around the world.
Some of those excuses include:
Diversity doesn't work.
I don't see color.
We just hire the best without regard to gender or race.
We don't want to lower the bar on job requirements.
I find these statements to be troublesome. At best they are ignorant, and at worst they build barriers to diversity by creating a culture where the status quo is acceptable. These statements create roadblocks to innovation by stifling the ability of leaders to harness the creativity of their workforce by restricting diversity.
These excuses stem from failing to be clear on your strategy. What is your motivation for wanting to take action? Do you have an authentic desire to change or is this a publicity stunt to placate your employees, customers, and investors?
The excuses also stem from failing to define organization values and align strategic diversity outcomes to those values. Do you know what you stand for as an organization? Do your employees know? Are you clear on which behaviors you will not tolerate in the workplace? Without a clear understanding of your organization's core values, it's impossible to embed effective diversity strategies into your systems and processes. Chapter 3 further discusses the establishment of values and how that relates to real organizational change.
Failure to create accountability in your senior leadership team is yet another area that cultivates these excuses. Do your leaders have clarity on what is expected of them and what their role is in creating an inclusive workplace? Do they know what level of ownership they have?
Have resources been allocated? Commitment goes beyond words. We focus on the failure to allocate time, energy, and dollars, but the failure to allocate decision‐making power is often overlooked. Without the ability to hold others accountable, your policies and procedures have no teeth.
Doing “the right thing” is difficult when you don't have information to direct your actions. The excuses that leaders rely on also stem from a failure to obtain data and create achievable metrics. How do you know if the needle moved when you don't know where it was when you began?
The Framework of the Blueprint
I work to remove barriers and reduce bias as a mission, but my mission is only successful when yours is too. The blueprint I work from is my own strategy that, when applied across the commonalities of business, provides a place from which to measure how close you are to achieving your goal. In my experience working with thousands of employees at companies around the globe, I have encountered common themes, common challenges, and common solutions that run across industries, across company sizes, and across cultures.
The basic framework is the same for each organization, whether you have one hundred employees or one hundred thousand. Where the difference lies is in the implementation. With the opportunity to observe actions and behaviors, as well as to begin to recognize the mindsets that drive them, I have been able to classify companies into four main levels or phases: Awareness, Alignment, Action, and Advocacy.
The categories collectively characterize the practices, policies, and procedures that an organization needs to address and the order in which to do it. While the concepts around diversity and inclusion may come from a U.S.‐centric lens, they are applicable globally. I also use the term “inclusive workplace” to refer to the concept that company leaders must create a culture that is accepting of individual differences. However, when you consider the vast number of dimensions of diversity in the Four Layers model (see Figure 1.1), you can see they influence each other, which is why intersectionality is so important (but I'm getting ahead of myself). That convergence and influence of dimensions is what can make this work seem difficult, and as you'll hear me say repeatedly, “Complex doesn't have to mean difficult and it definitely isn't impossible.”
You've probably also heard it said that you cannot have inclusion without diversity, but you cannot have an inclusive workplace culture without an organization that respects the diversity of the individuals, acknowledges the value that diversity brings to the organization, and actively works to ensure all employees within the organization are included in the practices, policies, and procedures of the workplace.
FIGURE 1.1 The Four Layers of Diversity.
Sources: Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe, Diverse Teams at Work, 2nd Edition (Society for Human Resource Management, 2003); Adapted from Marilyun Loden and Judy Rosener, Workforce America (Business One Irwin, 1991).
Awareness
The Awareness phase is the starting point for any organization's journey into diversity, equity, and inclusion. The goal is to become aware of the current state of your organization. It sounds much simpler than it is because this phase informs your strategy. It provides guidance and direction by surfacing the challenges to increasing diversity and creating inclusion while simultaneously offering evidence of what is working and what you should do more of.
Obtaining the data and the artifacts that will drive your pursuit of greater awareness can be done through several means. Surveys, focus groups, townhall meetings, feedback/suggestion boxes, and interviews can be used independently or in concert with one another to create a robust vehicle for listening to your employees.
This phase is not all about data and metrics. In each phase, there is an overarching need for education and communication. When working to “wake up” your organization leaders and employees as a whole, transparency of decisions being made is just as important as requesting feedback, while foundational diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts help stakeholders begin to see how their participation, or lack thereof, impacts the overall strategy.
As a way of illustration, let's take a look at Lisa, a figurative CEO of a made‐up tech company with 100 employees. Lisa and her counterparts in other departments have been given direction by their superiors to look into how diverse and inclusive their departments are. Lisa's first instinct is to reach out to Human Resources (HR) to get the demographic breakdown of her staff, assuming that boosting the number of underrepresented minorities should suffice to appease all parties. However, after a few minutes on the phone with the HR manager, she discovers that a handful of complaints regarding a hostile work environment have been filed anonymously and never addressed. Lisa realizes that she's going to have to dig a lot deeper to truly get a picture of how her department is doing and how to approach the damage that's already been done.
To completely move through the phases and reach Advocacy, this initial phase of Awareness makes it clear that diversity and inclusion within organizations does not only begin by increasing the number of represented identities across gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and age. An organization must undergo a process to become diverse and inclusive, one that starts with assessing how they are practicing the key elements in those core concepts. These elements are found in the experiences of your employees and it is imperative they are captured through metrics, data, and other investigative tools, which I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6.
Learning the state of your workplace culture provides you with a starting point
