Awareness
The Awareness phase is the starting point for any organization's journey into diversity, equity, and inclusion. The goal is to become aware of the current state of your organization. It sounds much simpler than it is because this phase informs your strategy. It provides guidance and direction by surfacing the challenges to increasing diversity and creating inclusion while simultaneously offering evidence of what is working and what you should do more of.
Obtaining the data and the artifacts that will drive your pursuit of greater awareness can be done through several means. Surveys, focus groups, townhall meetings, feedback/suggestion boxes, and interviews can be used independently or in concert with one another to create a robust vehicle for listening to your employees.
This phase is not all about data and metrics. In each phase, there is an overarching need for education and communication. When working to “wake up” your organization leaders and employees as a whole, transparency of decisions being made is just as important as requesting feedback, while foundational diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts help stakeholders begin to see how their participation, or lack thereof, impacts the overall strategy.
As a way of illustration, let's take a look at Lisa, a figurative CEO of a made‐up tech company with 100 employees. Lisa and her counterparts in other departments have been given direction by their superiors to look into how diverse and inclusive their departments are. Lisa's first instinct is to reach out to Human Resources (HR) to get the demographic breakdown of her staff, assuming that boosting the number of underrepresented minorities should suffice to appease all parties. However, after a few minutes on the phone with the HR manager, she discovers that a handful of complaints regarding a hostile work environment have been filed anonymously and never addressed. Lisa realizes that she's going to have to dig a lot deeper to truly get a picture of how her department is doing and how to approach the damage that's already been done.
To completely move through the phases and reach Advocacy, this initial phase of Awareness makes it clear that diversity and inclusion within organizations does not only begin by increasing the number of represented identities across gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and age. An organization must undergo a process to become diverse and inclusive, one that starts with assessing how they are practicing the key elements in those core concepts. These elements are found in the experiences of your employees and it is imperative they are captured through metrics, data, and other investigative tools, which I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6.
Learning the state of your workplace culture provides you with a starting point to begin to answer the question of “How do we do this right?” Assessment of trust, communication, and other key elements that are the roots of diversity and inclusion will provide you and your organization with a place your leadership team can begin to align on future action.
Alignment
In the Alignment phase, your organization leaders will utilize the information provided in the Awareness phase, which provided clarity around the current state of the organization and start to align on the strategy. Determining the direction and agreeing to support the strategy is an important and fundamental factor.
In this phase, education is again present to reinforce the knowledge that diversity and inclusion within organizations does not only begin by increasing the number of represented identities across gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and age. It is understood that an organization must undergo a process to become diverse and inclusive, and it continues by assessing how key elements in those core concepts are being practiced. To do so, there must be a shared understanding of what diversity and inclusion is rooted in and how it is important for the organization.
After months of one‐on‐one interviews and focus groups, Lisa's HR team has gathered eye‐opening, experiential data from her employees about the state of the organization. As she discusses her discoveries and proposed path forward with department managers, she learns that several of them felt the “diversity” assignment wasn't really a priority, that what mattered most was the optics of looking like they made an effort while still increasing the company's overall revenue. Lisa leaves the meeting frustrated and disappointed by the company's disjointed viewpoint.
The pillars of diversity and inclusion are held in the beliefs, actions, and practices of an organization, from employee to leadership. The objective of the Alignment phase is to educate everyone on the critical components of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace in order to practice and thus cultivate this in the organization. It is incumbent upon the leadership to authentically embrace this knowledge. To get the leadership team to buy in and commit to diversity and inclusion, the leaders have to align on the direction as well as the value to the company. Lisa and her team have a lot of meetings in their future because without alignment on the need to reach the goal, they have no hope of aligning on a strategy to achieve it. They have to help the leadership team see how unconscious bias is affecting each and every department and receive commitments to do something about it.
One additional outcome of the Alignment phase is the setting of expectations. This phase creates accountability in leadership and demands action as a next step. Demonstrating support for the strategy provides clarity, as well as trust, to the workforce and sets the expectation that action will follow. Failing to move to the Action phase destroys the momentum that has been built, casts doubt on the data that has been obtained, and erodes trust in your leadership team.
Action
This phase is where everyone thinks they want to start because of its label. “Action” is what everyone wants to do, but what they actually mean by “action” is really only offering unconscious bias education. (See the next chapter for what I think about that.) This phase requires actual action. This is where you do the work of reviewing and revising the practices, policies, and procedures of your organization and to do that, accountability, transparency, and authenticity will be required if the end result you seek is a truly inclusive workplace.
With her company's leadership finally aligned on its values and the import of a diverse and inclusive workplace, Lisa is now ready to start rocking the boat in her department. She begins by engaging the head of every department, from sales to research and development to marketing, to discuss ways to remove the barriers to true inclusion in their work environment.
Action means working to identify the places where bias and inequities continue to lurk. Upon discussion, there must be a deeper practice of inclusive leadership – role‐modeling the action that will be required to be taken to do the work.
Action means dismantling the practice of only hiring individuals from Ivy League colleges. Action means reviewing compensation across your organization and paying women and men the same salary for the same job. Action means working with the architect to ensure the new office you're building will not just be ADA compliant, but accessible. Action is determining why 30% of your workforce is diverse yet every leadership role is filled by a white man. Action is understanding why, on average, women leave your company after five years; it means pinpointing the challenge and then actually fixing the issue.
Advocacy
Reaching the Advocacy phase is something not very many organizations achieve. Not because of the difficulty, but because of the prior stages. So many companies try to begin with the Action phase when they are actually in the Awareness phase. However, without knowing that, they apply task‐oriented thinking to what should be strategic planning, resulting in an initiative that is short‐lived, under‐resourced, and without direction.
Lisa's department managers have finally bought into the value of a diverse and inclusive workplace as a result of upper management's valuation of its concepts. In turn, employees at all levels have begun to embrace the newly revised policies and procedures that address the unconscious bias we all harbor, remove the barriers