By Emma Sarro, PhD The conversation around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become a minefield. The acronym itself is now so politically charged that many organizations are stepping back, rethinking their strategies, or even eliminating their DEI initiatives altogether. What we’re left with is an eerie silence. Our own research shows that while 65% of organizations plan to continue the work, yet the path forward is anything but clear. This leaves leaders grappling with a critical question: If we cancel the words, does the need for the work actually go away? What happens if we stop the training, disband the teams, and erase the terminology from our corporate vocabulary? In the short term, the impact might be negligible. Relieving already overloaded employees from another mandatory training might even be met with a quiet sense of relief. But over the long term, the effects are likely to be significant and damaging. Why? Because DEI initiatives, when done right, aren’t only about social justice or reaching targets. They’re a direct response to the fundamental, universal nature of the human brain. You can change the label, but you can’t change the neuroscience. Ignoring these core brain processes doesn’t make them disappear; it simply leaves your organization vulnerable to their downsides, impacting everything from profit and innovation to talent retention. There are three foundational concepts about the brain that demonstrate why the work remains a business imperative. If you have a brain, you have bias Many leaders mistakenly believe two things: that mitigating bias is exclusively a “DEI thing,” and that their years of experience allow them to “trust their gut” on important decisions. The truth, however, is if you have a brain, you have bias. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts our brains use to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information we face daily. These shortcuts evolved to help our ancestors survive, allowing for rapid decisions with limited data. In the modern workplace, however, these same shortcuts can lead to costly mistakes, flawed strategies, and overlooked talent. The problem is, you can’t simply ignore that biases exist. Since these processes are largely unconscious, making people aware of their biases isn’t enough to change their behavior.  Because these biases are engrained into our cognitive systems, mitigating them requires science-backed strategies that focus not on shaming or blaming, but on improving the quality of all decisions, from hiring and promotions to product development and market strategy. NLI’s SEEDS Model® organizes the over 150 cognitive biases scientists have studied, and underpins our solutions and strategies for reducing unconscious bias. If you are not actively including, you are likely unintentionally excluding Let’s imagine you’ve assembled a “dream team” for a critical project. On paper, they have the perfect amount of diversity, with experts from every relevant field. But in meetings, a familiar pattern emerges. A few voices dominate the conversation, innovative ideas are met with polite but dismissive responses, and team members who challenge the consensus are subtly sidelined. The project stalls, along with the team’s collective intelligence. What went wrong? The team had diversity, but it lacked inclusion—a critical distinction.  Neuroscience research reveals that the brain treats social threats, like feeling excluded, similarly to physical threats. When employees feel excluded, their brains trigger a threat response that impairs intelligent thought, reduces problem-solving ability, and stifles self-regulation. The critical takeaway is that if you are not actively including, you are likely unintentionally excluding. Simply walking into a room and talking to only one or two people can send unintended signals of exclusion to others. To counteract this, leaders must be intentional about sending social rewards. NLI’s SCARF® Model— which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness—provides a powerful framework for understanding the five key domains of social experience that the brain is sensitive to. By intentionally sending positive signals across these domains—for example, by giving people a sense of control, or autonomy, over their work or ensuring processes are transparent and equitable, or fair—leaders can create an environment where everyone feels valued and is able to contribute their best thinking. The Power of Psychological Safety You can have a diverse and inclusive team, but one more crucial element is needed for high performance: psychological safety—the shared belief that it’s okay to take interpersonal risks like asking questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging the status quo without fear of punishment or humiliation. Contrary to popular belief, psychological safety isn’t about being “warm and fuzzy” or avoiding conflict. In fact, the highest-performing teams often experience productive friction—robust healthy debate. They operate with high standards in an environment with low interpersonal threat. A landmark study by Amy Edmondson found that the best-performing nursing teams reported making the most errors. They weren’t actually more mistake-prone; they were simply more willing to talk about their mistakes. This openness created a cycle of learning and continuous improvement that ultimately led to better patient outcomes. At its core, speaking up or challenging another is a risk calculation in the brain. If a past experience—either personal or observed—has taught an employee that challenging a decision leads to embarrassment or career-limiting consequences, their brain will flag that action as a threat, and they’ll choose silence. Creating psychological safety is about intentionally sending signals of social safety that buffer against this perceived risk, making people feel secure enough to be vulnerable and share their unique perspectives. The work remains The labels we use will continue to evolve, but the foundation of the way our brain works is unchanging. Our brains are inherently biased, highly sensitive to social triggers, and evolved to avoid interpersonal risk. The most successful leaders will be those who understand that fostering a culture of better decisions, smarter teams, and healthier debate is not an optional initiative—it is the essential work of modern leadership. To explore the science in greater detail and discover the brain-based frameworks your organization can use to drive performance, download the latest white paper from the NeuroLeadership Institute, DEI: Canceling the words doesn’t cancel the need. To

NLI recently launched an assessment that asks participants to rate their organizations’ leaders on the key behaviors of growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability (the Leadership GPA). Early results suggest that leaders struggle the most with embracing growth mindset and the least with accountability. Specifically, leaders face challenges in sharing mistakes, encouraging healthy debate, and challenging others without conflict. For the past year, the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI) has been exploring what we call the Leadership GPA — a simple yet powerful framework built on growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability. When leaders cultivate these three critical skills, they create the conditions for high performance across teams and organizations. As a research-driven organization, we wanted to know: How do employees perceive their organization’s performance in each of these areas? In late May 2025, we launched NLI’s Leadership GPA Assessment — a five-minute assessment that asks participants to rate how leaders in their organization typically demonstrate behaviors tied to each component of the GPA.  The assessment is still open, but we’ve already obtained some intriguing results. On average, participants rated their organization’s Leadership GPA at 2.61, the equivalent of a B- to C+ on a standard 4.0 scale. While this points to room for overall improvement, a closer look at the individual components reveals where organizations are struggling most. Growth mindset Growth mindset is the belief that skills can be improved over time, rather than being fixed at birth. People who embrace a growth mindset focus on improving rather than proving themselves. They respond more productively to feedback, adapt flexibly to setbacks, and view challenges as opportunities to grow. To our surprise, growth mindset scored the lowest of the three GPA components, with an average of 2.51. This result was unexpected, given that embracing a growth mindset is a well-known driver of beneficial workplace outcomes, and many organizations have invested in strategies to encourage it. NLI’s GROW: The Neuroscience of Growth Mindset is one of our most popular solutions, with numerous success stories from clients who’ve embedded growth mindset behaviors at scale. A closer look at the data points to one habit that challenges leaders the most: “encouraging people to share their mistakes, even when it’s uncomfortable.” This habit received the lowest average score of all growth mindset behaviors (2.38). And it makes sense. Admitting mistakes can feel like a direct threat to our status — our desire to be respected and seen as competent. Most of us would rather showcase our successes and quietly bury our failures. But mistakes are essential to learning, and when leaders share their own missteps, they normalize that discomfort for others. Admitting errors also builds a sense of relatedness with others. In fact, by saying, “I messed up — and here’s what I learned,” leaders often earn more respect, not less. Psychological safety Survey participants scored their leaders slightly higher on psychological safety, with an average score of 2.57. Psychological safety is the shared belief that people can speak up with ideas, concerns, questions, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. Among the specific habits of psychological safety, leaders struggled the most with “making it clear that robust debate is critical for achieving excellence.” In fact, this particular habit scored the lowest (2.29) of any in the survey. Leaders also found it difficult to “challenge people without creating conflict,” another behavior tied to psychologically safe teams.  A common misconception is that psychological safety means being nice — avoiding tension, smoothing over disagreements, and keeping interactions comfortable. But psychological safety isn’t about avoiding conflict. Teams with true psychological safety aren’t afraid to engage in robust, healthy debate to arrive at the best decisions and outcomes. For leaders, this means creating an environment where everyone feels safe to challenge ideas, question assumptions, or point out problems, with nobody viewing these behaviors as personal attacks.  In collaboration with noted psychological safety expert Dr. Amy Edmondson, NLI developed TEAM: The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety to help organizations establish an environment where discomfort doesn’t derail progress — it empowers it. Accountability We’ve been hearing from clients that many organizations are struggling with accountability, so it was interesting that survey participants rated their leaders the highest in this area, with a score of 2.76. An area for improvement was “reminding people of the purpose of any task” (2.66), an important step for leaders to spark motivation in their employees. While we trust the survey’s accuracy, our client interactions suggest a potential gap between perception and reality when it comes to accountability. Many employees think they and their leaders are being accountable, but are they really? And are they practicing punitive accountability (which relies on fear, blame, and punishment) or proactive accountability (where employees take true ownership of their obligations)? NLI’s newest solution, DELIVER: The Neuroscience of Accountability, equips organizations with three essential habits for building proactive accountability: syncing expectations, driving with purpose, and owning the impact. This approach ensures accountability is not merely a perception but a deeply embedded practice. Boost your organization’s leadership GPA Speaking of perception, another interesting finding from the GPA assessment is that different roles within organizations sometimes rated Leadership GPA differently. For example, founders and co-founders of companies scored their overall Leadership GPA 0.8-0.9 points higher than other roles, such as senior leaders, managers, or independent contributors. This result suggests that the highest-ranking officers in an organization may be overestimating their leaders’ effectiveness. If your organization isn’t making the honor roll just yet, there’s no need to worry. Elevating leadership effectiveness is within reach, and the key is focusing on the right priorities, rather than trying to improve everything all at once. By honing in on the three most critical areas — growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability — leaders can strengthen their skills where improvement is needed most. Over time, these habits will become deeply ingrained, transforming their organization’s leadership and entire culture. About the GPA Assessment: The assessment includes 12 questions (four each from the areas of growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability)

A common challenge for organizations is getting people to take responsibility for their work instead of deferring or shifting blame, a critical element in cultures of accountability. A recent study suggests that our sense of responsibility, and the brain activity that supports it, can emerge from having a sense of control or agency in our work, as opposed to merely following orders.  These results reveal a tangible way for leaders to foster a sense of responsibility for all individuals, even in hierarchical organizations.  If you’re a leader, how many times have you seen the following scenario play out? You give an otherwise dedicated team member an important task, only for them to work slowly, deliver subpar results, and then shrug their shoulders or shift blame. You’re confused. Aren’t they a high performer? Why don’t they take responsibility? Recent research offers a possibility for what might be going on. In a newly published brain imaging study, researchers showed that the act of merely following someone else’s orders, or not having ownership of our decisions, reduces our sense of responsibility for the actions that follow. In other words, how responsible we feel, stems from having a “stake in the game,” or some degree of ownership in the work.  This study builds on a growing body of work into how accountability happens in the workplace. Taking responsibility for the work done and the impact made is one of the characteristics of accountability, a concept that, while not new to the organizational landscape, is a current challenge facing many. While 91% of managers and employees say accountability is important at work, 97% of managers (as shared in a recent NLI Leadership Think Tank) say they struggle to hold their teams accountable. Everyone knows it matters, but almost no one feels confident implementing accountability.  The challenge is that in this new era of working, the formal systems organizations have historically relied on, may not work like they used to, primarily because we have learned that there are better ways to create accountability and now we need to revise the systems. For example, the common idea that holding employees accountable for their actions with performance evaluations, employment contracts, or disciplinary procedures is an effective means to help them improve, reach performance standards, and regulate their behavior, lacks one critical component — the individual’s belief or perception of being accountable. So, it may not be as simple as sending a list of tasks to a team member and expecting results. That’s because people won’t choose to be more responsible just because we tell them to. They need to feel responsible first. A sense of control fosters responsibility in the brain Research has suggested that there are several factors which will increase the likelihood someone will take responsibility for their actions or decisions. One of these factors is whether we believe we have a sense of agency or control over our actions. Today, few managers and employees report having such control. Only 21% of employees feel their performance metrics — which often define accountability — are within their control. And managers also claim they have “limited to no” agency or control to hold others accountable.   Prior research has shown that when we lose our sense of control, such as when we’re obeying orders or being told to do something, this immediately reduces our perception of responsibility. We feel less responsible for an outcome if someone else, especially with a higher status or rank, told us to do it. This poses a major challenge to organizations, especially those that are structured hierarchically. If individuals, whether it’s employees or managers, feel a lack of agency or control, they will also feel less responsible for their actions and shift blame to others. A recent study further explored this question by looking to see what happens in the brain when we don’t have a sense of control over decisions, especially when being faced with immoral or difficult decisions. Published in Cerebral Cortex Journal, the study tested a sense of agency by examining both free and coerced choices. Participants were either given free choice to inflict a mild shock to another individual, which added a factor of morality to the decision, or coerced to follow the test giver’s orders to inflict the shock.  As expected, participants felt less responsible for their actions when they were merely “following orders” than those that had “free choice” over their actions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging supported the behavioral impact. Researchers found that activity within the frontal gyrus, precuneus, and lateral occipital cortes, regions linked to our sense of control and decision-making, differed across the groups.  When individuals had “free choice” over their decisions, these brain areas were more highly engaged — people felt a sense of control and seemingly took a more active role in their decision, measured through the time it took to make a decision and engagement of brain areas that are associated with conscious decision-making. This fostered their sense of responsibility, and aligns with earlier work showing a similar effect — having a sense of control makes people feel “fully responsible” for their actions. On the other hand, when individuals were merely “following orders,” these brain areas were quiet and people acted almost immediately with no time to consider their actions — they did not actively consider their decisions as measured through a lack of engagement in decision making brain regions. This lack of brain activity acts to distance people, mentally, from the decision and responsibility for the outcomes, and aligns with work showing that participants report “not being responsible” when not having a choice.  Creating accountability through ownership These results suggest that getting to responsibility begins with a sense of agency. If leaders want their teams to be more accountable, they first need to increase their teams’ sense of control or ownership of their work. Any decision made towards their goals will then be made with a felt sense of responsibility, and they will be more likely to take that responsibility when

Coworkers you can count on share three key behaviors, which can be learned by anyone.

Many organizations mistakenly equate psychological safety with being nice, getting your way, or letting performance slide.

Learn about the three essential priorities for modern leaders with NLI’s new Leadership GPA quiz and webinar series.

Growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability must work together for effective leadership.

The latest article in the NeuroLeadership Journal explains the neuroscience behind fostering a culture of proactive accountability.