Three Actions for Beginning Your Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Leadership Journey at Work

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You want to create an intentional roadmap for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at your work and you feel overwhelmed. Your colleague over at [insert prestigious company name here] raves all the time about their multi-pronged strategies and wrap around programming and your boss sends you news links every day with a text message “Should we think about......?” When you get ready for bed at night, you reflect on the fact that your own identity journey is intermittent, deeply personal and sometimes inaccessible. You consider the fact that your understanding of the rules of Dominant Culture and how to navigate them have dulled your ability to hold open the uncomfortable question that begins with “What if.....” You are skilled, you are competent and you are worried about messing up.

Do not despair. This is the moment that precedes some of the most impactful leadership work you will undertake in your career. And the following three actions will help anchor you in your purpose and provide clarity to your teams.

1.   Be Explicit

Being explicit when you talk about diversity, equity and inclusion is perhaps the most countercultural thing you can do for your organization as you lead its strategic efforts. Dominant Culture norms keep leaders playing small when it comes to Equity and Inclusion because Dominant Culture norms place taboos around race, class and any other social and personal identifier. To speak about who’s in and who’s out, who here’s and who’s not, is ultimately to point out who has power, privilege and access and who doesn’t. The first step in disrupting the status quo is to be able to speak the words of what you want and what you are trying to learn, uncover and re-imagine. Being explicit means being specific and pushing your team to use common, clear language. This will necessitate speaking about things that people don’t generally speak about at work or in social settings. It will require naming what you are seeing and experiencing and asking questions about what those things mean in the context of inclusion. This practice will likely surface a broad range of competence on your team in talking about issues of power and access. 

Your role as a leader is to uncover as quickly as possible where your team is avoiding language, bypassing specificity for comfort's sake. The antidote for language avoidance and ambiguity is to practice out loud. 

Instead of: “We don't have a lot of diverse employees...” tryWe seem to have mostly [insert majority racial group type here] employees. Why is that? We would like to attract and retain a more racially diverse pool of employees.”

Instead of : “I really don't know about this, I'm not diverse,” tryI feel at a loss right now discussing this. I feel self conscious about [fill in the blank] and I don't know how to contribute.”

Instead of : “We keep looking for qualified candidates but there just aren't out there,” tryWe keep using the same methods that yield the results we have, I wonder if we need to think/practice differently about how we recruit for the diversity we are seeking.”

These language reframes will surface opportunities for conversation and learning about the systemic biases and barriers built in to our lives and provide parameters for team building about what it means to truly embrace, leverage and protect diversity and inclusion in your organization. Being explicit and precise with language helps define the field and gives your team footholds for continued learning. Without the ability to use explicit and precise language, teams run the risk of missing opportunities to celebrate, assess and analyze where they are succeeding or failing. Without explicit language you risk perpetuating the same environments you want to change.

2. Learn Who You Are

There’s the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and then there’s the stories other people have about us based on their experiences with us. Sometimes they align, many times they don’t. This is true for individuals and for companies, institutions and organizations. Before your team can identify strategies that will help recruit, retain and sustain employees through a lens of equity and inclusion, first find out who you really are. This self knowledge will help focus your DEI strategies and conversations by giving you the opportunity to ask internally “Does this snapshot of us match with who we think/say we are?” and then further, “Based on this information, what is the next right step in our DEI journey?”

Learning who you are means gathering data, assessing internal culture, and inviting feedback and input. Empower your teams to consider the visible and invisible dimensions of your culture and organizational being as you assemble the data. Do you have an extroverted culture, or an introverted one? Does your environment have art and signage that reflects the diversity and inclusion you say you value or are the symbols and artifacts of the organization working against who you say you are or want to be?

Lastly, in learning who you are, trust that the way you hold and examine your own truth will be the way you welcome, relate to and sustain relationships across differences. Be courageous and curious with what you discover. Be courageous in your commitment to grow forward, be curious with your own judgements about what the information reveals. Your goal is growth, not shame and blame. 

3. Connect Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to Your Values

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in your organization is not a vanity project, a program, or a hot initiative. It’s a way of seeing the world as a place for everyone to thrive, and a way of managing power and systems from an abundance model as opposed to a deficit model. With equity and inclusion at the center of your business efforts you are providing a reciprocal value feedback loop. Your organization invites new perspectives, voices, and ideas, and in turn listens, adjusts, refines and celebrates. Meaningful strategies will connect DEI with your organizational values. It is not the sidecar of your organization, it is part of the engine. Try testing your values and purpose with the question “How is our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitment alive in our value of X?”

It can be tempting at the beginning of a comprehensive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion organizational journey to create a separate house for the work and label it as a new initiative. This relegates DEI to “program” status and makes it vulnerable to budget cuts, downsizing and reorgs. While the journey will need specific stewards, oversight and accountability structures, for the sake of sustainability link it as early as possible to the stated values of your organization. 

This moment can be daunting, especially if your organization or company has opaque or hidden values. Refresh your team’s familiarity with the core values of the organization, then show how each of the core values is clearly linked to Diversity Equity and Inclusion. In this way, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion behaviors become your company values in action, interwoven with the core internal messaging of your organization.

If you are the leader who is tasked with leading their team through a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion journey, know that there is not one magic fix, not a single timeline or formula, and that you will need help from everyone. If you commit to being explicit, learning who you are, and connecting diversity, equity and inclusion to your core values in action, you will establish the foundation points for sustainable and dynamic transformation.

Kisha Palmer