S2-Ep53: Leading through Difference: Key Skills from the ILA Board Chair

Guest: Mike Hardy, ILA Board Chair

The real leadership crisis isn’t about performance. It’s about how we handle differences.

In this powerful episode, Professor Mike Hardy, Founding Director of the Centre for Peace & Security, joins host Maureen Metcalf to explore the defining leadership challenge of our time: Pluralism vs. Prejudice.

It’s critical: even if your organization only operates in one city, odds are your team will have people from different generations, family cultures, and hometowns…much less religions and ethnicities. Bonding them all into one cohesive team is essential.

Mike makes a compelling case that the future of leadership depends on moving beyond identity to behavior-based inclusion, and calls leaders to rethink how they respond to difference.

Here's what Mike and Maureen cover:

1. How a leader’s behavior, not identity, builds real trust;
2. The dance between pluralism and prejudice in today’s workplace; and
3. Why inclusion often fails…and what makes it work.

 

Produced in partnership with the International Leadership Association: https://ilaglobalnetwork.org/.

 

Enjoy a hearty Hardy binge with these other episodes featuring Mike:

- The Accidental Peacemaker with Mike’s friend Steve Killelea

- 11 Steps to Help You Heal Divides

- Peace through Better Leaders

For daily wisdom from our guests, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

 

RESOURCES:  

Mike’s Centre for Peace & Security is online at https://bit.ly/CentreForPeace.

 

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here. 

 

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

 

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here. 

 

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OUR PODCAST TEAM:  

Host & Executive Producer: Maureen Metcalf

Editor & Executive Producer: Dan Mushalko

Graphics Editor: Stacia Rogan

Booking Producer: Jenna Reik

 

CONNECT WITH US: 

YouTube: @InnovatingLeadership 

LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ILI-LinkedIn2 

Website: InnovativeLeadershipInstitute.com 

 

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating! 

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About Our Guest:  

Mike Hardy is the founding director of the Centre for Peace & Security at Coventry University. The Centre is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and experts whose work draws together issues such as conflict resolution and reconciliation, social identity, inequality and mobility, wealth and poverty, integration and pluralism, prejudice and discrimination, intergroup conflict and cooperation, the problem of civil rights and the politics of equality. Mike has been t