What Two Years as a D&I Practitioner Has Taught Me
It’s been almost a year since I’ve posted on The Bold Red Line. It’s been a busy eleven months, and a time of learning, frustration, and slow, incremental progress. Two years ago, I sat in a little expat bar called the Long Table at the 365inn in Beijing, working on my second post. And I’m sitting here today, back at the Long Table and thinking about what I’ve learned since then.
I started this blog as a place to chronicle my personal journey as a Diversity and Inclusion practitioner – and after a couple of years I’ve got thoughts…
Enthusiasm will get you started, but it will only get you so far.
Being a D&I practitioner is a long march. And when I talk to those who’ve been doing it for decades, it becomes clear that you take energy from every win, no matter how small. We’re pushing against the status quo, and that’s never an easy thing. Sometimes we’re helped by the larger societal discussion, and sometimes we’re not. We’ve got to be ready to keep at it, no matter what resistance we encounter.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice are all different.
I saw a quote recently from Dafina-Lazarus Stewart, an author and Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Bowling Green State University. She writes:
“Diversity asks, ‘Who’s in the room?’ Equity responds: ‘Who is trying to get in the room but can’t? Whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?’ Inclusion asks ‘Have everyone’s ideas been heard?’ Justice responds, ‘Whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the majority?’
“Diversity asks, ‘How many more of [pick any minoritized identity] group do we have this year than last?’ Equity responds, ‘What conditions have we created that maintain certain groups as the perpetual majority here?’ Inclusion asks, ‘Is this environment safe for everyone to feel like they belong?’ Justice challenges, ‘Whose safety is being sacrificed and minimized to allow others to be comfortable maintaining dehumanizing views?’”
When I first read that, I loved what Dr. Stewart had to say. I still do.
But the powerful distinctions being made here touch on a danger area for D&I practitioners in the workplace. I work for an organization that has only recently begun to discuss issues of inclusion and diversity. We’ve been talking about inclusion as a way of ensuring that all of our employees understand that our efforts need to include everyone. In a workforce that has an overwhelming majority of white, cisgender, able-bodied men, there is a great deal of risk in presenting the work of Diversity and Inclusion as being solely about how we open our doors to provide opportunities for other minoritized identities. The risk is that this work gets ignored or defunded or set aside before it ever has a chance to take root. I know we’ll eventually move to a place as an organization where we’re having other conversations – about diversity, equity, and justice. But for now, inclusion is a starting place for us. And we take the occasional foray into some of the other questions and responses offered by diversity, equity and justice.
And there is also the very real risk that too much talk in the space of social justice, too soon, will cause our professional D&I work to be seen as a personal or political agenda. And anything that takes us away from the business case for D&I is slippery ground…
Diversity and Inclusion has got to be about the business case.
Early on, we agreed that the work we do has got to always support our business case. We need to be able to clearly demonstrate how our D&I effort make the business better. For our company, that case has been focused on our customers, enhanced innovation, attracting top-tier talent, engaging all of our employees, and building our cross-cultural competence.
That said, some points of the business case are ones that we’ve had to strengthen over time. For example, there’s not a lot of data out there to support the idea that more diversity leads to greater innovation (although more is emerging all the time). In a data-driven, engineering-focused organization like ours, “trust us” doesn’t cut it. So we’ve looked for data where we can find it, to bolster the business case and further clarify how investing in D&I makes us a more effective organization.
And then there are the customers. Two years ago, we included our customers in our business case, even though they weren’t talking with us about this topic. For all we could see, they weren’t talking about it in their own organizations either. But two years on, we have large, industry-leading customers pushing us, and including questions about our commitment to D&I in proposal requests. This shift has made a very real difference, leading to…
It’s all about strategy.
Think about what you need to do to build an effective business case in your organization. Not a vision, not a wish list. An actual, numbers-driven business case. What are the buttons that you know you can push within the organization to secure buy-in at multiple levels? How do you get engagement from executives, managers, and individual contributors.
I’m convinced that this work requires me to draw on every lesson I’ve ever learned about influence and persuasion. And I’m learning constantly. Whatever levers matter in your organization, lean on them. HARD. Push, and be professionally persistent. This work matters. And learning how to make it matter to others is a great skill that can help to create some of those wins that you need to feed the progress that you’re looking to make.
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And yet, even with all the setbacks and challenges, we’re moving forward together. For the good of the business and, I believe, for the good of the communities where we work.
I’m eager to share more thoughts in the coming weeks on topics that I’ve found relevant, and that I’m not sure we always talk about when we talk about workplace diversity. Like socioeconomic diversity. Like educational diversity. Like linguistic diversity. These things matter, and sometimes they intersect. But they’re distinct, and important, and they’re worth talking about.
So that’s what I’m committed to doing. And I hope you’ll be along for the ride.
