The Leadership Gap That's Costing You Your Best People

Inclusive leadership is the strongest organizational predictor of employee creativity, voice, and retention identified in recent research. A 2024 meta analysis of 105 studies and nearly 40,000 employees by Li et al. found that inclusive leadership predicted task performance, innovative behavior, and reduced turnover more consistently than any single management style or personality trait.

The team looks fine on paper. The manager is decent, not a micromanager, maybe even well liked. But sit in on a few meetings and a pattern emerges: the same three people talk and everyone else has quietly retreated into execution mode. No new ideas. No pushback. Just people getting through the work.

Most leaders chalk it up to personality. “Some people are just quieter.” And sure, maybe. But I’d argue what’s actually happening is something more structurally interesting than introversion, and something a lot more fixable.

The symptom everyone recognizes

You’ve seen this team. The official culture is collaborative and open, but in practice there’s an inner circle of voices that matter and a wider group of people who’ve learned that raising things doesn’t really lead anywhere. It doesn’t have to be toxic. It can feel totally fine. The problem is what isn’t happening: the creativity, the surfaced risks, the left field ideas that might have saved everyone three months of work in the wrong direction.

The team isn’t disengaged because of the perks or the salary or the commute. It’s disengaged because something in how it’s being led has quietly taught people their specific perspective isn’t what’s being asked for.

The hidden cause

Here’s where I think most leadership programs are still getting it wrong.

A meta analysis published in 2024 pulled together 105 independent samples totaling nearly 40,000 employees and looked at what actually predicts outcomes like task performance, creativity, employee voice, and retention. The answer wasn’t charisma or a particular management philosophy. It was specifically inclusive leadership, and the mechanism it worked through was ‘psychological safety’. Li et al., 2024

And a separate cross national study of ICT professionals in Ethiopia and South Korea found that the hands off, trust the team approach, what researchers label ‘laissez faire’ leadership, was a negative predictor of task performance in both countries. Not neutral. Negative. Gemeda & Lee, 2020

So the managers who think they’re being respectful by staying out of the way are often, without knowing it, creating the exact disengagement they’d never intend to cause. I find that genuinely hard to sit with. And I think it matters that we say it clearly.

The ‘belonging and uniqueness’ gap

Here’s the concept that changes how you look at this. Researchers Amy Randel and colleagues established in 2017 that inclusion in the workplace actually has two distinct components: belonging and uniqueness. Randel et al., 2017

Belonging is “you’re welcome here.” Uniqueness is “what you specifically bring is exactly what we need.”

Most teams do a reasonable job at the first one. The second one is where leaders quietly drop the ball and don’t realize it, because the person is still showing up, still delivering, still technically “engaged.” But internally, they’ve stopped bringing their full thinking because nobody’s actually asked for it.

The metaphor that lands for me is a dinner party. You can be invited, fed, and technically included and have a fine time. Or someone can seek you out and say “wait, you have to meet this person, she’s working on the exact thing you’ve been thinking about.” One of those experiences makes you want to come back. The other one just means you showed up.

Why this matters, in numbers

The Li et al. meta analysis found that inclusive leadership predicted all of the following: task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, innovative behavior, creativity, employee voice, and lower turnover intention. That’s across 40,000 people and 105 studies.

A study of 293 employees across 45 diverse public sector teams found that inclusive leadership actively moderates the negative relationship between team diversity and inclusive climate, meaning the benefits of a diverse team only materialize when leadership creates the right conditions. Ashikali et al., 2020

That’s not a diversity initiative. That’s an operational strategy. And I’d argue if you’re not thinking about it that way, you’re leaving real performance on the table.

What to actually do about it

I’m allergic to advice that’s just “be more inclusive,” so here’s what I’d actually suggest.

Before your next 1:1, write one thing down. Identify something distinctively true about how this specific person thinks. What angle do they see that others miss? What makes their contribution irreplaceable rather than generic? Then say it out loud to them. Not “good work” but “the thing you flagged in that last project that nobody else caught, that’s the kind of thinking I need more of.”

In your next team meeting, replace “does anyone have anything to add?” with something specific. Try “actually, before we move on, I want to hear from [name] on this because she has context the rest of us don’t.” It sounds small. It’s not.

Look back at your last five decisions and ask who actually shaped the direction. Not who was in the room. Who actually influenced the outcome. The pattern will tell you more about your leadership style than most feedback tools can. (Though I’d also say do the 360. That’s just a different post.)

If you call yourself a hands off leader, push on that a bit. There’s a meaningful difference between “I trust my team to own their work” and “I’m not present enough to actively pull out each person’s specific value.” The research is pretty clear on which one correlates with higher performance and which one doesn’t.

A lingering thought

What this research keeps pointing me toward is a gap between creating a generally “safe” environment and actively making each specific person feel that their particular way of seeing the world matters to the work. Those are two different leadership tasks and most programs only train for the first one.

The second one is harder. It requires actually knowing your people. Not just managing them.

What’s one person on your team whose specific perspective you haven’t explicitly pulled on recently? That’s probably worth a conversation.

And if you’re wondering where AI fits into all of this, the leadership skills that drive inclusion are the same ones that determine whether your team actually adopts new technology. I wrote about why every leader needs to understand AI and how it connects to exactly this kind of people first leadership.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is inclusive leadership and does it actually affect performance?

Inclusive leadership is a style that actively makes each person on a team feel both that they belong and that their specific perspective is valued. Li et al. (2024) pulled together 105 independent samples totaling nearly 40,000 employees and found that inclusive leadership predicted task performance, creativity, employee voice, innovative behavior, and lower turnover intention.

Q: What’s wrong with being a hands-off manager if your team is competent?

The research is pretty direct on this. Gemeda and Lee (2020) studied ICT professionals across Ethiopia and South Korea and found that laissez-faire leadership was a negative predictor of task performance in both countries. Not neutral. Negative. Staying out of the way isn’t the same as trusting your team.

Q: What’s the difference between belonging and inclusion at work?

Randel et al. (2017) established that inclusion actually has two distinct components. Belonging is feeling welcome and accepted. Uniqueness is feeling that your specific perspective and contribution is irreplaceable. Most teams do reasonably well on belonging but quietly drop the ball on uniqueness, which is why people can still feel disengaged even in a technically “supportive” culture.

Q: Does a diverse team automatically perform better?

Not on its own. Ashikali et al. (2020) studied 293 employees across 45 diverse public sector teams and found that inclusive leadership actively moderates the negative relationship between team diversity and inclusive climate. The benefits of a diverse team only materialize when leadership creates the right conditions. Diversity without inclusion doesn’t produce the performance outcomes most organizations are expecting.

If this sounds like useful work for your leadership team, we design workshops around exactly these gaps at Peak Potential. Reach out here or take a look at our team workshop options.