Why Your Company’s Diversity and Inclusion Initiative Isn’t Working
By B. Adams, PsyD
Instructor of the ProThink Learning online course Diversity and Inclusion: Concepts and Strategies for Success
The Problem with Our Mindsets
Many organizations have attempted to make diversity a priority by setting robust targets for promoting women and persons of color to leadership roles, yet their pipelines still don’t show the desired level of diversity improvement. Why aren’t these initiatives working, and what can we do differently to achieve effective diversity and inclusion in the workplace?
Defining Diversity and Inclusion
When setting a goal, it’s important to clearly define what one hopes to achieve. For the purposes of this conversation, we’ll define diversity as a noun meaning “the mix” and inclusion as a noun meaning “making the mix work.” More specifically, inclusion refers to proactive behaviors we take based on self-awareness and respect for differences that make people feel valued for the unique abilities, qualities, and perspectives they contribute to an organization.
Enhanced social inclusion plays a large role in developing exceptionally diverse, productive, and engaging businesses. Enhanced social inclusion at work is the process of improving the terms on which individuals and groups participate and contribute value to an organization. It’s about enhancing opportunities for interaction with people that have marginalized identities.
The Importance of Inclusion
Individual and collective thought processes need to expand for organizational systems and policies to change. Only this will enable a company’s diversity and inclusion results to improve in a meaningful and sustainable way. In other words, people must change for companies to change. It is not possible for this to work in any other order. If individual employees do not possess inclusive belief systems, then a diverse, inclusive workplace can never truly develop. The charge is to transform the nature of employee and leadership development so that company culture can change.
Old vs. New Concepts
If diversity and inclusion are to evolve, there must be continuous improvement, learning, and adaptation of those concepts. The attempt over the past decades to be “color-blind” and “treat everyone the same,” however well-intentioned, has failed to effectively decrease the amount of discrimination in the workforce.
The United States has long been referred to as a “melting pot,” meaning that immigrants from many different parts of the world arrive on American shores and are expected to assimilate into mainstream American culture. But in this model, we wind up minimizing or rejecting differences among groups, and the pretense of sameness is sustained.
A New Narrative
A new narrative that binds diversity and inclusion to an organization’s business strategy holds great promise for our collective future. Yet, a commonly overlooked reason for a lack of diversity, particularly in business, is the failure to develop and align diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural awareness with the strategic priorities that support the company’s mission. If a company’s founders do not emphasize the value of a diverse and inclusive workforce in the original organizational DNA, then it is especially difficult to develop a preference for diversity and inclusion later on.
No framework yet exists for effectively and meaningfully navigating differences among people in every situation. Yet developing and implementing this inclusive mindset is critical to succeeding in and benefiting from diversity and inclusion. When employees in a company feel that they’re in a psychologically safe environment, they’ll feel free to express their viewpoints and ideas. Diverse input can enable companies to discover more innovative designs, better understand potential new markets, and have a more engaged workforce, all of which are tremendous, potential benefits to the business, its employees, and its consumer base.
To initiate changes to a company’s culture, each individual within a company needs to reflect on the sources of their beliefs, their assumptions about others, and their individual roles in supporting the structures (no matter how unintended or subconscious) that keep people with marginalized identities held back in the organizations they work for. Only then will corporate efforts be able to succeed.
