Advance Inclusion in your workplace
Lead the way to create inclusive workplaces with expert support, tailored resources, and a vibrant member community. Inclusive Employers membership gives you the tools and insights to advance inclusion and make a lasting impact.
If you work in equity, diversity and inclusion, you’ll know the feeling. You’ve got the data, you understand the challenges, and you can see exactly what needs to change. But getting others on board? That’s where things get complicated.
During our recent ‘Influencing for Inclusion’ webinar, Addison Barnett, Principal Consultant at Inclusive Employers, shared insights from working with some of the UK’s most complex and mature organisations. The conversation revealed something crucial: influence isn’t about having all the answers or the biggest budget. It’s about understanding people, telling the right stories, and creating momentum that actually sticks.
Here are seven strategies to help your inclusion strategies move from planning to progress.
1. Map your stakeholders (and understand what they really care about)
Before you can influence anyone, you need to know who you’re trying to reach and what matters to them.
Effective stakeholder mapping goes beyond names and job titles. Who has the power to make decisions? Who will be affected by changes? Who could become your strongest advocates? But here’s what often gets missed: understanding what drives them. What keeps them up at night? What are their priorities, pressures and pain points?
An operations director worried about efficiency might not immediately connect with abstract EDI goals. But show how inclusive practices reduce turnover costs or improve team performance, and suddenly you’re speaking their language.
The most effective EDI professionals translate outcomes into terms that resonate with each stakeholder’s specific concerns. This groundwork makes everything that follows significantly easier.
2. Build your case with data, but lead with story
Numbers matter. But data alone rarely creates the emotional connection needed to drive change.
The most compelling approaches combine robust evidence with human stories that bring that evidence to life. Link your EDI initiatives to organisational KPIs that leadership already cares about. Can you connect inclusive recruitment to talent retention rates? Does psychological safety correlate with innovation metrics?
Then add the narrative layer. What does the data mean for real people in your organisation? What changes when teams feel genuinely included?
During the webinar, Addison emphasised approaching EDI work like any other organisational project. Apply the same rigour to your business case. Define success factors clearly. Make it measurable.
This dual approach satisfies the analytical minds who need evidence before committing resources, whilst connecting with people who need to understand why this work matters at a human level.
3. Focus on the early adopters, not the whole crowd
Here’s a liberating truth: you don’t need to convince everyone all at once.
Research shows that you need approximately 25% of people genuinely committed to an idea before it reaches a tipping point and begins to spread more widely (Centola et al., 2018). Instead of exhausting yourself trying to bring everyone on board immediately, identify your early adopters. These are people who care about inclusion because it’s innovative, resonates with their values, or who naturally try new approaches before they’re fully proven.
Focus your energy there. Give them opportunities to engage with EDI work. Support them to become project champions and ambassadors. Help them succeed in visible ways.
Why? Because the pragmatists and sceptics in your organisation need to see proof before they’ll commit. By focusing on early adopters first, you’re building the proof points that will eventually bring the broader organisation along.
This approach is also kinder to you. Starting with people already predisposed to support you builds confidence, creates wins, and generates energy for the longer journey ahead.
Ready to join the leading EDI community?
Get monthly expert insights, practical tools and real stories to help you build an inclusive workplace.
Subscribe to Inclusion Insights for free
4. Think in sprints, not marathons
The traditional approach to EDI strategy often involves extensive three-year plans with delayed outcomes. In today’s environment, where priorities shift and budgets get reviewed constantly, this approach faces significant challenges.
Instead, consider shorter cycles of activity. Assess where you are now. Select one high-impact initiative that can be delivered relatively quickly. Build it with clear success measures. Implement it. Celebrate the outcomes. Then repeat.
You’re looking for activities that will shift things meaningfully but don’t require twelve months to show results. Not token gestures, but genuine improvements delivered in weeks or months rather than years.
This approach makes it easier to secure smaller budgets for pilot projects than large multi-year commitments. You can adapt based on what you learn from each cycle. And crucially, you can demonstrate value continuously.
Addison shared a powerful phrase during the webinar: when you achieve a positive outcome, “sweat that positive outcome within an inch of its life”. Make sure everyone knows about it. Use it to build the case for your next initiative.
5. Lean into bottom-up change
While senior leadership support remains important, the real shifts in organisational culture increasingly come from smaller, grassroots activities that create ripple effects across teams and departments.
This is good news for EDI professionals who might not always have direct access to the C-suite or unlimited budget. Bottom-up change is often more authentic, more sustainable, and paradoxically, more powerful than mandated initiatives from above.
This might be employee-led networks that create genuine communities of support. Team-level experiments with inclusive practices that get shared across the organisation. Peer-to-peer learning that spreads new approaches through informal networks.
Enable and amplify these grassroots efforts rather than trying to control everything centrally. Create the conditions for colleagues to drive change in their own areas. People feel ownership over changes they’ve helped shape rather than initiatives imposed upon them.
6. Protect your own wellbeing in the process
This isn’t a strategy for influencing others. It’s a strategy for sustaining yourself.
EDI work is emotionally demanding. You’re dealing with sensitive topics, challenging conversations, and resistance from people who don’t understand why this work matters. If you burn out, your influence evaporates.
Before you can create the conditions for others to thrive, you need to create those conditions for yourself. Set boundaries around your time and energy. Build your own support network of colleagues who understand EDI work’s specific challenges. Know when to step back and recharge.
Be realistic about what you can achieve. You cannot single-handedly transform an entire organisation’s culture. What you can do is show up consistently, make thoughtful choices about where to focus your influence, and trust that small, sustained actions create change over time.
The most effective EDI professionals aren’t martyrs who sacrifice themselves for the cause. They’re strategic, boundaried people who understand that sustainable change requires sustainable effort.
7. Make your narrative compelling and credible
Influence ultimately comes down to communication. How you frame EDI work determines how others perceive its value and urgency.
The most powerful narratives are grounded in data and evidence. They connect to genuine organisational priorities. They paint a picture of what’s possible. And they’re told in language that feels authentic and accessible rather than full of jargon.
When building your EDI narrative, consider what you’re really trying to achieve. Are you trying to create urgency around a problem? Then your story needs to help people understand the real cost of inaction. Are you trying to generate excitement about an opportunity? Then paint a vivid picture of what success looks like.
Make sure your narrative is credible. Acknowledge complexity rather than oversimplifying. Be honest about challenges as well as celebrating wins. Demonstrate that you understand the practical realities of your organisation, not just the theoretical ideals of inclusion.
The colleagues you’re trying to influence are sophisticated professionals. They can tell when they’re being sold something versus when they’re being invited into a genuine conversation about making things better.
Why this matters
These strategies matter because EDI work is fundamentally about influence. Unlike some organisational roles where you have direct authority over outcomes, EDI professionals usually work through others.
The strategies outlined above give you frameworks for building that influence systematically. They help you move beyond hoping people will simply “get it” and instead create conditions where EDI thinking becomes part of how your organisation naturally operates.
They also help you work more sustainably. By focusing on early adopters, thinking in sprints, and protecting your wellbeing, you’re building an approach to EDI work that you can maintain over years rather than burning bright and burning out.
And perhaps most importantly, these strategies help you demonstrate value continuously. When you can point to specific wins, connect them to organisational priorities, and tell compelling stories about what’s changed, you build the credibility that creates space for deeper transformation.
Keep learning, keep leading
Influence isn’t a skill you develop once and deploy unchanged forever. The most effective EDI professionals are committed to continuous learning, constantly refining their understanding of what works and adapting their approaches accordingly.
That’s where thought leadership programmes become invaluable. They provide ongoing access to new research, emerging practices, and insights from across different sectors and organisations.
If you’re looking to deepen your influencing skills and stay connected to the latest thinking in EDI, consider subscribing to Inclusion Insights, the new thought leadership programme from Inclusive Employers. You’ll receive regular analysis of trends affecting EDI work, practical frameworks you can apply immediately, and perspectives that challenge you to think differently about familiar problems.
Influencing for inclusion is complex work. But with the right strategies, the right support, and a commitment to learning, you can create meaningful change that helps people thrive.
References
Centola, D., Becker, J., Brackbill, D. and Baronchelli, A. (2018) ‘Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention’, *Science*, 360(6393), pp. 1116-1119. doi: 10.1126/science.aas8827.