What’s Missing from DEI Initiatives?
By LeRoy Thompson, DPA Senior Consultant
With all of the attention that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have captured, a few things are still missing.
First, from the plant floor to the board room, there is a need for clarity around the terms and implications for each area of emphasis. Second, as with many previous efforts to address the underlying issues, many organizations have been unable to establish and communicate the business reason for spending the requisite time and energy. Third, industry executives are grappling with developing a straightforward process for moving DEI from meaningful symbolic gestures of allyship to substantive action plans to produce the desired internal and external outcomes.
Filling in the missing pieces is not all that difficult. But the emotional content of these issues, the haunting history of inequity, and the inertia of organizational culture have exacerbated our challenges.
A Look in the Rearview Mirror
Before offering some concrete insights and guidance, let’s understand that we’ve come a relatively long way since the 1990s when “diversity” was last a hot topic. Back then, it was simply a code word for gender and ethnic discrimination. The idea of equity and inclusion was not even a consideration. Companies were struggling to achieve greater workforce diversity and develop workplace cultures that valued the idea that cultural differences were an asset to a high-performing project team, business unit, or department.
However, outside of an emphasis on awareness training designed to prevent further conflicts, managers placed little attention on root cause analysis or rethinking recruitment and retention policies. The training and development focus was on changing employee attitudes about cultural differences. As noble as it sounded, using attitude change as an effectiveness metric was way too ambitious. In addition, attitudes are nearly impossible to measure. In hindsight, the attitude was not the lever that could move workplace culture. Attitudes have a minimal correlation to achieving organizational outcomes. Some current research suggests that a focus on changing someone’s attitude can end up strengthening biases.
The complex dynamics involving perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors made the “rules” governing diversity confusing. Most traditional trainings taught employees what not to do to avoid an instance that could be considered to be inappropriate. The result was that employees avoided many normal and necessary workplace situations out of fear of “making a mistake”. The unintended consequences of this were several:
- Key people were left out of important decision-making activities
- There was less valuable dialogue around issues
- Employee productivity and morale decreased.
Not much thought was given to understanding how to help employees comprehend and apply what they should do to address bias and use the elements of diversity to increase productivity.
Thirty years after our initial attempts at diversity, equity and inclusion, things are a bit different. There’s hard evidence that organizations that embrace DEI in the right ways consistently outperform their competitors.
It’s important to recognize that there is a neurobiological basis for understanding and addressing inequity and exclusion. From childhood, well-meaning people provided us with social guidelines largely designed to protect us from the “unknown.”
The “unknown” included groups of people who were not a part of our social sphere and were therefore perceived to be potentially dangerous. Any encounter with a person perceived to be dangerous stimulates a cascade of neural pathways emerging from the amygdala and hypothalamus. Neurotransmitters and electrical activity drive stereotypical (biased) perceptions, assessments, and decisions in an unknown situation. If these unknown groups are allowed to become “familiar” through positive interactions, the brain’s capacity for plasticity creates new neural activity that then results in dismantling biases.
Finding the Way Forward
Our current opportunity to move the needle on DEI has to be based on establishing clear definitions and real-world context for the terms we are using. For example, having diversity is, by and large, not the issue. Surprising maybe, but across industries, companies now have diverse workforces in terms of gender and ethnicity.
There are certainly instances, however, where the diversity of a company’s workforce is not in proportion to the community it serves. Or diverse representation at the working level may not translate to diversity at leadership levels. One organization trying to improve diversity in leadership roles is Deere and Co., which focuses its global DEI initiatives on Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and mentoring programs that are aimed at increasing exposure so talented employees get noticed.
Equity
Equity looks at systems and processes that have imbalance built into them, regardless of the intent of the person who is operating. According to Race Forward (a significant influencer and resource provider for DEI work):
“Racial equity is about applying justice and a little bit of common sense to a system that’s been out of balance. When a system is out of balance, people of color feel the impacts most acutely, but to be clear, an imbalanced system makes all of us pay.”
The bottom line is that equity looks at systems and processes that have imbalance built into them, regardless of the intent of the person who is operating.
Here is a key: for most organizations, a focus on equity will be directed externally more so than internally. A health care organization, a mortgage lender, or even a resume service may end up perpetuating disparate treatment for people based on their ethnicity. Their software programs’ decision-making algorithms may have been developed by individuals with “implicit” biases. The system will generate a different risk profile for patients, raise barriers to grant mortgages in certain communities or fail to forward resumes with non-native English-sounding names. There is also a chance that on the inside, hiring, promotion, and reward systems have the same built-in bias. Largely, the internal issues that organizations need to confront are about “inclusion”.
Inclusion
Developing A Game Plan
Because DEI issues often carry significant emotional content, a well-structured process is required to move people and systems along. It has to be recognized that there are critical stages that need to be managed or else more damage than benefit can result. Rather than create a DEI effort with lots of pomp and circumstance, you may find it valuable to take an incremental approach. There is initially a communications phase where leadership articulates its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by linking it to organizational values, performance standards, and business objectives. This provides a platform for broad engagement, enabling almost everyone to find a place for themselves in that commitment. It also goes a long way towards developing that critical mass of support that any change effort needs.
Next, there will likely be an opportunity for some education around the DEI concepts and tools. Again, having a focus on the business reasons is important. Interestingly, current research suggests to not make seminars or workshops mandatory. The goal, using an incremental mentality, is to create a compelling message around DEI and let the commonsense draw people to it. It’s clear when you create a safe space for the necessary dialogue and discussion around the issues there are lots of people who really do champion respecting and valuing their colleagues.
Although inequity and exclusion are equally egregious, the way to approach them has some distinctive features and different desired outcomes. If your assessment is that there are significant systemic biases present, then you’ll need to address equity. The tools and strategies here are all about data. You can’t get to the bottom of the issue unless you do some data-gathering, data disaggregation and root-case analysis. There will also be an important role for stakeholders in validating both your assessment of the source of the inequity and in whether your efforts to restore balance have been successful.
In so many cases, the issue will be the lack of inclusion. The tricky part here is that feeling excluded can be a very subjective judgement. But the subjectivity doesn’t mean it’s not actually also true. It’s vital to hear from those affected by exclusion is vital to get down to the specific organizational activities where the impact is most strongly seen. You need to collect those insights and prioritize which areas to address. Once the high-impact areas are addressed and progress is clear, you can then move on to the next. For example, being a part of project teams can be a huge factor in one’s growth and development. If patterns of exclusion exhibit themselves in the selection process it will be important to craft solutions to fix them. Generally, these solutions are easy to come by, especially if the display of inclusive behaviors is a part of one’s KPIs or other performance metrics. It’s still true- you get the behaviors that you measure and reward.
What’s Next
We all recognize that there is much more progress to be made. For some, it will be worrisome to adopt this incremental mindset. Those who been most negatively affected by inequity and exclusion have a valid argument that change is too long overdue. Anything other than incremental change may be less likely to be sustained. If we lose this moment with so many minds and hearts open to real change, the fear is that it may not come again.
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Daniel Penn Associates Senior Consultant LeRoy Thompson has 30 years of expertise in delivering solutions to meet a wide range of organization development, executive coaching, managerial, supervisory, and employee training needs. He works with a broad range of clients in racial equity, diversity, and inclusion. Thompson’s work in the public sector has included the U.S. departments of Energy, Interior, Justice, Defense, Agriculture, Treasury, the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, Arlington (VA) County, Riverside (CA) County, and Sarasota (FL) County. Clients include T. Rowe Price, Cox Communications, Marriott Corporation, McCormick, Gannett, the American Bankers Association, the American Cancer Society, United Way of America and local United Ways across the country. In the wake of renewed focus around racial equality, he has facilitated sessions for federal agencies, developed engagement strategies for municipal governments in the selection of new chiefs of police, and created and delivered training curriculums for organization-wide racial equity training to state agencies.
Thompson served in positions at McKinsey & Company, Kepner-Tregoe and Booz Allen and Hamilton. He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Business. His award-winning TV broadcasting and publishing credits include “Written Skills for Business Communications” (AMA-By-Satellite), the book “Mastering the Challenges of Change” and the Strategy and Leadership magazine article “e-Commerce: Changing the Rules of Strategy Implementation”. He is a Certified Agile Scrum Master, Certified Virtual Presenter and Certified Virtual Host.
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