Podcast Summary: This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil

Episode: Diversity Isn’t a Strategy - It’s a Leadership Result with Aiko Bethea | 378
Airdate: January 12, 2026
Host: Nicole Kalil
Guest: Aiko Bethea, founder of Rare Coaching and Consulting

Overview

This episode of This Is Woman’s Work dives into what it truly means to lead with diversity—not as a checkbox or strategy, but as the natural outcome of authentic, courageous, and accountable leadership. Nicole Kalil and guest Aiko Bethea examine leadership beyond surface-level advice, exploring the emotional labor, self-awareness, and the real work required to lead across differences and within our own values. They emphasize that inclusive, equitable, and diverse workplaces are reflective of genuinely well-led organizations, and that leadership is both deeply personal and unavoidably structural.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Redefining Leadership and Diversity

• Leadership is nuanced and complex, especially for women or those outside the stereotypical leadership mold.
• Leadership is harder to “live” than to define, particularly under the pressure to conform to a traditional, often exclusionary, standard.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion are outcomes of great leadership, not strategies or boxes to be checked.
  • "Diversity is not a skill set. So when you're a leader who is looking at people as whole people...it's going to create a space where more people can see themselves being successful…and the output would be much more diversity in the people who are on the team." – Aiko Bethea [03:45]

2. The Power Dynamic in Leadership

• True leaders share and redistribute power, rather than wielding it over others.
• When power and agency are distributed, belonging and innovation increase—more people feel they can show up as themselves, take risks, and recover from mistakes without fear of shame.
• This draws in talent, creativity, engagement, and commitment. Diversity becomes both an output and a measure of great leadership.

3. Diversity: Moral Imperative and Strategic Advantage

• Diversity is not just “the right thing to do”—it’s good business, enhancing creativity and problem-solving.
• Aiko frames inclusive leadership as an act of patriotism:
  • "It's actually the most patriotic thing you can do because you're inviting the potential of the full workforce." – Aiko Bethea [06:35]

4. The Challenge—and Necessity—of Self-Interrogation

• Leading truly diverse teams requires leaders to confront their comfort zones.
  • Lazy leadership is sticking to sameness; novel, effective leadership means tension, growth, and sometimes being at odds with ingrained systems or family stories.
• Expansion and introspection are hard work:
  • "I might have to see some things about myself that I don't like too much...that’s a hard process and hard grieving. It takes a lot of emotional labor and maturity." – Aiko Bethea [09:04–13:07]

5. Mistakes, Accountability, and the Spotlight

• In the current climate, public mistakes in leadership feel riskier, with judgment swift and intense.
• Courage means owning mistakes; the cost of not doing so is greater than losing a title—it’s a loss of integrity and the inability to model courage for others.
  • "What is the cost that you're paying that's even higher by not naming and owning? That's an internal cost." – Aiko Bethea [14:48]
• Transparency, self-accountability, and ownership are crucial and contagious behaviors.

6. Self-Accountability and Staying True to Values

• Nicole and Aiko discuss the difficulty of sticking to their values, especially when challenged or exhausted by the world’s noise.
• Leadership is lived most in the hard moments—choosing curiosity or generosity even under pressure.
  • "It’s really easy to hold under our values when things are going well, but it’s in those moments where choosing to stay true...is both hard and a great example of leadership." – Nicole Kalil [24:12]

7. Leading Across Cultures: Elevating Yourself First

• Aiko clarifies that her work is about inviting leaders to elevate themselves so they can effectively lead any team, not just "diverse" ones.
• Self-awareness and self-management are the foundation for leading across any difference.
  • "It starts with, what am I bringing to the table? What do I need to excavate?... Do I like the impact it’s having on myself and other people?" – Aiko Bethea [25:19]
• Great leaders flex to bring out the best in others, based on self-understanding.

8. Measuring Leadership Impact

• Leadership is not a formula or set of prescriptive actions—each situation is a new “chemistry experiment.”
• You know you’re leading well if:
  • Your actions align with your values
  • Results are both objective (business metrics) and subjective (team well-being, retention, feeling proud)
  • "How do the people around you walk around and leave?...Now there's something I need to be accountable for because that's not the impact I want." – Aiko Bethea [30:15–35:38]
• Feedback, curiosity, and openness are key.

9. The Limits and Possibilities of Leadership in the Workplace

• Leadership isn’t about meeting every need—workplaces have limits, and not all expectations are healthy or realistic.
  • "It's not a leader's or workplace's job to meet its team's every need. We have over rotated a little bit…your workplace should be healthy and productive but it's not supposed to meet all of your needs." – Nicole Kalil [36:06]
• Empathy does not negate accountability; leaders can be both supportive and rigorous.

10. Wellness as a Leadership Outcome

• Well leadership means alignment, humanity, dignity, and generosity.
  • "Being a well leader doesn't mean that you're always gonna feel like you're knocking it out of the park...but that you are in alignment with who you aspire to be and that you are supporting other people in being aligned." – Aiko Bethea [36:47]
• Treating others well feeds back into your own resilience and satisfaction.

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the core of leadership:
  "Leadership isn't a one size fits all solution. It never should have been. It's not about having all the answers or following somebody else's blueprint. It's about doing the real, often messy, sometimes disorienting work of leading in a way that aligns with who you are and who you want to be." — Nicole Kalil [39:19]

• On power and belonging:
  "When you do that, more people feel like, 'I can work here; I can actually be successful. This person really sees me. This leader does.'” — Aiko Bethea [03:45]

• On default systems:
  "We have a system that rewards you for sameness...It's not only limiting a system, but it is self-limiting." — Aiko Bethea [09:04]

• On courage:
  "Courage is contagious...when you see somebody else naming what they're doing and taking ownership for it." — Aiko Bethea [14:48]

• On accountability:
  "I have to be willing to hear, that's me holding myself accountable and learning about this impact that I didn't even know was there." — Aiko Bethea [35:05]

• On wellness in leadership:
  "It's not us versus them, it's an us. And how do we move this forward? How do I get the best out of this person so they can even see their best?... All that takes churn out of the system, decreases your emotional labor, helps you to stay grounded." — Aiko Bethea [37:49]

Notable Segment Timestamps

• [03:45] – Diversity as the result of great leadership
• [06:35] – Diversity as patriotism, not factionalism
• [09:04–13:07] – The hard self-interrogation required of leaders
• [14:34] – Accountability and public vs. internal costs of mistakes
• [20:19] – The challenge of being grounded amidst exhausting noise
• [25:19] – Leading across cultures starts with elevating yourself
• [30:15] – Measuring leadership by both values and objective results
• [36:06] – Defining the boundaries of workplace responsibility
• [36:47] – Wellness as alignment and generosity in leadership
• [39:19] – Closing reflections on leadership

Final Thoughts

This episode reframes diversity and inclusion as byproducts, not tactics, of truly effective leadership grounded in self-awareness, generosity, and courage. Nicole and Aiko offer a blueprint for expansive, humane, and results-driven leadership—one that asks us to lead with our full selves and invites others to do the same.

Key Takeaway:

Great leaders create the conditions for diversity and belonging by elevating themselves, sharing power, staying accountable, and leading with both rigor and heart.
As Nicole closes:
"May you lead with intention, with self trust, with self accountability, with your full self at the table, not despite what makes you different, but because of it. We need women at tables where decisions are being made. We need you to lead." [39:21]