Inclusive Leaders’ Voices: Why I Created This Podcast
Christiana Ekpete
Role:
Senior Specialist Lead, PSD Scotland
Christiana is a registered nurse by profession and recently held the post of Senior Specialist Lead in the Leading to Change team. She has acquired skills and knowledge in human resources, adult nursing, public health and health promotion, case management, spiritual care, and healthcare management in Health and Social Care. Christiana has a strong commitment towards staff and student wellbeing at work as well as workplace health promotion, development, and education. She is privileged to utilise her experiences to champion candidate-centred recruitment, developing resources which uphold the tenets of the National Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy in developing a model for international recruitment, and offering reflective training and practice, whilst supporting her team in the day-to-day decision making of the project.
Christiana enjoys family time, travelling, singing, and supporting charities to combat period poverty in her native community.
I created Inclusive Leaders’ Voices because leadership is often treated as neutral — even when lived experience shows it isn’t.
Before I ever used the language of inclusive leadership, I experienced its absence. Early in my career, I sat in rooms where important decisions were being made, yet the voices shaping them were remarkably similar. On paper, inclusion was present — policies, values and intentions were all there — but in practice, something didn’t align.
I remember raising a concern about how a proposed change would disproportionately affect people who were already marginalised. The response wasn’t disagreement, but silence. Later, someone told me quietly, “You’re right, but this isn’t the right time.” That moment revealed a lot. Inclusion was seen as optional. Leadership decisions were treated as neutral. Impact was something to be dealt with later.
It made me ask a difficult question: if leadership continues to look like this, even with good intent, who does it actually serve?
Over time, I began to notice patterns — who was listened to, who was labelled “challenging,” whose expertise was trusted, and whose voices carried more risk when speaking up. I also had to confront my own learning curves, unlearning the idea that expertise alone is enough if we don’t question whose expertise is already valued.
Inclusive Leaders’ Voices exists because these experiences aren’t isolated. Across sectors, people are navigating systems where the burden of proof is uneven and inclusion is framed as a personal interest rather than a leadership responsibility.
This podcast is about reframing leadership — away from authority and towards responsibility. Responsibility for how power is used, how decisions are made, and how environments are shaped.
Each episode brings together leaders, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what inclusive leadership looks like in practice — not as performance, but as everyday choices that require courage, consistency and accountability.
Inclusive leadership isn’t a separate agenda. It’s how leadership should be done. And every choice sets direction.
This story is a condensed version of a full testimonial by Christiana, sharing her experiences of launching the Inclusive Leader’s Voices podcast.
You can hear the full podcast by clicking the button below.
