Representation: an overused diversity, equity, and inclusion goal

Congrats! You’ve done it. You’ve made the important decision to get serious about your organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Maybe your leadership team has been moved by current events; or maybe you’ve had an incident with an employee, customer, or supplier that made you realize that your organization isn’t doing as well as you thought you were in this area (news flash: most organizations aren’t doing as well as they think they are in this area). No matter what caused you and your organization to start thinking more about DEI, welcome to the journey.

The first thing many organizations think about when they start to get serious about DEI, is representation: having a more diverse team that will look great on a glossy brochure. As a coach, facilitator, and consultant in the areas of leadership, communications, and DEI, my first question for prospective clients is usually, “What are your DEI goals?” I typically get two things in response to this question. First, I get a story about what led the organization to start thinking more about DEI in the first place: a brave employee voiced concerns that may have gone unheard for years; an important member of your leadership team — in fact the only woman/black/latinx member of your leadership team — resigned unexpectedly. Second, I get a vague goal that focuses on representation. This sounds like, “Our goal is to have 25% of our open positions filled with diverse talent in the next two years,” or “We’ve tried everything and still can’t seem to find enough qualified women/black/latinx candidates for our open positions. We need help.”

I often surprise clients when I tell them that representation is only one indicator of success when it comes to DEI, and in fact is not a very good one. What other goals have they thought about in the areas of inclusion and equity? This usually leads to uncomfortable silence.

What I’ve realized is that leaders and organizations that are just starting out on their DEI journey often don’t know where to begin. They toss out ideas related to representation because it’s easy and appealing. They want the brochure with the diverse group of happy smiling people, and they want it without having to change much about how their organization operates. But that’s all representation is: a shiny brochure. If you’re really serious about starting on your DEI journey — and if you’re reading this you probably are — you need to start with a better understanding of where your organization is so you can set more effective goals.

There’s a wealth of data and information that you can look at to assess how your organization is doing with inclusion and equity. You can look at employee turnover, retention, and tenure. You can look at salaries, titles, number of months/years to promotion. You can track things like speaking time in meetings. I worked with one organization that had decent representation when it came to gender diversity: three women and six men on an executive team. Not bad. But when I looked at the speaking time in their leadership meetings, the men were speaking for twice as much time as the women. So while the brochure showed a nice picture of gender diversity, the influence the women had on the team’s decisions didn’t match. Equity and inclusion were severely lacking.

(I know some of you are thinking, “Why didn’t the women just speak up more?” I’ll do a follow-up article on why blaming, shaming, and training people from historically marginalized groups to speak up more, without changing the power structures that they operate in, doesn’t solve the problem.)

Then there’s the more qualitative data: what does your employee survey say? Have you asked employees how much they think their opinion matters at work? Have you asked how often they experience microaggressions in the workplace or with clients? How about client surveys or focus groups? What questions are you asking that could give you some indication of how your clients feel about your organization’s equity and inclusion efforts?

When you start to look at this data, either on your own or with the help of a consultant, you can get a fuller picture of where your organization is when it comes to DEI. The picture that develops may not be pretty. But without this picture, you can’t get started on building a DEI strategy in any meaningful way. You’ll set the wrong goals, and employees and clients will see any initiatives you launch for what they are: glossy brochures with no substance behind them.

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