A Layered Approach to Practicing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace

Diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges are deeply seeded in our organizational cultures and engrained in the behavioral norms of those around us. Addressing these challenges requires focus, particularly in three practice areas: inclusive management, enabling equitable practices and procedures, and developing and mentoring others. Leaders can start to build on these practices with a lens of expanding access and increasing diversity within their own sphere of control.
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Melaku and Winkler (2022) recently wrote a Harvard Business Review article, entitled “Are your organization’s DEI efforts superficial or structural”, championing structural approaches to DEI. In particular, they note the importance of providing access to career opportunities, promoting a culture of allyship, making a public commitment to DEI, and well as committing to measuring the impact of these efforts. As an internal organizational development professional, I know that structural change happens at the intersection of strategic and relational efforts that engage others in a collective purpose, which is tracked and measured. Organizational development consultants are change leaders working to couple ground-up with top-down change, while prioritizing iteration. We do this by coaching leaders around their purpose and presence, facilitating conversations across constituents, and developing long term measurable strategic plans and practices.

Recent change literature suggests reframing change implementation with an eye to engaging stakeholders in deeper, more interactive ways to enable longer term success and buy-in. When looking at why change fails, Schwarz, Bouckenooghe, and Vakola (2021) propose that change will be most successful when it impacts surface, intermediate, and deep structures. They suggest that surface structures need to be reframed and made to have meaning to enable change. They note that multiple stakeholders need to be engaged in change (change leaders, change recipients, and community members), through a process generating organizational narratives that are retained and rewritten in the process. Finally, change needs to impact the deep structure of the organization, lasting over time, changing conventions, norms, and shared values, and shifting organizational frameworks and paradigms. For those interested in engaging more on with this topic, I invite you to read A Layered Approach to Practicing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace, a research summary I co-authored with Jodi Detjen, Managing Partner with Orange Grove Consulting. The article encourages change leaders to ask themselves:

• What – which of change practices have taken root in my organization? How impactful are they?
• Who – who is benefiting from these practices? Who is engaging in these programs?
• Why – is DEI apparent in the values, vision and actions of leadership and organizational culture?
• When – are DEI initiatives focused on short term or long term change?
• How – are you measuring the impact of your efforts across demographic groups?

By asking yourself the above what, who, why, when, and how questions, you can assess the extent to which your practices are engaging change at the surface, intermediate and structural levels.