When It Comes to Inclusion, “We Aren’t Ready” Lacks Courage
By Vash Ebbadi-Cood (he/they), Founder & Principal Consultant, Endura Consulting
Two years ago, I resigned from an Executive Director role in protest.
I had spent years building the kind of career that looks good on paper. Governance experience, DEI credentials, a reputation as someone who could hold complexity and still get things done. I was the Executive Director responsible for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) work at a health authority. On paper, I was exactly the kind of leader who was supposed to make sure IDEA wasn't just a poster in the break room, or a rainbow lanyard during Pride.
And then a member of my team, someone doing precisely the work her role called for, was pushed out. Not because she had done anything that violated policy. Not because there was a finding of wrongdoing at work. She was removed because a small group of people complained, and the organization decided that managing the appearance of risk mattered more than standing behind the person who had been asked to do this work in the first place.
I have spent more than two years thinking about what happened, and what it taught me about courage, or the lack of it, in leadership.
The Phrase That Stops Everything
If you have worked in IDEA, equity, or any kind of systems change work, you have probably heard some version of "we aren't ready." It shows up disguised as caution. It sounds reasonable in the room. Nobody is against inclusion, they just think the timing is off, or the optics are complicated, or the organization needs to "manage this carefully."
I heard that phrase more times than I can count. What I have come to understand is that "we aren't ready" is rarely about readiness at all. It is about risk tolerance. And when leadership's risk tolerance for supporting equity work is lower than its risk tolerance for abandoning the people doing that work and the people that the work impacts most, we fail.
In the situation I am describing, a small number of complaints came in about my team member’s personal advocacy against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, activity entirely outside her job description, done on her own time, in her own voice. Rather than taking the time to understand what had actually happened, or applying the same due diligence the organization applied to every other kind of complaint, leadership moved in days to remove her from her role. There was no meaningful investigation. There was an apology letter written on her behalf, handed to her, with an expectation that she would post it publicly and take the blame.
I argued for a different path. I asked for the process the organization claimed to follow for any other complaint. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that this situation was different, and that keeping her in the role was no longer an option. I refused to be the one to remove her. A week later, I resigned.
Courage Isn't a Personality Trait, It's a Practice
I used to think courageous leadership was mostly about individual character. Some leaders have backbone, others don't. Two years out, I don't believe that anymore. Courage in IDEA work is a practice, and it is one that has to be built into decision-making structures well before a crisis hits, because when the pressure comes, and it will come, most organizations default to whatever protects them, not whatever is right.
The people who have the least structural power are often the ones asked to be the most courageous. They are expected to speak up, to advocate, to bring their whole selves to work, and then they are the first ones sacrificed when that same authenticity becomes inconvenient for the institution. That is not courage. That is exploitation dressed up as inclusion.
Real courageous leadership has to sit with the people who hold institutional power. It is the board member who asks why due process wasn't followed. It is the executive who says, out loud and in the room, that protecting the organization's image is not the same thing as protecting its people. It is the willingness to lose something, a relationship, a reputation, sometimes a job, in service of doing right by the people you are responsible for.
What I Have Learned Since
I don't have this all figured out. I still think about what I could have done differently, whether there was a version of that fight I could have won from the inside instead of walking away from it. But two years of sitting with this experience has left me with a few things I believe more firmly than I did before.
Courageous leadership matters in IDEA work, and it cannot be optional. It is the job of senior leaders and decision-makers to challenge the systems that produce harm, not simply to manage the fallout when harm becomes visible.
The work cannot sit solely with the people who carry lived experience. Their insight is essential, and organizations depend on it, but it is not fair, and it is not sustainable, to ask the people most affected by inequity to also be its primary defenders. That responsibility belongs to everyone with decision-making power, especially those who have the least personal risk in doing so.
And a boardroom or executive team that is not itself inclusive will never build an inclusive organization. You cannot delegate equity to a department and call the job done. Addressing the systems that produce marginalization takes intention, it takes momentum, it takes courage, it takes action, and it takes the discipline to sustain all of that long after the moment of crisis has passed.
I left that role because I could not, in good conscience, participate in what happened. I am still figuring out what comes next in this work, but I know this much: the organizations that will actually change are the ones willing to ask harder questions of themselves than "are we ready," and willing to act before the answer is forced on them by someone else's harm.
