Preparing for the day when DEI is illegal, Part 1

In September of 2020, then-President of the United States Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that essentially prohibited companies that have DEI programs containing “objectionable” content from doing business with the US government.

That EO was rescinded by the next POTUS, Joe Biden; but there “are currently more than 30 bills across the country targeting DEI funding, practices, and promotion at schools. As of May 2024, 10 bills have been signed into law by a governor.”

In January of 2024, Presidential candidate?Donald Trump?“traveled to Rochester, a city of blue-collar, culturally conservative voters who swung his way in 2016 and again in 2020.?

“We will terminate every?diversity, equity and inclusion?program across the entire federal government,” the former president declared to a packed auditorium.”?(https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/03/03/trump-plans-crush-dei-affirmative-action/72774345007/ )

The impact of these actions can’t be overstated. In the single day, DEI was nearly wiped out for all the nation’s companies that do business with the federal government. The hostility to DEI is unmistakable, significant and, arguably, growing. It must be addressed. We need strategies for this reality.

At the same time, commitment to DEI is, arguably, also growing. Many states are pushing back on anti-DEI sentiment. And talented business leaders, who have done DEI skillfully over the years and have reaped huge rewards, see the tremendous competitive advantages it brings. These leaders know that DEI, done properly, makes them more profitable, and they don’t want to back away from it and the success it generates. At the same time, they don’t want to get sued, or lose engagement, and one could argue that it's fairly unlikely that business leaders will sacrifice government contracts to save their DEI programs.

While we’ve seen some companies scale back or neuter their DEI programs, we’ve also seen some organizations double down on their DEI programs while they can. How can we retain the spirit, the soul of DEI, deal with and hopefully prevent the backlash, and prepare for a future where the attacks on DEI become more severe?

Of course, there are many avenues to address this fight, and these are being pursued, honorably and passionately and skillfully.

Yes. And.

There is an additional path; one that stems from the theory that where there is chaos, upheaval, and retreat, there is also opportunity. Because if we’re being honest, there are ways that we can innovate on the message and the practice – and possibly even the name - of DEI. The presence of this level of threat creates – indeed, necessitates - opportunities for innovation.

DEI’s current vulnerabilities encourages the DEI industry to introspect; to be honest about what’s working and what’s not, and to provide philosophical and strategic support for those who still believe in DEI as both a force for good in the world and a force for improved profitability and engagement in the workplace.

I’ve written about this a little in my Thinking About… series; the fact that the flagship tool of DEI is problematic because it doesn’t scale; that the acronym DEI suffers because it conflates two different problem statements that require two very different solution approaches; I also examined the intellectual wasteland that is the Meritocracy movement or MEI.

But there’s one critical idea that I want to deepen now, as we consider different ways to describe the value-add of modern DEI: that DEI’s greatest contribution to the workplace is its value as an Internal Relationship Management tool; sort of a CRM but for employees and contractors, versus customers and prospects.

In other words, maybe the greatest contribution to the workplace from DEI is not its ability to enable awareness.

Maybe DEI’s greatest contribution is its unique and powerful ability to enable better relationships, across any dimension of Diversity.

Before I continue, just to be clear, this strategy does not refer to DEI “bad actors” – the people who, for example, simultaneously want Black people to lift themselves by their bootstraps and then oppose programs run by Black people that try to help Black people. And I’m not referring to hiring practices – the D in DEI - which is a large and highly necessary conversation that I’ve partly tackled elsewhere.

Regarding DEI’s contributions to the modern workplace, I’m asking two questions:?

1)??????? What happens after you’ve made good-faith efforts to diversify your workforce?

2)??????? How do you ensure that you’re receiving maximum Return On your DEI Investment?

There’s value in looking at this question from the perspective of why we do DEI at all.

One way to state the point of DEI – especially the E&I parts – is to create workplaces where a) everyone is talented and locked in, fully engaged in facilitating the success of the enterprise; and b) everyone works effectively with each other to create the best possible outcomes for the business in the innumerable small actions that add up to excellence. When it comes to human interaction in the workplace, DEI “sweats the small stuff.”

The key to achieving these two outcomes is human beings working effectively with each other; i.e., outstanding, well-managed, healthy relationships.

Notice that I didn’t say “good” relationships, or “strong” relationships, or “family-like” relationships. “Good” connotes too much of a value judgement to be particularly useful in a detailed “business culture” conversation. “Strong” can cut both ways, as a relationship can technically be both strong and toxic – i.e., it’s enduring, it lasts, but it’s still detrimental to its participants. And there is a lot of data to suggest that “family-like” is not always a wise objective. The word I used is healthy. The role of DEI is to deliver healthy relationships.

And that means delivering healthy relationships at scale, between everyone. It means delivering healthy relationships across traditional dimensions of Diversity, like race, gender, age, LGBTQ+ people and so on. It also means delivering healthy relationships across non-traditional dimensions of Diversity, like introvert / extrovert, loves-conflict / avoids-conflict; Engineering / Marketing; Development / QA; IT / Basically Everyone. What DEI has evolved into is a tool that has taken 30+ years of work bridging gaps between traditional dimensions of Diversity, and applies those learnings to the task of bridging gaps between all dimensions of Diversity.?

In other words – and this is key:

You know your DEI initiative is working when your Engagement Surveys / Activities reveal that everyone, across the enterprise globally, is getting better at managing their relationships.

Modern DEI achieves improved internal relationship management skills by utilizing the tools of DEI.

This is not to minimize the urgent need to deal with racism, sexism, ageism, etc. in the workplace via learning experiences focused on awareness-building and sensitivity. It is to suggest, for example, that even if we solved cross-racial issues tomorrow, not all people of color get along with each other. White people are not all the same and do not always get along. Not all women get along. Not all people of similar ages get along. We can address both “traditional” dimensions of Diversity and the overall experience of the workplace culture by positioning DEI in terms of its relationship management capabilities. This language broadens the value of DEI while strengthening and clarifying the scope of what DEI delivers and why these deliverables are valuable.

With this strategy, everyone gets helped with the kinds of incidents that can really harm team effectiveness.

This means your DEI initiative is working when everyone knows how to have the Trust conversation, and the Accountability-Not-Finger-Pointing conversation, and the Stopping-Colluding-Against-Chris-Just-Go-Talk-To-Chris! conversation, etc.

And more importantly, your DEI initiative is working when people report that having the Trust / Accountability / Etc. conversation isn’t weird or uncomfortable or as hard as it used to be.

By positioning DEI as a relationship management tool, and building those practices into the culture, those difficult conversations people typically avoid gradually become less difficult, and people are less likely to avoid them. As any leader will tell you, this outcome is nothing less than a gigantic win for the business. And DEI can deliver it.

DEI as a relationship management tool supports the company’s overall vision of “focused on the goal of becoming a relationship-smart company” throughout the enterprise. By focusing on employee (and contractor) relationship management, DEI helps to instill into the culture the single most important capability within the culture; the one capability that can, by itself, move the needle on performance outcomes; the one capability that is the heart and soul, the very bedrock, of every successful business ever. That capability is: being good at relationships.

DEI has become tremendously vulnerable in the corporate sector, but we cannot allow that. The DEI industry has learned and evolved over the years, and there is tremendous waiting to be unlocked by focusing on those lessons. Those lessons can be deployed to address both non-traditional and traditional DEI / Team Effectiveness issues, and deliver greater levels of value.

Utilizing the tools of DEI to create relationship-smart cultures might be the best way of preserving the spirit of DEI even in the face of relentless opposition.