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 in which 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’ really mean, 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 this possible, the environment must first make itself safe. This is the reasoning behind starting with changing the company. People can change on an individual level, if given the right environment to be able to do so, but theory must always lead to action, and so Aggie’s efforts target those stakeholders with the power to make the most change in order to fuel this passion for altering the culture for the better.

Moreover, Aggie is slowly but surely becoming more of a going concern in the industry in which she works, and embodying more and more of her own tenants as she does so. Delivering her talks and educational work as her most authentic self in order to inspire others to do the same has allowed her to truly flourish, and to ensure that her staff do too, carefully curating a space in which people can talk openly and honestly with each other, discussing theory, resources, and ideas that lead to actionable results.

One of the most important facets of Mahogany Inclusion Partners’ work, therefore, is this notion of knowing you can do anything. However, it also encourages clients and their teams to truly think on whether they are the best people for the job, enabling them to have the courage and grace to hand over the reigns to someone else when that individual is more suited to the task at hand. Whether this is a specific role, a job on a task list, a promotion, or something else entirely, fostering this mentality allows professionals to think of the health of their team and value the different skills and viewpoints of the co-workers around them.

Valuing partnership, compassion, good intent, and meeting a client halfway, its staff lead by example by showing how an exemplary inclusive culture can make a business thrive. Furthermore, each team member is valued for their specific skills and perspectives, and it is their dedication and tenacity that allowed them to pull through the pandemic, and their hard work helping organisations ruminate on the murder of George Floyd and how that tragic loss of life is emblematic of a wider problem. With powerful conversations sparking like never before, Mahogany Inclusion Partners is the guiding hand behind these, leading the world towards a bright future as it continues offering various training programmes and lectures, providing people a safe space in which to learn, grow, and improve.

For business enquiries, contact Aggie Mutuma at Mahogany Inclusion Partners via their website – mahoganyinclusionpartners.com