Facilitating Belonging: A Case for Inclusion as the Bedrock of Contemporary Leadership

Nuts About Leadership 2025, 2, 4 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17601245 Book Review Facilitating Belonging: A Case for Inclusion as the Bedrock of Contemporary Leadership Rose White 1 1 [email protected] Abstract A new book positions inclusion as a cornerstone of modern leadership. The Contemporary Leader: The Value of Inclusion in Successful Leadership links inclusion to enhanced productivity, psychological diversity, and personal growth. Drawing on the author’s extensive multicultural experience and leadership in global coaching, the book offers a structured journey from defining inclusion to institutional implementation. Through reflective chapters and inspirational sources, it urges leaders to cultivate empathy, challenge biases, and foster belonging in rapidly changing environments. This review evaluates the work’s themes, structure, and potential impact. Keywords: diversity; growth mindset; inclusion; institutional change; leadership Riza Kadilar’s book, The Contemporary Leader: The Value of Inclusion in Successful Leadership is a reflective and practice-oriented exploration of how inclusion drives effective leadership in an era of uncertainty.1 The book’s central purpose, as articulated in its foreword, is to guide readers in aligning their inner world with external change while fostering self-awareness, empathy, and a sense of belonging. It frames inclusion not merely as a policy goal but as a conscious, active process of welcoming the “other” and creating shared value. Within the leadership development and organizational behavior fields, the book is significant for its emphasis on psychological and emotional dimensions of inclusion. It positions inclusion as a vital response to polarization, technological disruption, and demographic shifts. By placing empathy, unconscious bias, and belonging at the heart of leadership practice, Kadilar moves beyond compliance-driven diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) checklists to cultivate what he calls “psychological diversity,” the rich inner stories each team member carries. Kadilar writes from a rich tapestry of personal and professional experience. As past president of EMCC Global, he has led in multicultural settings across Europe and beyond, often navigating minority perspectives while living in different countries. His career in senior banking and his lifelong curiosity about multiple viewpoints, shaped by family, education, and global interactions are evident in the acknowledgements. These experiences inform his advocacy for inclusion as both a personal ethic and a leadership imperative. The book emerges amid heightened global discourse on DEI, particularly in corporate and coaching contexts. While it does not explicitly engage with specific scholarly Received: 2025-10-21 Revised: 2025-10-25 Accepted: 2025-11-05 Published: 2025-11-17 Citation: White, R. (2025). Facilitating Belonging: A Case for Inclusion as the Bedrock of Contemporary Leadership. Nuts About Leadership, 2 (4), 376–379. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17601245 Copyright: © 2025 by the author. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Nuts About Leadership 2025, 2, 4 377 debates, its structure and tone suggest a response to the limitations of traditional, traitbased leadership models. It favors relational and adaptive paradigms. The book is organized into eight core chapters, supported by front matter and concluding inspirational reflections. The structure progresses logically from foundational concepts to personal and institutional application. The Introduction poses the question “Why inclusion and why now?” and defines the term while linking its urgency to global change. Chapter 1 clarifies inclusion and its contemporary importance. Chapter 2 examines the interplay of inclusion, productivity, and diversity, including psychological diversity and personal “backdrop stories.” Chapter 3 explores leadership paradigms and the author’s personal relationship with the concept. Chapter 4 addresses barriers to inclusion. It covers emotions, empathy, power, trust, unconscious biases (including Project Implicit), cognitive dissonance, privilege, and belonging. Chapter 5 frames inclusion within personal development. It touches on memory, growth mindset, and learned optimism. Chapter 6 shifts to organizational contexts. It introduces the Institutional Inclusion Barometer and a development strategy. Chapter 7 offers forward-looking reflections on designing inclusive futures. The final section, Chapter 8, draws inspiration from Japanese culture, the Athena Doctrine, resilience, change management, Gestalt, coaching, mentoring, situational leadership, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and data science. The book has three central themes: inclusion as a psychological state, diversity as a performance driver, and leadership as relational and adaptive. They shape a cohesive argument. Kadilar asserts that inclusion enables individuals to feel seen, safe, and valued, which in turn unlocks potential. The inclusion of unconscious bias and cognitive dissonance in Chapter 4 reflects a sophisticated understanding of human behavior, while the growth mindset focus in Chapter 5 aligns with established psychological frameworks. The argument is strengthened by its progression from individual awareness to systemic change, with the Institutional Inclusion Barometer serving as a potential diagnostic tool. The use of personal reflection (e.g., “A Memory”) and diverse inspirations (e.g., Japanese culture, situational leadership) adds depth and accessibility. Kadilar’s work contributes meaningfully to leadership literature by integrating personal development with organizational strategy. The Institutional Inclusion Barometer and development strategy represent practical innovations, while the emphasis on psychological diversity broadens traditional DEI discourse. The methodology appears reflective and narrative-driven, drawing on the author’s lived experience and global exposure. While this lends authenticity and relatability, it may limit empirical rigor. The writing style is engaging and motivational, suitable for practitioners, though the dense list of topics in Chapter 4 risks overwhelming readers. Overall, the book excels in accessibility and inspiration. The book shares thematic overlap with leadership texts emphasizing empathy and belonging, but distinguishes itself through its multicultural lens and institutional focus. Its inclusion of Japanese cultural insights and situational leadership sets it apart from more Western-centric works. The blend of personal memoir, psychological insight, and organizational tools creates a unique hybrid approach. This hybridity is analytically potent: Kadilar refuses to treat inclusion as a soft-skill add-on, instead embedding it within measurable institutional architecture. Previewed in Chapter 6, the Institutional Inclusion Barometer functions as both a diagnostic dashboard and change lever. It invites organizations to quantify “felt safety” and “perceived voice” alongside traditional KPIs. By pairing this tool with situational-leadership theory, Kadilar demonstrates that inclusive behaviors are not fixed traits but adaptive responses calibrated to context, team maturity, and cultural nuance. Nuts About Leadership 2025, 2, 4 378 The Japanese cultural thread, introduced in the final inspirational chapter, is more than ornamental. Concepts such as wa (harmony) and kaizen (continuous improvement) quietly reframe Western individualism, showing how collective humility can accelerate psychological safety faster than top-down mandates. This East–West synthesis counters the Anglocentric bias of most DEI frameworks and offers globally distributed teams a shared vocabulary for belonging. For practitioners, especially executives, coaches, and HR leaders, the book offers a roadmap for shaping inclusive cultures. The Institutional Inclusion Barometer could serve as a diagnostic framework, while growth mindset and empathy exercises support individual development. Researchers may find value in testing the barometer’s efficacy or exploring the intersection of psychological diversity and team performance. The Contemporary Leader is a thoughtful, experience-rich contribution to leadership studies. Its strength lies in its humane, reflective tone and its bridging of personal and systemic change. While empirical depth is limited, its practical orientation and global perspective make it highly relevant. I recommend it to business leaders, organizational consultants, and leadership coaches seeking to cultivate inclusion in dynamic environments. By modelling vulnerability from the authorial podium, the book enacts the very inclusion it preaches, collapsing the distance between expert and reader and inviting practitioners to author their own inclusive narratives. Nuts About Leadership 2025, 2, 4 379 Reference 1 Riza Kadilar, The Contemporary Leader: The Value of Inclusion in Successful Leadership (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2025), ISBN 978-1-394-27637-0 (hardback). 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