How Accountability Turns Your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Commitments into Outcomes

When you think about diversity and inclusion initiatives in corporate America, you’ll find that, in the last few years, individuals and organizations have made a lot of commitments: commitments to a certain action, commitments to advance representation, commitments to create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organization. To achieve those commitments and help ensure progress, it is critical that organizations set clear goals and consistently measure progress so that they are held accountable to their own commitments as well as to their employees and other stakeholders.

Accountability Turns Words into Actions

In general, how organizations make progress on big commitments can look pretty similar: set a broad strategy about how to approach a commitment’s outlined goals and then break it down into smaller actions to work towards those goals. Over time, and in total, you end up arriving at the end state you originally committed to. Sounds simple enough, right?

But there is a key aspect to this formula that leaders often struggle with, and that’s accountability (one of my 6A’s at Deloitte Consulting).

We see accountability all the time when it comes to reaching goals in our own lives. If someone’s goal is to train for a marathon, they will join a running group, train with a friend, or set up a personal training regimen to hold themselves accountable. If someone’s goal is to learn a new language, they can sign up for a group class or use an app that tracks their daily progress. At work, we have managers or mentors who help us stay on track as we work towards our career goals. These are all forms of accountability that keep us working towards our goals and the end states we’re striving for.

When it comes to accountability for DEI-focused goals, it can be much trickier. First, it’s a new muscle, most have never done it before. Second, DEI goals that rely on quantitative data to measure progress can be few and far between and, when set around specific metrics, can be difficult to tie to any one individual or team. Third, many DEI goals – especially those around building an inclusive culture – are a lot about changing behaviors and rely on qualitative data to measure, which can make it challenging to provide an objective measurement of progress. ?

And while countless DEI commitments have been made in the last few years alone, we’re seeing that some remain unfulfilled and collective progress in certain areas has fallen woefully behind. For example, research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics highlights how commitments to advance diversity in the workplace haven’t yet yielded as much progress when it comes to racially and ethnically diverse professionals in leadership roles. From 2019 through 2022, the percentage of white professionals in management positions decreased from 79% to 77% - with racially and ethnically diverse professionals making up just 33%. This tells us that we’ve made some progress but still have a long way to go in helping more Black, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino/a/x professionals take on leadership roles in our workplaces.

That’s why we need accountability. It helps ensure you’re making progress toward your DEI goals as well as transforming your organization’s commitments into real outcomes. That’s how we drive real progress and sustainable change.

3 Different Types of Accountability

When it comes to DEI, I believe there are three types of accountability:

1.????Organizational accountability – holding our organization and its leaders accountable to the established DEI goals and commitments

2.????Collective accountability – holding each other accountable for organizational DEI goals and inclusive behaviors

3.????Personal accountability – holding ourselves personally accountable to a higher standard for inclusive leadership

It’s important to understand these three types of accountability and how to implement each type into everyday practice.

Putting Accountability to Practice

Organizational Accountability – Because Accountability Requires Transparency

Accountability requires transparency and, from my experience, there are two important things when it comes to putting organizational accountability to practice: implementing transparency reporting and clearly cascading DEI goals throughout the organization.

At Deloitte, we have a set of broad DEI goals that we've declared and shared with the world. These are organizational goals that we hold ourselves accountable for by communicating our objectives and progress to our stakeholders, our clients, and our people – through our actions and in our annual DEI Transparency Report.

For example, in our inaugural DEI Transparency Report, we committed to the following DEI goals regarding our Deloitte US workforce:

·??????Increasing the number of Black and Hispanic-Latino/a/x professionals in our US workforce by 50% by 2025

·??????Increasing female representation in the US workforce to 45% by 2025

·??????Increasing the representation of racially and ethnically diverse US Partners, Principals, and Managing Directors (PPMDs) to 25% by 2026

·??????Increasing the number of female US PPMDs by 25% by 2025

This report showing how we are – or are not – making progress is one of the ways we publicly show our commitment to DEI. In many ways, this type of ongoing reporting “forces” an organization to act as it creates a mechanism for stakeholders, both internal (employees) and external (customers, clients, etc.), to help hold the organizations and its leaders accountable.

We get a lot of feedback on our DEI Transparency Report, we use it to better our organization. It isn’t always easy but by being transparent, our professionals, clients, and other stakeholders can see that we remain focused on our goals and are holding ourselves accountable.

However, simply being transparent on DEI goals and progress is not sufficient on its own. The other critical component to putting organizational accountability to practice is to cascade these broad DEI goals throughout the organization and tie them to year-end performance for organizational leadership.

In doing this, the collective progress on organizational DEI goals and performance against the annual DEI targets are ultimately tied to annual compensation. This helps assure that an organization’s leadership and their various teams are held accountable and consistently working to advance the organization’s DEI goals. And that adds up to an impact that can be felt across an entire organization.

Collective Accountability – Because Advancing DEI is a Team Sport

In between organizational and personal accountability sits an important layer, which I call: collective accountability.

Because advancing DEI is a team sport, collective accountability is about how each of us holds each other accountable for inclusive behaviors. This type of accountability is very qualitative in focus and is more about holding our people accountable rather than about instituting formal systems and processes to advance DEI. And that requires a collective understanding of what “good” looks like.

To inform this collective understanding at Deloitte, we have instituted a DEI impact framework and ongoing training to show our teams what good looks like across many DEI dimensions. One great example of this is by providing guidance around “Say This Not That,” which highlights offensive language and provides guidance on how team members can call others in and have productive conversations to help them improve.

Through collective accountability, organizations can enable their team members across the organization and at all levels to be a critical source of accountability. Doing so not only helps an organization fulfill its DEI commitments but builds an invaluable culture of inclusion.

Personal Accountability – Because Personal Commitment is the Key to Sustainable Change

Personal accountability means each of us is responsible for our own actions and how we show up as individuals. It is the key to sustainable change.

In my opinion, the most important way we practice individual accountability is through allyship. As I’ve said before, allyship is a verb, and it requires us to practice every day – in how we as individuals build authentic relationships and champion our colleagues, check in with and support our team members, and commit to being “anti” (e.g., antiracist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist).

It comes down to us as individuals wanting to be allies and holding ourselves accountable, not because it’s tied to year-end performance evaluations, but because it is the right and moral thing to do - AND it’s good for business. That is the ideal state and driver of sustainable change.

When everyone truly understands what it means to be an inclusive leader, they personally commit to the journey of being a true ally, independently invest time in learning what “good” looks like, and hold themselves accountable for results. But these behavioral changes take time and work to achieve.

At Deloitte, we marked this past year as the Year of Allyship and have focused our efforts on helping our teammates understand the beauty of allyship by educating on ways to be an ally, celebrating different identities across our organization, and emphasizing the business value that can be unleashed by harnessing the power in diversity through equity and inclusion.

I’m pleased that personal accountability is on the rise, but we still have ways to go to bring about sustainable change.

Building Trust Through Accountability

All three of these forms of accountability work together and help ensure that progress is being made towards larger goals and commitments, and that the type of culture you’re trying to work towards is actively being built. ?

When you identify and put into practice the three layers of accountability across an organization, it helps build trust. Your external stakeholders trust that you’re working towards your stated goals, your internal teams trust leadership to make good decisions, and teammates trust each other to show up to work each day, committed to doing what’s right and making an impact.

Accountability, and the trust that it brings, can help you move beyond the world of commitments and into the world of outcomes and progress, creating an organization that doesn’t just talk the talk, but truly walks the walk when it comes to advancing DEI.