a chance to participate in these efforts, and create an environment that makes everyone feel comfortable bringing their true self to the office—without ever feeling like an outsider. Learn how to model open communication, discover implicit associations, delegate work equitably, and more.

Join global workforce management expert Dr. Shirley Davis as she shares how to create and lead an organization that leverages the diverse talents of all contributors. Dr. Davis reveals the benefits of inclusive leadership, including the positive impacts it can have on employee engagement, innovation, and creativity. She then outlines a best practice framework for developing inclusive leaders in an organization, and shares tips for avoiding common leadership pitfalls. Upon wrapping up this course, you'll be equipped with practical strategies you can use to cultivate a more inclusive workforce.

Countless sources have documented the difficulties women face in reaching the top tiers of today's businesses. Women leaders face different expectations, norms, and realities—and are paid and promoted less. Creating an environment of "inclusive excellence," where both women and men can thrive, takes the right skills and strategy. This course is for anyone who wants to build a more equitable and collaborative culture at their organization, including women leaders and the men who work with them. Business professors, colleagues, and coaches Daisy L. Lovelace and Carolyn Goerner discuss the common challenges that women in leadership face—including gender bias, communication barriers, and imposter syndrome—and introduce strategies to overcome them. Plus, get tips for championing women's leadership and becoming a strong ally.

Does the training you create really reflect your audience? Have you considered someone’s geographical location, learning preference, or accommodation needs? These types of questions should be core to the instructional design process. In this course, learn how to make sure your training is inclusive by considering everything from your graphics to the subject matter experts (SMEs) you select. Instructor Samantha Calamari illuminates ways in which individuals with different learning styles, abilities, and cultural backgrounds can be left out of traditional learning experiences. Throughout the course, she shares techniques and design methods that can help your training resonate with these—and all potential—audiences.

Understanding the working of the brain—a field known as neuroscience—can positively impact how we work with and lead others. Knowing how to change the brain to motivate and engage people, for example, allows leaders to focus on brain-based behaviors that can be changed to move their teams in the right direction. In this course, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and business consultant Srini Pillay shares insights from the latest neuroscience research on how to leverage the brain for maximum impact. Learn how to change your brain for the better, build confidence and resilience, and align the brains of your team so you can focus on common goals. Plus, find out how to use neuroscience to solve common management challenges, such as increasing team diversity, performance, speed, innovation, and focus.

Great leaders care about more than just the bottom line. They achieve—or exceed—their goals by bringing humanity to their work. In this course, Carolyn Everson, the vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, delves into how (and why) adopting the core tenants of enlightened leadership can boost both your effectiveness and overall happiness. Carolyn shares lessons gleaned from her own experiences at Facebook and other top companies, including how to lead with greater transparency, build successful, diverse teams, find the right mentors, and lead as a woman in tech. Plus, learn about the importance of hiring people that are better than you; approaching sales interactions as an advisor, instead of just a salesperson; making generosity a business practice; and more.

Managing the relationship between an organization and its people is essential to providing fair and practical outcomes for both sides. But in the era of digital and automated work, employee relations are in need of a refresh. This course provides an introduction to employee relations for the 21st century—the techniques and tools for creating stronger, more effective representation for workers in all industries. Instructor Perry Timms describes the rights and protections of workers and the tools that employees have at their disposal for representation and negotiation, from collective bargaining to arbitration. He also explores the importance of a strong psychological contract between employees and organizations, buoyed by diversity, inclusion, well-being, and engagement. Finally, explore essential skills for managing employee relations, including working with union reps, handling conflict, and representing the organization professionally in disciplinary situations.

Assumptions are necessary to help us make sense of our world. We are bombarded with so much information that we simply couldn't function if we didn't each have some basic premises to work from. That said, the critical thinker knows assumptions can get in the way of rational decision making. When solving problems, it's necessary to use strategic thinking to challenge our assumptions and find the right solutions. This course defines what assumptions are, describes how different kinds of assumptions may be challenged, and covers the importance of seeking out other people's perspectives.

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With so much business happening on a global scale, cross-cultural communication is more important than ever before. Communication is always a challenge, and when diverse cultures interact, good communication can be even more challenging. In this course, you'll learn about the importance of achieving a proper mindset for cross-cultural communication. You'll explore aspects of cultures that affect how people communicate across cultural boundaries. You'll learn also considerations for speaking and writing in cross-cultural environments.

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Globalization is a reality. Once, only explorers and world travelers needed to be culturally knowledgeable, but now most of us work with people from different cultural backgrounds. Our variations in attitudes, beliefs, and communication styles present daily challenges for business leaders charged with managing across cultures. Managing diversity is now a necessary skill. In this course, you’ll learn about leading diversity. You’ll explore the dynamic nature of cultural intelligence (CQ) and how to grow it and use it to bridge cultural differences. You’ll also discover techniques for motivating, influencing, and managing across cultures, and adapting your own leadership style. Finally, you’ll learn about managing conflict across cultures by identifying and navigating cultural barriers and minefields.

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As a manager, it can be daunting to find yourself in charge of a diverse group, comprised of different age ranges, backgrounds, and experiences. It's inevitable that you'll encounter difficulties. Effectively handling conflict, whether it's team conflict or difficult employee behavior, is essential to productivity and requires developing conflict management skills. This course covers useful techniques and processes for conflict resolution. You'll learn methods for resolving conflict when dealing with an employee's difficult behavior. You'll also learn ways of effectively managing team conflict and understanding and dealing with conflict in the workplace as a whole.

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Organizations reap the benefits of diversity—when employees bring their whole, authentic selves to work. Diverse teams are more productive, innovative, and engaged. Authenticity at work includes sharing and speaking up about work and life experiences that may be different based on one’s identity. Developing the skills to conduct meaningful conversations on potentially polarizing topics such as race, religion, and gender is critical for human resources professionals, managers, and team leaders. Mary-Frances Winters offers a multistep process for building the skills necessary to engage in inclusive conversations. Find out how to conduct an exploratory self-assessment to better understand yourself and your team, learn tactics to go from polarization to common ground, and discover practical techniques for discussing difficult topics.

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We're all biased. Our experiences shape who we are, and our race, ethnicity, gender, height, weight, sexual orientation, place of birth, and other factors impact the lens with which we view the world. In this course, diversity expert Stacey Gordon helps you recognize and acknowledge your own biases so that you can identify them when making decisions, and prevent yourself from making calls based on a biased viewpoint. Stacey explains some of the most common forms that a bias takes: affinity bias, halo bias, perception bias, and confirmation bias. She helps you recognize the negative effects of bias within your organization, as well as the benefits to be realized by uncovering bias in decision-making processes. Finally, she outlines strategies for overcoming personal and organizational bias.

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Discussions about cultural differences can be uncomfortable. They take courage. In this course, Duke University professor Dr. Daisy Lovelace shares principles and strategies that can help you have more productive, meaningful conversations on topics related to diversity. Daisy helps you understand that everyone has a unique lens based on their experiences, and that understanding and appreciating that difference is the first step in being able to discuss sensitive topics. She also outlines a number of techniques to help you navigate these difficult conversations.

Diversity is having a culture that values uniqueness: people of different backgrounds, cultures, genders, and races. Inclusion means inviting diverse groups to take part in company life. If you're tuned into conversations about HR, you've probably heard these terms before. But there's a third critical piece: belonging. It's belonging that makes each individual feel accepted for who they are. Explore the diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB) approach, and discover how to activate it in your organization. Join HR luminary Pat Wadors as she explains how to drive the conversation on DIBs, hire and retain diverse talent, listen to employees, and integrate DIBs into your employee life cycle. Managers and executives should tune in for special tips on embedding DIBs in the employee experience.

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“Diversity and inclusion” has become such a familiar phrase that it’s easy to lose sight of what it means. Workplaces that incorporate a wide range of human experience—across gender, culture, age, sexual preference, and other differences—are more adaptable and more innovative places to work than their more homogeneous competitors. Not surprisingly, they do better on recruitment, retention, productivity—basically any measure of success you can think of. This course explains how to improve your organizations diversity and inclusion by thoughtfully examining the challenges and opportunities they present. Learn how to support a diverse workforce through wise management, carefully structured conversations, and a culture designed to celebrate the unique value of each team member. This course includes videos from: Jane Hyun, an internationally renowned executive coach and leadership strategist Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, a career discovery platform Wendy Luhabe, South African social entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant, marketing expert and TED speaker (“Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation”) Claire Groen, vice president of litigation and deputy general counsel at Amway Note: This course was produced by Big Think. We are pleased to host this content in our library.

Inclusive work environments can yield greater creative output, boost employee morale, and benefit a company’s bottom line. But even as a slew of modern companies make strides towards true workplace inclusivity, many still miss the mark. This is often due to a lack of cultural competence, or the ability to engage and adapt across cultural differences. In this course, instructor Mary-Frances Winters explains why cultural competence is key to the success of any diversity-related initiative, as well as how to assess and grow your own cultural competence. She shares scenarios and techniques that can help you grasp how your worldview impacts your behavior, as well as how to more effectively engage and adapt across cultural differences.

Explore perceived inter-generational differences and find out how to tap into the collaborative value of age diversity across an entire team. Join instructor John Tarnoff to learn how people born into distinct age cohorts can work together effectively, turning seemingly divergent attitudes and backgrounds into harmonious and productive working relationships. John busts some of the common myths about each generation, and provides playbooks and best practices to support managers and reports in working more effectively together. He also lists the action steps organizations can take to better support age diversity.

Each of us is a member of a society that is often partitioned into groups and tribes. While this is common to most societies, it can have harmful effects in the workplace, interfering with productivity and organizational success. We all hold biases, whether conscious or unconscious. Part of understanding the role of unconscious bias in the workplace is admitting to yourself that you, too, hold biases. Once accepted, you can take an anti-bias approach to overcoming unconscious prejudice. In this course, you'll learn how to recognize your own unconscious and implicit bias and how they can fall prey to social stereotypes.

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Learn how to roll out a diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIBs) program tailored to your company's unique needs. Dereca Blackmon, CEO of Inclusion Design, can help. In this course, she helps you understand exactly what your organization needs by asking the right questions and identifying the right partners and champions for your program. She explains how to develop buy-in by making the case for DIBs with senior leaders and employees alike, and solicit and incorporate feedback from participants. Then Dereca explains how to promote your program and keep the momentum going strong with employee- and leadership-led content. Finally, discover how to set expectations regarding the outcomes of your training program and evaluate its success.

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIBs) isn’t just a buzzword. DIBs programs can have real impact on employees’ productivity and welfare. Think about the best group you ever belonged to—where you felt like everyone cared about you, understood you, and valued you as a part of the group. That is the kind of environment that promotes sharing, innovation, and growth. This courses shows HR leaders how to develop a DIBs strategy that builds diverse, inclusive environments where everyone feels like they belong. Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson explains how to create a strategy for your organization and start integrating DIBs into core HR activities, such as recruitment, training, performance evaluations, and promotions. Plus, learn how to get buy-in and evaluate the ongoing success of your program.

Finding ways to effectively lead diversity efforts is often seen as the grand challenge for today's leaders, particularly when you consider the complexity of a global workforce. In this course, join Stefanie Johnson as she discusses the benefits of diversity in general, and shares ways that organizations can enhance diversity and inclusion in different cultural contexts. Stefanie explains how prioritizing diversity can be beneficial to your business, goes over how to create a local or global strategy, and shares a real-world example to help you grasp what a global diversity strategy looks like in practice. Plus, she goes into using benchmarks to see if your diversity efforts are working, and details approaches to diversity and inclusion in different cultural landscapes.

As a buzzword, "diversity" sounds good, but speaking frankly about age discrimination, gender bias, and hiring disparities can take many talent acquisition professionals out of their comfort zone. In this course, Stacey Gordon explains how to confidently approach the topic of bias and successfully address it when recruiting. She outlines the most common mistakes that recruiters make as well as ways to assess your current recruiting strategy to achieve success.

Learn about the challenges and opportunities inherent in working in diverse organizations. This transformative learning path reviews current thinking and best practices on essential topics such as bias in all of its forms, cultural competence, communication, allyship, and accountability.

Discover ways to effectively lead diversity efforts in your organization. In this learning path, leaders can learn how to recognize the business need for DIBs, create a truly inclusive workplace, communicate honestly and effectively, recognize their own biases, and accept the differences of others.

Team leaders should aim to create an inclusive culture that celebrates differences and fosters the best performance from every team member. In this course, leadership coach Vanessa Womack equips you with knowledge and impactful strategies that can help you successfully manage, counsel, and lead a diverse team. Vanessa first explains how to prepare yourself to lead by identifying cornerstones of diversity and reviewing diversity and inclusion terminology. She then shares strategies for observing and coaching your team to cultivate behaviors that build trust and strengthen relationships.

People around the world are having difficult conversations about race and justice. But few are talking about how to talk about race. This has left some professionals sitting on the sidelines because they don't know what to say or how to say it. In this course, negotiation and conflict resolution expert Kwame Christian shows how to apply a useful framework to open up an effective dialogue at work and facilitate understanding. Kwame highlights the barriers that make talking about race so challenging. He then shares how to apply a framework that provides a consistent tool for how to have these conversations. Using this framework, you can acknowledge and validate emotions, use curiosity to open up dialogue, and work with others to determine what you're trying to solve. Plus, Kwame shares general tips for talking about race, including how to avoid common pitfalls and talk to your kids about race and society.

Find greater meaning, well-being, and productivity by learning how to interact with others across differences. Continue your Thrive journey and discover how to create inclusive environments where everyone can thrive. In this course, Arianna Huffington and Verna Myers discuss the impact of our cultural lens on our daily relations and how to counter bias in our words and actions.

Working in a toxic environment can make anyone feel helpless. Even HR representatives can feel like their hands are tied. But you have the power to change the trajectory of your organization’s culture. By going from bystander to upstander—someone who holds their coworkers accountable for bad behavior—you can turn a toxic workplace into a supportive environment where employees are able to do their best work. In this course, Catherine Mattice Zundel introduces tools and strategies to become an upstander and an ally. Learn how to build an upstander culture, hold employees and peers to professional conduct, and develop the skills you need to speak up when fellow employees are being bullied or harassed.

We have entered a new era of understanding regarding issues of race. Now is the time to advocate for change in the workplace—to address structural inequalities and embark on active anti-racism. But how do you effectively drive company-wide change? Discover an approach that will turn your passion into persuasion and bring real results. Director of the American Negotiation Institute Kwame Christian explains how to have the difficult conversations you need to create a more equitable future at your organization. Learn how to identify exactly what needs to change—and ways to get leadership to commit—and define your vision for success. Once you have your plan, you can use the tools and techniques Kwame introduces for negotiating change, driving accountability, maintaining focus, and overcoming emotion. In closing, he identifies resources for practicing self-care when performing the hard work of anti-racism. These tactics will help you advocate for equality and combat the forces of racism that exist at a structural level in many organizations.

Gender diversity in the workplace drives innovation and performance. As a male ally, you can help boost diversity by chipping away at the systems that perpetuate everyday unconscious bias. In this course, Emilie Aries shares simple actions you can take right away to further gender equality in your workplace. Get tips for amplifying women's voices at work, including how to use your power to pass the mic to those whose voices often go unheard. Learn how to challenge the common leadership-likability double bind that women face as they rise through the ranks. Plus, learn how to sponsor women at work, shoulder your share of emotional labor, and more.

Gender bias is holding women back in the workplace. Whether deliberate or unconscious, bias makes it harder for women to get hired and promoted and negatively impacts their day-to-day work experiences. Created by LeanIn.Org, this short video series—one introductory video and six two-to-three-minute videos—is designed to provide an understanding of how gender bias impacts women’s and men’s experiences at work. These videos cover the five most common types of biases women face and address the concept of intersectionality. The videos can be watched individually or paired with a card-based activity that brings people together to have meaningful discussions about gender bias. 

What does it mean to become a true ally? This question is more relevant now than ever. True allies start with an inclusive mindset based on three basic principles: be brave, be humble, and be dedicated. Discover how to put these principles into practice, become a better ally, and be the change you want to see in the world. In this course, Dereca Blackmon—CEO of Inclusion Design Group—helps you understand the diversity and inclusion concepts underlying an inclusive mindset and conduct a self-inventory to identify the motivations driving your allyship actions. Next, she explains how to practice humble allyship that puts marginalized voices first. Lastly, learn how to continue your journey by dedicating yourself to education and practicing allyship in real-world situations.