Welcome back. Last week we discussed the case for diversity and why organizations must accept the demographic reality of a changing world. Quick summary. Use energy where you can find it. Use the promise and not the expectation of innovation from diverse teams and data to help make the case for investment in DE&I. Do not underestimate how much inclusivity can impact your bottom line. Think about the cost of job dissatisfaction and turnover because your organization failed to be inclusive. It makes no sense to have workplace diversity yet still have a community of silos where every group feels they need to assimilate or flounder like fish out of water. But if inclusion is the goal, how does an organization get there? How does an organization grow from a community of silos to a community of inclusiveness? Well, this week we're going to talk about how institutions can mature into inclusive organizations and the experiences many go through on their path to becoming mature. Don't worry, very few organizations are truly mature. Even if they are, no matter how diverse they are or how much money they've invested in DE&I, there is someone at that organization that feels excluded. Every organization has work to do. That's why I'm going to refer to growth as more of a continuum. Since the continuum is a continuous series of elements or items that vary like a range of temperatures from freezing to boiling, we'll use that as our description of growth. The more mature the organization becomes, the hotter it will get until boiling with inclusivity. Regardless of where on the DE&I continuum you find your organization, just know we all have more maturing to do. At the beginning of the continuum. It is freezing cold. It's cold because the organization has no real commitment to DE&I beyond the status quo. Maybe there is a sexual harassment policy or an occasional webinar on diversity that employees can join. But it's the kind of thing that no one is required to attend, and those that do attend are not rewarded for doing so. At this frigid level, these organizations don't prioritize DE&I activities until something comes up like a crisis. To them when they see any diversity in the organization, they think, hey, Joe is a person of color and he seems happy, and they leave it at that. If the needle of diversity moves at all at this organization, it's by accident because they don't have any intentional efforts at this level because there is absolutely no desire to establish formal goals or tasks to hold anyone accountable. That my friends is the essential ingredient for any organization to mature. Accountability. At this level of frigidness, there is zero accountability. Think zero degrees equals zero effort. The reason might be because they're too small to care, or maybe they have a stagnant workforce with little movement or maybe turnover is so high, they just don't have the time to implement a diversity recruitment strategy. Maybe they see diversity initiatives as an unaffordable luxury, or maybe they think, and this is my personal favorite. We don't have DE&I issues because we're colorblind and we treat everyone like family. When I hear the word like family thing, I cringe a little because it negates the importance of accountability. When you think about the difference between a family member and an acquaintance, is that a family member receives unconditional love. Like when your crazy uncle comes over from a holiday each year and takes over the TV and eats all the food and falls asleep. Now no one can hear the TV or themselves over his snoring, but because he's your family, you invite him back year after year. Contrast that to the workplace where our coworkers usually are not our relatives. The truth is no workplace relationship is unconditional. Our relationships are very much conditioned on performance. Instead of using the family reference, I tell my work group that we're a team and every team member has a key role to play. While I may root from my teammates, celebrate their scores, and support them in their misses, if they do not perform their role, I can't keep them on the team. It's unfair to the team to do so. At this point of the continuum, no one has the role or the power to energize a DE&I strategy. No one is held accountable to do so and they are happy making do with what they've got. Unfortunately, at these organizations, marginalized employees either adapt or leave because there is zero chance that the culture will ever change. Now as things start to heat up a bit and the organization moves from this point of the continuum to the next, they're doing so because they've invested in compliance efforts and by compliance, I mean the law or legal and regulatory mandates. The messaging at this point of the continuum, is that everyone, every employee is being treated the same, equally. The buy-in here is for the organization to enforce it's anti-discrimination policies and the principles of equal opportunity. This is great, but remember, this does not mean the same thing as equity. Disparity may still exist even at this point. For example, remember the drunk uncle. Now imagine your drunk uncle and aunty both work for the equal opportunity organization. They are similarly situated in every way and they are hired to do the same or similar work. However, it is later discovered that the uncle makes 5,000 more annually than the aunty. When asked why, the hiring manager says that each employee has the right to negotiate their own salary, and that is exactly what led to the uncle having higher pay. Now we know over time policies like this usually lead to pay disparities that often impact women and people of color. But unless there's a finding of discrimination, there probably is no real effort to address the disparity at this organization because they believe, we treat everybody the same, equally, she should have negotiated better. See the issue? When you talk about diversity with an organization at this point of that continuum, they usually direct you to the internal equal opportunity office or to human resources, because those are the offices that respond to regulatory employee mandates. But when you ask the same organizations about DE&I strategies, what is the organization actually doing to move along the DE&I continuum? They usually respond with something superficial because they are a staff of too few and they are too busy doing compliance stuff. The DE&I agenda is void of any real concrete efforts and if there are any goals, they're usually around the surface-level diversity, such as recruiting a more gendered, racial or ethnic workforce. While basic data is collected, no one is held accountable or empowered to do anything with it. These organizations are all about risk mitigation. When a problem arises, their solution is to put additional measures in place to address the risk and move on. However, as the organization matures and heat around DE&I begins to rise, you begin to see the organization set goals beyond surface-level diversity. You can find some semblance of a diversity plan or statements somewhere on their website and some marketing material with diverse people in it. But that's pretty much it. At this point of the continuum, the organization is at least lukewarm in its case for diversity, having some buying and investment. Maybe in addition to the EEO office, they have added an office specifically for diversity or diversity committee in some programming. While, all of this is great. It is all done in a random haphazard way, void of any coordination, and there is still much left to be desired. For example, the organization may collect data like from a climate survey or offer some program like implicit bias or allied training. But there is no real plan to connect those activities to a broader strategy. Like things are happening or being done, but it feels like busy work for some or empathy exercises for others. The purpose for the effort is unclear and even though the organization can point to some success, DE&I is still very much optional, it's something that you do if you believe in it. Because no one is expected to do anything substantive. Over time, members and organizations at this point of the continuum conclude that lukewarm diversity efforts are a little more than picturise facade painting. While employees may stay, they resent messages that claim how welcoming and inclusive the organization is because they expected real change. If none occurs, employees grow frustrated and may call the organization out on it. Now maturing into the next point of that continuum is definitely due to accountability. The organization is definitely at a hotter point when it really starts to embed DE&I efforts into its broader strategic vision. Here, even the higher-ups and rock star employees that escape most mandates are made to understand that their success is conditional on the implementation of DE&I initiatives. DE&I is hot at this point and the heat is palpable. You see it everywhere. In budgeting, messaging, success and plan, everywhere. Accountability is palpable. It's not just occasional data collection. It's constant. It doesn't look like one-off compliance training, it's a series of training specifically for leaders on DE&I. Elements of DE&I are a part of every supervisor's annual evaluation, like asking them what did they do to create an inclusive environment for all of their employees? At this point, the organization is very much concerned about surface and deep-level diversity and train incessantly on how to manage both. They just don't collect data, they expect someone to do something with it. For instance, if the data indicated that there was a disparity in pay, like with the uncle and auntie example, managers would be expected to do something about it, it would not be optional, it'd be prioritized. They may require managers to set aside a portion of their budget each year to make equity adjustments when they find such disparities. What tends to cool DE&I at this point is that while equity efforts are prioritized and embraced, they still may be reactionary instead of addressing the cause of the disparity at its root. Another problem is that only a few of the leaders are held accountable, like the hiring managers and supervisors and others in the organization have the option of opting out. At the hottest point of the continuum, DE&I is fully integrated into the day-to-day activities and culture of the organization's DNA. From the tippy top downward, everyone is held accountable for creating an inclusive environment. Here they take pride in the data that shows that the DE&I efforts have led to high-performing, diverse thinking teams because they have made critical investments to prioritize and manage these functions well. At this point, leaders are DE&I champions and support the accountability systems that expose systemic socio-cultural barriers because they have the will and the courage to take them down. Using the uncle-aunt pay disparity example. At this level of inclusive commitment, when leaders discover a policy that creates disparity like the negotiation policy, they address it and make it more equitable. Maybe if one negotiates a high salary, then everyone in the cohort gets that salary. Maybe there's another solution, but the point is they root out and dismantle systemic inequity. At this point of the continuum, the organization is red hot for DE&I because they consistently challenge the status quo and no one is threatened by that. They understand that to protect Diverse voices means that everyone is empowered to speak up and propose a better way to do things. To them, they are the employer of choice because of what their employees experience. Like the puzzle analogy that I've been using. At this point of the continuum, all the pieces of the puzzle have come together and they're all included to reveal an extraordinary image. This is the goal. With this level of heat, DE&I is on fire and extraordinary indeed. I'll see you next week.
