What your DEI strategy is missing: the hard part

My father taught me a lot about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) almost fifty years ago, though I certainly didn’t realize it at the time. This article is dedicated to him.

Inclusion is the most important part of DEI: without inclusion, all your work hiring into diversity and assuring equitable compensation will be noble gestures whose impact is never realized. All three are important, for sure, but making your organization more inclusive is the hard part…Inclusion has to happen all day, every day, and requires significant systemic change to how your organization currently operates.

I say this from the perspective of 20+ years of management sciences research, and most recently, a decade training and coaching well over 100 organizations in worker and team empowerment, essentially inclusion by another name.

Our current BLM-aware zeitgeist has brought inclusion into the spotlight, but Inclusion has always been a huge problem, especially in the type of knowledge work organizations that are common these days, the Meritocracy....read the rest of this article on Medium.com here.