Reflections
Awareness, Accountability, Authenticity: Reflections on Inclusive Leadership at RADIUS
I have worked in places where success often occurs despite leadership, not because of it—and as a leader, I am determined to not put my team in that position.
Bonnie Arthur has been RADIUS’ Executive Director since 2024, and has been a member of RADIUS’ Leadership Team since 2020. She joined RADIUS in 2018 as General Manager after 11 years at Banff Centre’s Leadership Development area, and holds an Executive MBA from SFU’s Beedie School of Business. She believes that meaningful change and leadership can be shared amongst every person on a team, while clearly detailing appropriate levels of accountability and responsibility.
Bonnie was asked to share some thoughts on Inclusive Leadership at RADIUS in advance of our Inclusive Leadership Masterclasses running in May 2026; May 6-7 is open enrollment, and May 13-14 is for white leaders. We have decided to host a cohort for white leaders because it is difficult to hold oneself separate and accountable for this work without putting additional labour on racialized team members, so we hope that this cohort helps create a network of like-minded leaders who can support each other through the program and beyond.
I joined RADIUS in 2018 at a time when I needed a safe space to land, and I was so fortunate to find it; I felt supported and encouraged to be myself and to show up authentically at work. These were really important, values-based deal-breakers that I was looking for at a time when I needed a fresh start in a new city 1000km from home.
Over the next year, RADIUS grew significantly, launching several new initiatives and more than doubling our team from 7 to 16. Then, in early 2019 we underwent a staff and community led call-to-action on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (which we referred to as our JEDI initiative) prompted by challenges experienced by equity-denied community members, both on our team and in public spaces, while working for or with RADIUS.
Awareness
We brought in a consultant who led an equity audit and soon I was reading the anonymous feedback from colleagues on my team. The same team members among whom I felt so safe and encouraged were having wildly different experiences than me. Most of our staff who identified as Black, Indigenous, or racialized indicated that they had to code-switch to fit in, that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing more about themselves as people, and that they felt that their opinions or perspectives would neither be welcomed nor valued in the workplace.
This came at a time when RADIUS had only ever had white leaders, myself included, and these reports made me immediately want to jump to action to fix everything. But, as we’ve learned with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, sitting with and understanding the truth is a very important part of one’s journey– as individuals and as institutions– in order to lead to meaningful, informed solutions to the identified problems. This meant that for a while the voiced concerns, inequities, and injustices lingered unresolved. While that time was necessary to make sure that the solutions we came up with were real and had impact, the longer nothing changed, the heavier it felt knowing that the grievances had been aired but not rectified.
sitting with and understanding the truth is a very important part of one’s journey– as individuals and as institutions– in order to lead to meaningful, informed solutions to the identified problems.
As a white human leading an organization that predominantly supports non-white communities, being able to meaningfully commit to inclusive leadership is more important than ever. There are hundreds of books written about leadership, leadership styles, how people quit bosses not jobs, how culture eats strategy for breakfast; I believe that creating an inclusive culture that serves my team is one of the most powerful things I can do to retain my staff and achieve our goals. I consider my job to be to create a place where my employees can thrive and do the work they’ve been hired to do, and that I am helping them achieve their goals.
At RADIUS, when we talk about inclusive leadership we often discuss how diversity is an outcome based on creating equitable, accountable, and inclusive spaces— and that there is not one checklist or perfect words or actions that will guarantee success. The needs vary day to day but there are behaviours that we can practice to help us get there.
Accountability
First and foremost, inclusive leadership requires accountability for my decisions and the humility to change them when needed. As a leader, there are moments when having the institutional knowledge and the trust of the team means making hard decisions and being able to justify them as required. A key element to supporting decision-making as an inclusive leader comes from having transparent, clearly laid-out decision-making processes. Our team has created many processes to help hold us accountable in our decisions, from having an Ethical Fundraising Playbook when it comes to applying for grants to having a screening process for RFPs and clients. It is important to acknowledge that if I were to regularly make decisions that did not use the ethics models and playbooks our team painstakingly designed, it would undermine these processes entirely. Every day in my role striving to be an inclusive leader is one of exploring this measured balance.
Navigating tensions in decision-making is never easy; as leaders, we are often juggling our personal human reactions of defensiveness and burnout while holding space for our team to do the same.
I find that having significant input from my team ensures we have internal buy-in to help manifest and support the change initiatives we are introducing, but there have been significant moments when the team has called for leadership to step up and lead, and then question the decisions being made. Navigating tensions in decision-making is never easy; as leaders, we are often juggling our personal human reactions of defensiveness and burnout while holding space for our team to do the same. During all this, we are also continuing to care enough and believe in the work to continuously be compelled to step up. None of these processes are clear, easy, or have an obvious trajectory; it is through accountability, humility, and trust that we are able to maintain momentum together.
Authenticity
How do we help foster that trusting environment, one that has space for healthy conflict, collaboration, and stronger decisions? It involves making space to be humans together. As a simple example, we start our meetings with “humanity check-ins” that are often not about work, encouraging each other to share how we’re showing up, how we are feeling, or what we’re thinking about. As an introvert and intellectualizer, authentically modeling the way in spaces like this are often difficult. Displays of humanity can be vulnerable and can take up a lot of space, and I don’t want to be centering myself or putting emotional labour on my team– even with my years of trust-building on this team, there remain systemic power imbalances because of the identities and roles that I hold. Further, my not participating in these moments is not an option—while each individual has discretion on what they want to share on any given day, I can’t ask everyone else to be vulnerable and then abscond that duty myself. So I share, I acknowledge the things that keep me up at night, and I name my responsibility for those things. When I am vulnerable with my team, it comes with the acknowledgement that it is my responsibility, not theirs, to support that vulnerability. Then when the trust is there, I am gifted with hearing back from my team about what they are facing and we actually get to work on solving some of those things together.
I have now been at RADIUS for over 8 years and I am exceptionally proud of how we have continued to learn and grow. I’m grateful for the dozens of amazing team members who have joined us over the years and done so much more than just contributed to our work. They have helped shape how we work together, how we understand what being an inclusive workplace can and should look like, and how we think about equity and diversity as indicators of such a place. As a leader, my role of supporting my team and our workplace culture to be able to do the amazing work that we do together is something that I take very seriously and something that I am honored to be a part of every day.
We look forward to welcoming 2 new cohorts of our Inclusive Leadership Masterclass to join us and our alumni in May. Thank you for being a part of the RADIUS experience with us.
This article uses The Three A’s of Inclusion framework by Bailey et al (2020), one of the many conceptual frameworks RADIUS uses and teaches to hundreds of leaders and decision-makers across public and private organizations and sectors. Come learn and apply more concepts and case studies with us and explore the messiness of inclusive leadership.