Practitioners and leaders have been working at creating a culture where Diversity, Equity and Inclusion thrive some time. While there has been some success, the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Aubrey and Rashard Brooks, have given us a heightened awareness and thus landscape to build. To create such an environment, there are three levers that are key:

• Design the program to focus on the acquisition and development of talent
• use data and technology to create accountability for leaders
• transform the systems to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion are integrated in all aspects of the culture.

Design the program to focus on the acquisition and development of talent

DEI programming has historically focused on recruiting. Hiring diversity will help conquer the beast, but it is clearly not enough. Without deep effort on development, your company’s retention records will inform you how quickly the employees you have hired have become disappointed and disenchanted with the opportunity for them at your firm. Sadly, you lost the investment in recruiting, but it’s also important to consider when you really lost them? What discretionary effort was lost? What creativity and contribution were lost? While these can seem immeasurable, these insights are meaningful.

Programs must have a heavy focus on development. This is actually hard work because development dominates the life cycle of employee. Be aware that bias is lurking around every corner. Consider who and how folks are considered for promotion. Look at your approach to assigning work, particularly those career-defining assignments that typically carry risk for the Executive Sponsor and all involved. If there is not a way to extend that equitably, then you will lose the confidence of your new recruits and they will believe that what you espoused about the culture was not true for them. All of the investment to hire now falls into the wasteland of smoke and mirrors. It will be seen as another attempt by large corporations to fool a group of people who have been led on and let down far too many times. Try the following three practices to see how it improves your outcomes:

1. Measure and hire people with strong emotional intelligence. Doing so utilizing a tool that provides a blind view of the demographics will expand your choices and strengthen your ability to do perform the next suggestion.
2.  Mesh Diversity. Require diverse slates with at least 40% women and people of color. This criterion will strengthen the mix of people you hire.
3. Measure talent to determine potential. Managers have good input and observation, but are not typically trained and equipped to assess future contribution and capability. Reliable and valid instruments will help you make better assessment and include a broader group of people. Gallup has strong instruments to help with this piece, particularly for managers and leaders.

Use of data and technology to create accountability

Using data to create leadership accountability ensures there are real measures for the culture you are creating and drives DEI is a leadership skill. In addition to accountability, the numbers are there to help leaders stay on course and help them determine where their greatest impact can be. Our challenge is how best to use numbers in DEI. We are hamstrung by a system that often makes setting goals and being accountable to the numbers difficult. Leaders retreat for fear of being accused of playing race or creating disadvantage for the advantaged. At times, we are courageous enough to capture the numbers, we stop short of having any accountability for the numbers. To build a program that has meaning and can grow over time, the accountability piece has to be in place. Who is accountable if women are leaving twice as fast as their male counterparts? Who is help responsible if African Americans or LatinX won’t even apply? These are leadership issues. The data is there to help you stay on or get back on course, but you can’t fix what you don’t own. Consider these practices to add to how managers are evaluated:

1. Help managers use engagement surveying as a way to get to real information about their team with a genuine opportunity to make it better. Too often they see engagement just as a number that needs to be manipulated. The number is a tool, not the goal. Understanding and managing the experience of employees is the objective. Help managers get to that.
2. Help managers explore how to develop each person on their team and hold them accountable for that development. If you can help them manage their bias on who gets the best opportunities, you will build inclusivity as a cultural experience across the company.
3. Help managers understand and build their emotional Intelligence. The more behaviorally strong leaders are the healthier the organization will be. Mesh Diversity can help with this as a pull through from the recruiting work.

Transform the Systems

Finally, it is time to rethink our talent systems. Many of them have been in place for some time. We need to look at the infrastructure and how it supports bias and exclusion. Like any system, when it was designed and implemented, our understanding of inclusion is not what it is today. We can safely assume it was built with some biases that thwart our efforts. We need to deconstruct the system and rebuild it so that is yields what we want: an inclusive culture and diverse workforce.

Three areas to look at right away are performance management, employee relations and promotion. When you apply the lens of inclusion, you may find :

• Fewer minorities and women get the top ratings and pay increases
•  more minorities have employee relations issues that are not seen or supported (the firm sides with management and managers are rarely wrong or accountable when they are)
•  fewer women and minorities are getting promoted.

While the last variable is known, this is an opportunity to fully explore why and assess what is in the way. Reconstruct the process to eliminate that bias. As you work on reconstruction, engage a fully diverse team to guide the effort. Replacing one biased system with another will result in wasted time and resources. This is an opportunity to finally say to the various communities that have been shut out: “Not anymore. You are welcomed here.”

Dr. Lisa