DE-Bye?

From the glorious social reckoning summer of 2020 — which we’ve mostly now forgotten about or ignored entirely — until about late 2021, there was a huge rush in hiring diversity consultants and internal diversity officers. I was actually working at a place called Neuroleadership Institute at the time, and a huge chunk of their billings for consultant work (60% I’d guess) were coming in the form of diversity and inclusion training, or some program tied to diversity and inclusion in some way. Ironically, a very affluent and stuck-up white woman laid me off from that job. She also had blown-up footprints of both of her children’s feet hanging above her bed, which we regularly saw on Zoom calls. It made me feel weird. I bet her husband feels same. Anyway.

Well, now what’s happening is that a lot of these diversity consultants are getting fired — “That’s a non-essential activity, and we are belt-tightening due to economic confusion” — or the internal DEI roles are falling as well. This is detailed a bit here, from this AM:

A few different things are happening here, IMHO:

The first is that most diversity training is force-fed, doesn’t work, and causes backlash. There has been research on this for years, but corporations love to rush into what other corporations are doing — corporate existence is a giant copycat game — so we ignore the research and just keep doing these programs where you take one step forward if your dad was in finance, etc.

The second is the “Chauvin got his” narrative: When I was working at that Neuroleadership company, I did a few sales calls. Not many, but some. I heard at least three executives say that after Derek Chauvin got jail time (21 years, if I recall correctly), they — the executives — thought, “OK, this is over now. Back to business as usual.” It’s like Chauvin did a bad thing, then everyone wanted corporations to respond to diversity even though their Boards were lily-white, so once Chauvin got sent to the pokey, now can we go back to being overly-white? People were saying this on calls. It was hysterical. But it’s also how a lot of people think.

The third is inflation and interest rates: Money ain’t free presently. When money ain’t free, you need to drop non-essential programs. Most consulting is honestly non-essential, but diversity consulting is especially often non-essential. So, it’s getting dropped. And if you gave someone a $125,000 salary to basically manage spreadsheets about diversity and inclusion that no one with true power ever looks at, well … time to axe that salary too.

And perhaps most importantly, the fourth is that you don’t need complex DEI programs. You just need better managers and cross-functional teams: If you have to work with someone from a different background to get something done, you will naturally find common ground with them. That is how human beings operate. Some people are pricks, and will not do that — but most will. Companies think about DEI, and inclusion specifically, like some revenue or lead program. They think it needs a manager, and documents, and tracking, and status reports. It needs none of that. It really is just about people respecting the boundaries and experiences of other people, and periodically listening and caring. We try to commodify it because that’s what corporations do with everything else, but it’s much simpler than that.

You think the decline of DEI roles is good or bad?

** A note: it is easy to see DEI jobs get axed and frame it as “Oh God, the old white guys who run companies are trying again to install 1954 America everywhere. Send the wives home! They must bear fruit! I don’t think it’s that. I just think these programs are ineffective and executives love to cut costs. And post-2020, I think most smart executives realize you don’t need complex programs and tiers of managers. You just need exposure and interaction.