70 CEO MONTHLY / 2021 CEO OF THE YEAR 18 ISSUE 10 2021 , Aug21195 Fostering Environments of Inclusivity and Understanding Mahogany Inclusion Partners, led by the ‘CEO of the Year, 2021’ for London in the United Kingdom, is the company creating spaces inwhich organisations can have tough conversations. By cultivating open, honest, and educational atmospheres, it allows its clients to grow and better themselves by learning what ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’ reallymean, operating with understanding and compassion as it does so. Mahogany Inclusion Partners strives to make the world a better, fairer, and more equal place. Fundamentally, this company works hard to improve the inclusivity of a client’s company’s internal structure, making it a more welcoming and healthier environment in which all employees are equally valued as part of the team despite different backgrounds and skillsets. In essence, Mahogany Inclusion Partners wishes to make it so that everyone has the opportunity to thrive. With the founder – Aggie Mutuma – having two decades of experience working for people’s welfare in national and global organisations, from Mothercare to McDonalds, she has been able to empower Mahogany Inclusion Partners with the core pillars of culture, value, and talent. This allows Mahogany Inclusion Partners to consistently show its clients the immediate and long-term benefits of creating inclusive environments. In short, everyone involved in a company feels supported and encouraged, both by their co-workers and by the managerial bodies above them; in turn, this results in better performance and results for leaders. The power of inclusion is prevalent everywhere in the corporate world, and when done right, it promises to adapt an organisation to withstand all the challenges of a changing future by ensuring that the staff behind it are well taken care of. Previously, since Mahogany Inclusion Partners have been working in inclusion and diversity training for so many years, it has encountered pushback from executives and higher ups who feel that diversity excludes them – specifically, for the most part, white men. Mahogany Inclusion Partners wishes to show them that in fact, it does include them. They too need to make a vested effort in educating and bettering themselves; no one is excluded from needing to learn and grow, and no one person can ever enter the corporate environment fully informed about the complex world of inclusion. This, Mahogany Inclusion Partners strives to show, should not be a daunting premise, but an exciting one. It wishes to encourage a genuine interest in learning how to make the corporate world more accessible for everyone, taking care to eradicate a ‘cookie cutter’ approach and instead implement methods of empathy, understanding, and tailor-made solutions that are developed around the specific company in question. Mahogany Inclusion Partners finds it incredibly important to get to know each business it works with, and therefore will always collaborate with its clients in order to understand the people, the processes, and existing culture. Aggie herself, of course, has been able to lead this team so well due to her own experience with inclusivity training. By showing in every seminar and training programme her own efficacy, and training each of her staff members to mirror her own ways of working, she creates a united front that focuses in on empowerment as a foundational tenant when working with her clientele. Essentially, her focus is always on doing right by people. She champions the idea of asking for permission, not forgiveness; Mahogany Inclusion Partners is a company that works hard to make the world a more inclusive place by fostering this environment in its client’s businesses too, showing them that taking the path of the most empathy is always the best way. When in doubt, Aggie encourages her clients to ask. It’s okay to not be sure of the correct action to take or thing to say, so when in that situation, she teaches an attitude of seeking that information, either by using recourses of – if appropriate – by asking the person. In this manner, she intends to show how important it is to be your authentic self and to feel like you can embody this authentic self in the workplace safely, knowing that in order to make
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