It’s Hard to Celebrate When… 🤔
As we step into Diversity Month, the atmosphere is undeniably different. The startling drop in DEI job postings by 44% in 2023 and the drastic budget cuts—up to 90% in some companies—cast a long shadow over the occasion. High-profile critiques, like those from Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, who’ve challenged DEI efforts on fundamental levels, comparing DEI to racism, side by side the dismantling of DEI in state and educational institutions amplify this year’s complexities. Celebrating feels challenging when the very core of our DEI initiatives faces such profound questioning. 🚨
Let’s Focus on Calibration 🔍
This moment calls for a deliberate recalibration of our DEI efforts. Calibration means taking a hard look at where we are versus where we aim to be, ensuring our actions aren’t just rooted in good intentions but are genuinely moving the needle toward creating workplaces that are both inclusive and diverse. It’s about fine-tuning our approach to ensure it’s both impactful and reflective of our broader goals. 🎯
How Do We Calibrate? 🛠️
Recalibration begins with a thorough examination of our past strategies, openly acknowledging areas where our company and in some case our well-meant actions as practitioners may have led to outcomes we didn’t intend.
Revisiting Our Past Strategies with a Critical Eye 🔎
- Reacting to Social Pressure: In our haste to respond to social demands, signing public pledges, we often launched DEI initiatives that lacked long-term vision or strategic grounding, leading to superficial changes rather than addressing systemic challenges.
- Not Demonstrating Business Imperatives: The failure to consistently connect DEI with business outcomes made these initiatives particularly susceptible to cuts when the economic climate turned harsh, highlighting a missed opportunity to showcase DEI as a core business strategy. 💼
- Lack of Partnerships: By treating DEI as a standalone function rather than integrating it across business operations through deep partnerships with functional leaders, we missed leveraging broader insights, resources, commitment, and impact. 🤝
- Overindexing on Hiring: Our focus on hiring for diversity, while essential for driving representation, often overlooked the full spectrum of inclusion, from retention and development to leadership opportunities, creating vicious cycles. 🔄
- Insisting on Organizational Accountability: Our approach to accountability frequently failed to explain to people in the organization their role in owning DEI and holding them accountable via feedback, rewards, and recognition. 📈
Opportunities for Realignment and Renewal ✨
- Stand Firm: In the face of skepticism and financial constraints, we must hold steadfast to the importance of DEI, continuing to be clear about its critical place in our business imperatives and human imperatives. 🏋️♂️
- Evolve Our Strategies: This means adapting our approaches to be more nuanced and integrated, ensuring they’re not only responsive to immediate social pressures but are sustainable and aligned with our long-term business objectives. 🌱
- Showcase the Need in Our Organization: We must do a better job of articulating why DEI is essential, using both data and personal impact of those historically underrepresented to highlight its impact on employee engagement, and organizational resilience. 📊
- Leverage Power and Privilege of Community: Those of us in positions of influence have a unique responsibility to champion DEI, using our platforms to advocate for change and leveraging those platforms to identify opportunities for collective solutioning. 💪
- Commit: Practitioners, I know DEI Fatigue is real, but recalibration requires a renewed commitment to DEI, underpinned by actionable strategies, clear goals, and an unwavering dedication to building workplaces where every individual can thrive. The workplace needs you. ❤️
Forward Together 🚀
As we recalibrate, let’s view Diversity Month not merely as an opportunity to showcase all of the “good” but as a catalyst for enduring change. By critically evaluating our past approaches and embracing a future of strategic, integrated action, we can ensure our DEI efforts withstand scrutiny and contribute to a truly inclusive, high-performing organizational culture.
