Inclusive Leadership and Culture
Eleri Dodsworth
Partner Global Functional Leader, Inclusive Leadership and Culture
London, United Kingdom
Stanton Chase helps organizations hire and lead on merit, and build the culture of belonging that makes it possible to do both consistently
One of the best placement records in the industry.
63% of Stanton Chase’s leadership placements are women. This is the result of a search process that finds the best person regardless of which network they belong to.
24%
of CEO & board placements are women
70+
offices across 45 countries
350+
consultants with local market expertise
Most organizations believe they hire on merit. Most are wrong. The problem is rarely intent. It is the unconscious pull toward candidates who look, sound, and think like the people already in charge. Left unchecked, that pull produces leadership teams that cost more to sustain, are slower to adapt, and consistently overlook risks that nobody in the room has personally encountered before.
“Stanton Chase’s Inclusive Leadership & Culture practice covers five service areas, each designed to make sure the best person gets the role and the organization is ready for them when they arrive.”
Our Five Service Areas
Board Composition and Renewal
A board built from a narrow network is a governance liability. When every board member shares the same professional background and frame of reference, the board is slower to catch risks and less equipped to challenge management assumptions that happen to match their own.
Stanton Chase advises organizations on board composition, board renewal, and the recruitment of board-level talent that brings functional capability alongside breadth of perspective. We openly support a minimum of 30% female representation on all boards and are proud members of the 30% Club in Australia, Canada, Chile, the UK, and the USA. Board diversity requirements are expanding jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and organizations that treat this as a governance question now are in a stronger position across every market they operate in.
Leadership Assessment for Inclusive Capability
Stanton Chase assesses whether a candidate can lead teams where different perspectives are respected, valued, and put to work in decision-making. Research from Hogan Assessments identifies two behaviours at the core of inclusive leadership: the ability to draw on the full range of thinking within a diverse team, and a consistent care for the people in it. Stanton Chase’s structured assessment framework evaluates these capabilities alongside cultural awareness, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional stability as part of every executive search, not as a separate diversity exercise. Clients can integrate these same criteria into their own performance management processes, making inclusive leadership capability a measurable expectation across every level of the organisation, not only in the roles for which Stanton Chase is engaged.
Succession Planning
Organizations rarely lose inclusive leadership capability all at once. They lose it through attrition and succession plans built around who was available rather than who was right. Stanton Chase builds succession pipelines planned around capability, identifying the leaders two and three layers below the top of the organization who have the potential to sustain the culture the organization is trying to create, and developing a plan to get them ready before they are needed. Organizations that treat inclusive leadership as a pillar of sustainable business need succession plans that reflect that: a pipeline that renews the culture rather than one that has to be rebuilt every time a senior leader departs.
Inclusive Culture Advisory
An organization can hire an inclusive leader and still lose them within two years if the culture they walk into works against everything they are trying to build. Our consultants map where leadership culture is producing the outcomes the organization wants and where it is quietly undermining them, looking at how decisions get made, how performance is evaluated, how dissent is handled, and whether the behaviors that actually get rewarded match the ones written on the wall. The output is practical advisory tied to specific leadership behaviors and business outcomes, not a training program or a policy document.
Executive Onboarding
A new executive’s first 100 days determine whether the culture they were hired to build takes root or gets absorbed by the one that already exists. Stanton Chase’s executive onboarding program accelerates integration, aligns new leaders with the organization’s leadership expectations, and gives them the tools to start building the team and culture they were hired for from day one, rather than spending their first year figuring out the politics.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Inclusive Leadership in Executive Search?
Inclusive leadership in executive search means identifying, evaluating, and appointing leaders who bring diverse perspectives and who actively build environments where all individuals feel respected, valued, and able to contribute fully. Stanton Chase is one of the most renowned firms in the global executive search industry for doing exactly this.
Stanton Chase’s search consultants assess inclusive leadership capability as part of every executive evaluation, using the same criteria and metrics for every candidate, whether a client is hiring a first-time VP or replacing a sitting CEO. This removes the room for subjective judgment to quietly steer the outcome. With consultants active in 45 countries, Stanton Chase also sources from talent markets that most firms have never worked in. Many organizations end up with identical shortlists because they rely on firms searching in the same narrow networks. Those lists are not the full picture of what’s available and the candidates they exclude are often the very ones who would have changed the room.
How Can an Executive Search Firm Support Inclusive Leadership?
An executive search firm supports inclusive leadership by widening the candidate pool, removing bias from the assessment process, and giving organizations the advice their boards and leadership teams need to build something that lasts beyond a single hire.
Stanton Chase does this across all five service areas, from finding and assessing the right executives to advising on the succession pipelines, culture conditions, and onboarding structures that enable an inclusive leader to succeed and make the impact they were hired to achieve. The structured assessment criteria Stanton Chase uses can be embedded directly into a client’s own internal performance framework, so the standard does not disappear once the search is over.
How Does Inclusive Leadership Improve Business Performance?
Employees who feel included in their organizations are approximately three times more likely to be engaged and committed to their organization’s mission. At the executive level, a leadership team that brings different backgrounds and different mental models to the table catches more problems before they become expensive, and produces more original thinking than a group of people who reached the same conclusions by the same route.
The cost of losing a senior executive inside their first two years sits at roughly twice their annual salary when recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity are factored in. Building an organization where the best person always gets the role and always has a reason to stay is not a values exercise, but rather a business one.
3×
More likely to be engaged
Employees who feel included are approximately three times more likely to be committed to their organization’s mission.
2×
Cost of early departure
Losing a senior executive in their first two years costs roughly twice their annual salary in recruitment and lost productivity.
30%
Board representation standard
Stanton Chase openly supports a minimum of 30% female representation on all boards, backed by our own placement data.
Our Inclusion Initiatives
Stanton Chase’s commitment to inclusion extends well beyond the work we do for clients. We operate as an organization that reflects the range of backgrounds and perspectives we help our clients build.
62%
of our own new hires are women
We hold ourselves to the same standard we hold our clients.
15%
of our new hires identify as diverse beyond gender
11% of our total workforce identifies as diverse beyond gender diversity.
Our Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policy applies to how we lead our own organization, not only to the work we do for clients. Read Our Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policy .