After 15 years of experience navigating corporate DEI, Kamana Khadka realized the need for inclusion to expand beyond one department. Now, as Founder and Chief Multiplication Officer of Inclusion Multipliers, she equips leaders with actionable, results-driven practices to create safe, diverse workplaces.
Shiwon Oh: What drives your inclusion work?
Kamana Khadka: My inclusion work didn’t start in a boardroom. It started in a hospital waiting room. As a volunteer ad hoc interpreter for Nepali-speaking refugees from Bhutan, I spent my early years in the U.S. watching people in my community struggle to access basic healthcare because no one could understand them. A mother couldn’t explain her child’s symptoms. An elderly man couldn’t consent to his own treatment. These were humans being rendered invisible by systems that weren’t designed with them in mind.
That experience lit something in me that has never gone out. I went on to found Arizona’s first systematized, professional refugee-led medical interpreter microenterprise, training over 65 interpreters across 29 languages, specifically designed to give refugees both health access and a sustainable career path through a Nina Mason Pulliam grant and under the Asian Pacific Community In Action—because I learned early that access isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between someone being seen as a full human being or being reduced to a problem.
When I moved into corporate DEI, that same fire carried me forward. Over 14 years across non-profit, healthcare, and corporate settings, I kept seeing organizations investing in awareness training while the underlying systems—who gets hired, who gets developed, who gets heard—remain unchanged. People were being centered in mission statements but sidelined in practice.
What drives me now is a simple conviction: belonging isn’t something you train people into. It’s something leaders create conditions for, or accidentally destroy. That’s why I built the Inclusion Multipliers™ framework. I want to give leaders something they can use on Monday morning to create environments where every person can contribute their full intelligence, take meaningful risks, and perform at their peak because the system is designed for them.
At its core, what drives me is this: every person deserves to work somewhere that treats them as a whole human being, not as a headcount, demographic category, or checkbox. I believe leaders have far more power to make that vision real than most of them realize.
SO: What does it look like to nurture systemic inclusion versus training one DEI expert?
KK: This is the question that reshaped my entire career. For years, I was the DEI expert, or the single person an entire organization relied on to “do DEI.” I managed advisory boards, built dashboards, and led conversations from the frontline to the C-suite. And I was excellent at it. But no matter how effective I was, the moment I left a room, the impact left with me. The expert model is additive, not multiplicative.
Think of it this way: if you train one DEI expert and they touch 100 people a year, you’ve added 100 touchpoints. But if you develop 20 leaders who each nurture belonging in their own teams, and those leaders develop others who do the same, they multiply. It’s how there’s actual cultural change.
Systemic inclusion means embedding the capabilities for inclusive leadership into the people who already own team outcomes—the managers, directors, and VPs who set the tone every day. It means moving the work out of HR’s hands and into the business’s operating rhythm. It looks like a director redesigning her team’s meeting structure so that quiet voices get heard before loud ones. It looks like a VP building feedback loops into his hiring process so bias surfaces. It looks like a frontline manager creating psychological safety, not because they attended a workshop, but because they’ve developed the capability to read their team and respond accordingly.
In my Inclusion Multipliers™ framework, I teach five capabilities: Performance Catalyst, Intelligence Amplifier, Risk Navigator, Systems Architect, and Talent Multiplier, because these are the actual levers that make inclusion self-sustaining. When leaders develop these capabilities and then develop other leaders in the same way, you get exponential impact. The work no longer depends on one person or one department. It becomes how the organization operates.
If your inclusion strategy collapses when one person leaves, it was never a strategy. It was a dependency.
SO: Can you debunk some common diversity training myths?
KK: Myth #1: “Awareness creates change.”
This is probably the most expensive myth in the industry. Organizations have spent billions on unconscious bias training, and the research consistently shows it doesn’t change behavior. In some cases, it actually worsens situations by giving people moral license. For instance, they may think, “I attended the training, so I’m one of the good ones.”
Awareness without system change is entertainment. Leaders don’t need to feel differently about inclusion; they need to be equipped to lead differently. They must change how meetings run, decisions are made, talent is developed, and performance is measured.
Myth #2: “DEI is an HR function.”
When inclusion lives exclusively in HR, it becomes a program rather than a practice. The leaders who control team dynamics, project assignments, and development opportunities are the ones who actually shape whether someone experiences belonging or exclusion every day. I’ve seen this firsthand when I managed 95 Culture Captains across an organization, and the biggest breakthroughs didn’t come from the programs I designed. They came when individual leaders started owning the culture on their teams. HR should enable and measure; leaders should own and model.
Myth #3: “You need to use DEI language to do DEI work.”
This myth has become especially damaging in the current political climate. Many organizations have frozen their inclusion efforts because they’re afraid of the acronym. But belonging, engagement, and high performance don’t require a label—they require intentional leadership. I help leaders reframe this work in terms of performance, talent strategy, and risk management, language that resonates with skeptics and supporters alike. The goal is to anchor results.
Myth #4: “One big event creates lasting culture change.”
A powerful keynote or a company-wide summit can spark energy, but it cannot sustain transformation. Culture changes through daily leadership behaviors repeated over time: how a manager responds to a mistake, whether a leader seeks dissenting opinions before making a decision, and whether new employees feel welcome to contribute, or are politely sidelined. The organizations making lasting progress are those that treat inclusion as an operating system rather than another calendar event.
SO: What are some of the most impactful outcomes you’ve seen come out of your leadership methodology?
KK: The outcomes I’m most proud of are the ones that show up in business results. At one organization, we reduced attrition among the company’s largest ethnic employee group by 5% year-over-year. In an industry where replacing a single employee can cost 50-200% of their salary, that translates directly to millions saved. We also achieved 44% female hires and 39% ethnically diverse hires in a single year, broadening the talent pipeline in ways that strengthened leadership bench strength across the board.
But some of the most meaningful outcomes are harder to quantify. I built a culture program that achieved 62% associate engagement with 100% executive participation, including the CEO. When you get every senior leader actively participating, not just sponsoring from a distance, it sends a signal through the entire organization that this isn’t optional or peripheral. It’s how we lead.
I facilitated a program called #JoinTheConversation where associates at every level, from frontline technicians to the CEO, shared their personal stories in a structured, safe setting. One session featured a frontline worker talking about navigating her identity in a male-dominated field. The room was silent afterward—not uncomfortable silence, but the kind that comes when people realize they’ve just heard something that changes how they see a colleague. That’s the kind of moment that no training module can manufacture.
In one operation, we successfully increased the number of female technicians in a role that had been almost exclusively male for decades. It happened because leaders redesigned their outreach, reconsidered what “qualified” looked like, and created environments where women could see themselves succeeding.
What all of these outcomes share is that they weren’t dependent on me being in the room. They were the result of leaders developing the capabilities to create these conditions themselves. That’s the multiplication effect, and it’s the only kind of impact that lasts.
SO: How can leaders take concrete steps to transform their company culture with diversity and inclusion at the forefront?
KK: I always say to stop trying to transform the whole culture at once and start with the system you control. Here are five concrete steps any leader can take starting this week:
First, audit your meetings. Meetings are where inclusion lives or dies in real time. Ask yourself: who speaks first? Who speaks most? Whose ideas get built upon and whose get politely acknowledged and forgotten? Redesign one meeting this week so that input is structured—have people write before they speak, rotate who leads the discussion, and explicitly ask for dissenting views before closing a decision. This is the Intelligence Amplifier capability in action, and it costs nothing.
Second, ask the uncomfortable question. Sit down with three people on your team this week and ask: “What’s blocking your best work?” Then actually remove one barrier. This is what I call being a Performance Catalyst—creating conditions where people can contribute their full capability. Most leaders assume they know what’s getting in the way. They’re almost always wrong.
Third, redesign one system, not a mindset. Pick one process—hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, project assignments—and examine it for where it unintentionally filters people out or reinforces sameness. The best leaders I work with don’t try to change how everyone thinks. They redesign the system so better outcomes happen naturally, regardless of individual bias. This is the Systems Architect capability, and it’s where lasting change actually lives.
Fourth, develop leaders, not programs. Identify two or three people in your organization who already create belonging naturally—the leaders whose teams have lower turnover, higher engagement, or stronger innovation. Study what they do, make it visible, and give them the platform to develop others. This is the Talent Multiplier at work: instead of building another program, you’re building a pipeline of leaders who multiply the culture you want.
Fifth, make the business case personal. Every leader has had a moment where they felt unseen, unheard, or undervalued at work. Connect inclusion to that lived experience. When leaders understand that creating belonging is the condition under which their team produces the best work, they stop seeing it as a mandate and start seeing it as a competitive advantage.
The thread connecting all of these steps is simple: belonging is not a feeling you hope people have. It’s a condition leaders design for. And when leaders develop the capability to do that—and develop others to do the same—you get something far more powerful than any training program: a culture that multiplies.
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