Watch the recording of the webinar:
Listen to the recording via our podcast:
View the Slides:
Alternative download (PDF)
The premise of this session is direct: organizations don't reach their full potential unless everyone in them is engaged in the work of improvement. That's not a slogan, and it's not a policy framing. It's an operational constraint. The ideas you don't hear, the problems people don't surface, the disagreements that stay unspoken — those are the gap between the performance you have and the performance you could have.
Dr. William Harvey opens the session by pointing back to a phrase he picked up from Tracy and Ernie Richardson, longtime Toyota practitioners and authors of The Toyota Engagement Equation: everybody, every day, engaged. William's framing is that he treats this as a verb. How do you actually engage everybody every day, in your leader standard work, in your meetings, in the way you ask questions, in the systems you design? That's the question this webinar walks through.
The session is grounded in three lenses: lessons from the U.S. Marine Corps where William served, lessons from operations leadership at Michelin, and lessons from teaching at the University of Cincinnati. The result is a perspective that's neither corporate-glossy nor academic-distant. It's practical and direct, with William's willingness to call out specific things — including things he's done himself — that work against engagement.
William opens with a pattern most CI leaders recognize. Organizations describe inclusion programs by stacking up business outcomes — twice the revenue, higher performance, more innovation, better business results. All of those claims are supported by research. None of them tend to land emotionally with the audience.
His diagnosis: the business case approach turns people into tokens. "We're doing this because it's good for the business" implicitly asks the included person to prove the business case is true. As a disabled veteran, William has experienced being put into that role — speak for all veterans, represent the demographic, justify the inclusion. He doesn't want to be a token. Most people don't.
Research backs up the reaction. The framing that produces the most belonging, the least sense of being stereotyped, and the strongest sense of being valued for actual contribution is the simplest one: it's the right thing to do. Not the fair thing to do — that opens an ethical argument the workplace doesn't need to have. Not the good-for-business thing to do — that turns the included person into instrumental value. Just: it's the right thing to do.
The practical implication is small but it changes a lot. When leaders frame inclusion as a moral or business calculation, the framing itself undermines the goal. When leaders frame it as the default — what we do because it's right — people stop having to defend their inclusion and start contributing.
William served in the Marine Corps and uses three specific lessons from that experience to make the operational case for inclusion.
Every Marine is a rifleman. The phrase is gendered language William flags — but the underlying principle is what matters. From the moment a recruit steps off the bus at Parris Island, the Marine Corps drills in a single shared identity. Junior or senior, officer or enlisted, every Marine is a rifleman. The shared identity creates instant connection across decades. Two Marines who have never met before, who served thirty years apart, recognize each other as Marines first.
The contrast in most organizations is striking. We say "that plant," "that department," "that country" — language of separation. Marines say "we." The language reveals what people actually identify with. If a leader keeps saying "we" while teams keep saying "they," the leader's vision hasn't actually been adopted by the team.
The Harry Potter problem. William makes the point through the four-house structure of Hogwarts — Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin. The houses give students identity and belonging, but they also create artificial division. The students don't recognize they're all Hogwarts until something forces them to. The same dynamic plays out in organizations across plants, divisions, departments, and business units.
A photo of four U.S. Army soldiers from different units illustrates the same thing visually. Different uniforms, different unit affiliations, immediately legible as different. When stress hits, those visually distinct teams default to protecting their immediate group rather than the broader organization. The protection of "us" over "them" can be functional in a Marine fireteam — but it's destructive when "us" is a department and "them" is the rest of the company.
Standards stay non-negotiable. A common pushback when organizations talk about expanding inclusion is "we'd have to lower our standards." William's direct response: the Marine Corps has the highest standards of any organization in the U.S. and integrated women into combat positions in 2013 without lowering them. The question isn't "how do we lower the standard so more people can participate?" The question is "how do we include everyone and keep — or raise — the standard?" Reframing the question changes what becomes possible.
He pulls up the example of a 24-year-old lieutenant who became the first woman to lead an infantry platoon after the integration policy. The infantry officer course is one of the most physically and mentally demanding training programs in the U.S. military. The standards stayed exactly where they were. She met them. The system that adapted was the policy, not the standard.
William's framing for peer accountability is one of the more practical takeaways in the session.
He asks the audience: when accountability for standards in your organization happens, is it leader-to-team or peer-to-peer? In most organizations, it's leader-to-team. Leaders are the enforcement layer.
In the Marine Corps, he argues, peer-to-peer accountability is the dominant driver. Marines hold each other to the standard because the standard is internalized and shared. The structure of training, the goals, and the team-based incentives all reinforce that the team is responsible for itself. Escalating to a senior leader is the exception, not the default.
The mechanism that produces this isn't culture in the abstract — it's specifically the way goals are set. In the Marine Corps, William's framing is that he was never given a goal he could complete alone. Every goal was a team goal. In corporate America, the opposite is usually true. People are given individual goals that produce individual rewards, which creates immediate division and erodes the shared identity that makes peer accountability possible.
His challenge to the audience: experiment with team-only goals for 2025. See whether unit cohesion shifts. The hypothesis is testable.
The most direct part of the session, where William explicitly says: get rid of belt systems. Get rid of certifications. They create unnecessary division.
The starting point for his thinking was a conversation with Tracy and Ernie Richardson. He asked what kind of belt system Toyota had used when they worked there. Their answer: they didn't have one. The organization most often cited as the gold standard of continuous improvement didn't use a belt structure to organize its practitioners.
What does Toyota use instead? William points to Mike Rother's Toyota Kata work: there are coaches and there are learners. Or, more precisely, practitioners and coach-practitioners. Either you're doing the work or you're coaching others while still doing the work yourself. There's no end state. You don't graduate.
His personal reflection sat with the audience. He pursued black belt and master black belt certifications. He got them. And once he had them, he stopped practicing as actively. He shifted to coaching mode because it was easier and he was good at it. It wasn't until that conversation with Tracy and Ernie that he realized he'd traded the discipline of being a learner for the comfort of being credentialed.
The other operational problem with belt systems: they ration improvement capability. William tells a story from earlier in his career about asking his plant manager to send him for black belt training. The answer was that the plant had already sent two people that year, so he'd have to wait until next year. He was being told, in effect, "you're not allowed to improve our business yet." That moment crystallized for him what was wrong with the structure. Improvement isn't a scarce credential to be allocated. It's a daily practice anyone should be able to start at any time.
His proposed substitute: practitioner and coach-practitioner. No colored belts. No tiered hierarchy. Either you're doing the work, or you're coaching others while continuing to do the work yourself.
A small, specific story William tells that does outsized work. He had been running continuous improvement teams for years, and as part of building team identity, he'd routinely create custom team T-shirts. Different team, different design, different shirt. He thought he was doing a good thing — visible team identity, marketing, energy.
A friend at the same company pulled him aside. Over those years, William had given out hundreds of shirts. The friend's group had never received a single one. The friend's words: "I don't feel like I'm part of the team because I don't have a T-shirt."
William's first reflex was the wrong one — why would a T-shirt matter that much? But the question itself was the diagnosis. The T-shirt didn't matter as a piece of fabric. It mattered as a marker of belonging. By creating shirts that belonged to specific teams, he had created visible signals of who was in and who was out. Without intending to, he had built the same Hogwarts-house dynamic he was warning against in the session.
His revised practice: company shirts only, with the company name on them. Not team shirts. Not project shirts. The signal of belonging is the organization, not the subgroup.
He extends this to a hiring practice he recommends. When a new employee starts, have their company shirt or polo waiting on day one. The most common pattern at the companies he's worked at — including ones with extensive branded gear for existing employees — is that new hires don't get any. The visible signal on day one is "you're new and you're not part of this yet." The simple fix changes that signal.
William surfaces specific phrases he's said himself, or heard others say, that exclude people without anyone intending to.
"My most important holiday is..." — once said in a small group meeting, where he realized as the words came out that he was framing one tradition as universally important when it wasn't. He pulled the leader aside afterward to flag it.
"That is so gay." Inappropriate, and the alternatives are easy.
"Oh, no one here is disabled." A statement that erases the people who are.
"I know you have kids to care for." An assumption about family structure that may not apply.
His framework for what to say instead is the THINK acronym — true, helpful, inspiring, necessary, kind. If the answer to those questions is yes, it's worth saying. If it's not, it's probably not.
His honest note: people committing to this work will still mess up. He's used words he no longer uses, but it took years to fully drop them. The point isn't perfection. The point is direction — toward language that includes more people more of the time, with grace for the gaps.
The most operationally useful section for CI leaders. William grounds engagement in research from William Kahn (1990), which identified three conditions that need to be true for someone to be psychologically engaged in their work.
Is the work meaningful to the person doing it? Both in the present and in the trajectory toward where they want their career to go. Work assigned without that meaning may get done, but it doesn't get the person's full effort.
Is it safe to be the person's real self? This is psychological safety territory — can people show up authentically without facing consequences for it, whether obvious (exclusion from the group) or subtle (passed over for promotions for reasons they can't quite identify)?
Does the person have the availability and health to engage? Not just time. Health. Mental health. Family circumstances. When someone is sick or someone they love is sick, the work can't get full attention regardless of how meaningful or psychologically safe it is.
William's challenge to the audience: think of a time you felt disengaged at work. Was it because one of those three was missing? In the audiences he's run this exercise with, no one has ever said "no, none of those." The framework holds up against lived experience.
William offers a four-part frame, drawing on conversations with Deondra Wardelle and on Mike Rother's work on deliberate practice.
Set clear objectives. Inclusion strategy starts at the leadership level with a defined direction. What is the organization actually trying to achieve? Without that, distributed efforts can't align.
Focus your efforts. William notes that the DEI team at Michelin has done well by focusing on a few critical things rather than trying to address everything at once. The discipline of focus is what makes the work tractable.
Get feedback early and often. Talk to people across the organization. The 10 team members across 250 in the U.S. that Michelin's DEI team supports work because they're embedded enough to surface what's actually happening, not what's happening from a corporate distance.
Make consequences known. In some organizations the consequences are legally defined. In others they're internal. Either way, the consequences for not following the standards have to be clear and consistent.
His personal practice on the deliberate inclusion side comes from Deondra: at conferences, deliberately seek out people on the edges of the room. Invite them into conversations. Ask different questions than the standard work questions. William mentions that asking conference attendees about their hobbies — rather than their roles — once produced a 35-minute conversation with three strangers about antique collecting. The conversation never happens if the question stays at "what do you do?"
The Q&A surfaced a common framing question: how do you balance psychological safety and accountability?
Mark's reframe in the discussion is worth lifting because it shifts the question. Psychological safety and accountability aren't on opposite ends of a spectrum that needs balancing. They aren't in tension at all. Healthy psychological safety produces more accountability, not less, because candid feedback flows in both directions. Leaders give candid feedback to employees who fall short of standards. Employees give candid feedback to leaders about whether the standards make sense. Both are forms of candor, and both depend on psychological safety being real.
Tim Clark's four stages of psychological safety give a useful structure here. Inclusion safety. Learner safety. Contributor safety. Challenger safety. Without the first three, the fourth — being able to challenge the status quo — won't happen, and that's where the operational value lives.
William's complement: people involve people in setting the standards in the first place, and then accountability becomes natural. If the standard was set together, holding the standard isn't punishment — it's enforcement of an agreement everyone made.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to what William described.
KaiNexus makes ideas, problems, and improvements visible from anyone in the organization, not just from credentialed practitioners. The infrastructure removes the bottleneck that belt systems create. A frontline employee with a useful observation has the same path into the system as a senior leader with a strategic initiative.
The platform tracks impact, follow-up, and outcomes, which closes the futility loop William described in passing during the Q&A. People speak up when speaking up reliably leads to action. KaiNexus is the layer that makes "reliably leads to action" actually true at organizational scale.
It also surfaces patterns leaders can't see otherwise. Which teams are contributing? Which aren't? Where is participation thinning out, and what's correlated with that pattern? The visibility lets leaders address inclusion gaps as operational problems with diagnostics, not as cultural problems with vague frustration.
If your organization is trying to engage everybody every day but doesn't have the infrastructure to make speaking up worthwhile, the gap isn't intent. It's the system. That's the gap KaiNexus is built to close.
Dr. William Harvey is an experienced operations leader with extensive background in chemical processing, manufacturing, and operational excellence. He oversees multiple sites at Michelin while leading strategic planning and continuous improvement work, and is starting his eighth year of teaching marketing, finance, and management at the University of Cincinnati. He holds certifications in change management, quality leadership, operational excellence, team building, and the DiSC model, and a doctorate in educational leadership. William is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose work focuses on inclusive leadership, engagement, and the connection between culture and operational performance.
What does "inclusive excellence" mean in a continuous improvement context?
It means engaging everybody, every day, in the work of improvement — drawing on Tracy and Ernie Richardson's framing from The Toyota Engagement Equation. The connection to enterprise excellence is operational: organizations don't reach their potential when ideas, observations, and challenges from large parts of the workforce never surface. Inclusive excellence is treating engagement as the lever that unlocks performance, not as a separate program running alongside the improvement work.
Why doesn't the standard business case for inclusion land well?
Because the framing asks the included person to justify their inclusion through business returns, which turns them into instrumental value rather than a person contributing to the work. The framing that lands best in research and in practice is the simplest one: it's the right thing to do. That neutrality removes the burden of proving the case and lets people focus on contributing.
Can you maintain high standards while expanding inclusion?
Yes. The U.S. Marine Corps integrated women into combat positions in 2013 without lowering its standards — among the highest in the U.S. military. The right question isn't "how do we lower the standard so more people can participate?" It's "how do we include everyone and keep or raise the standard?" Reframing the question changes what becomes possible.
Why does Dr. Harvey argue against belt systems and certifications?
Two reasons. First, they create unnecessary division — practitioners get categorized by belt color rather than by what they're actually doing in the work. Second, they ration improvement capability — organizations limit how many people can be trained, which sends the message that improvement is a scarce credential rather than a daily practice. His proposed substitute, drawn from Toyota Kata: practitioner and coach-practitioner. Either you're doing the work, or you're coaching others while continuing to do the work yourself.
How can leaders engage everybody every day in practice?
Set clear objectives at the leadership level. Focus on a few critical things rather than trying to address everything at once. Get feedback early and often by being embedded with the people doing the work. Make consequences for not following the standards clear and consistent. And in daily practice, ask different questions — not just about work, but about what people care about, where they came from, what they bring to the team that isn't visible in their job description.
How does this connect to psychological safety?
Psychological safety is one of the three conditions Kahn's research identified for genuine engagement: is the work meaningful, is it safe to be your real self, and do you have the availability and health to do the work? Without psychological safety, people can't show up authentically, can't admit mistakes, can't challenge the status quo — which means the improvement work doesn't get the candor and contribution it needs. Inclusion and psychological safety reinforce each other.
Are psychological safety and accountability in tension?
No. Healthy psychological safety produces more accountability, not less, because candid feedback flows in both directions — leaders to employees, employees to leaders. The reframe Mark Graban offers in the session: when people are involved in setting the standards in the first place, holding the standard becomes enforcement of an agreement everyone made, not a top-down enforcement of someone else's expectation.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy