Does DEI Keep Centralizing the Centralized?

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Does DEI Keep Centralizing the Centralized?

Two Camps 🖇📎

DEI seeks to make change. There are different methods, but all strive to create more diversity, equity, and inclusion. While this quest is similar, paths diverge regarding what should change. Strategies tend to fall into two camps: 1) the individualist approach and 2) the organizational approach.

The Individualist Approach 📎

The individualist approach concentrates on changing individuals. This tactic suggests exclusionary behaviors stem from things like bias, microaggressions, and privilege. These issues are rooted in an individual’s psychology, behavior, or cultural experience. Those elements influence a person’s thinking, actions, and attitudes. According to this perspective, exclusionary environments come from specific people who do or say specific things. The thinking here is that if an organization has problems with recruiting, retaining, and advancing people from underrepresented groups, solutions come from addressing the racist assumptions of specific recruiters, the sexist jokes told by particular managers, and the ableist privileges enjoyed by leaders who decide which people being reviewed get promoted.

With this focus, the individualist approach proposes a certain set of solutions. It concentrates on having individuals recognize their role in perpetuating exclusion. The point of anti-bias training becomes getting the individual to challenge their psychology. Sessions regarding microaggressions work to have participants modify their actions. Programs addressing privilege endeavor to have each person recognize their privileges. According to the individualist approach, making organizations more inclusive requires changing how one thinks, acts, and sees the world. The logic follows that if companies want to reap the benefits that come from having an inclusive company, that company must change its culture, and the way to change a “culture” is to change the hearts of its individuals.

The Organizational Approach 🖇

In addition to the individualist approach stands the organizational approach. DEI practitioners who use this method agree that exclusionary behaviors stem from things like bias, microaggressions, and privilege. However, for them, the problem is with organizational systems that allow the exclusionary psychology, behaviors, and cultural experiences of individuals to translate into interpersonal patterns of behavior. Instead of concentrating on what specific people do or say, this approach focuses on creating processes that ensure inclusivity regardless of the exclusionary individuals who carrying them out. Here, if an organization has problems recruiting, retaining, and advancing people from underrepresented groups, the organizational approach looks to update the lists of colleges the company recruits from, improve the agenda templates so meetings can be structured more inclusively, and revise criteria so ableism can’t influence the promotion process.

The organizational approach focuses on changing not individuals but the systems in which they operate.

It concentrates less on training sessions that strive to have individuals recognize their biases and more on implementing programs that circumvent biases altogether. Rather than getting people to admit their language is microaggressive, it focuses on creating organizational guidelines for inclusive vocabulary, conversational patterns, and language use. Rather than trying to change the hearts of its individuals, it seeks to change culture by changing its systems. Those in this camp argue that you can document a change in a policy, quantify a change in the results of hiring practices, and even collect empirical data regarding how alterations improve organizational success.

Similarities Between the Two 🖇📎

On the one hand, the individualist approach concentrates on getting individuals to challenge their biases, microaggressions, and privilege. In doing so, this method tends to deemphasize what people should do when they are negatively impacted by those factors. For example, it might press males to confront their misogynistic thinking more than providing strategies for how women can confront those who exercise that thinking against them. It may challenge cisgender people to acknowledge transphobic microaggressions but overlook advice for how transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary folx might increase their chances of promotion in a microaggressive workplace.

On the other hand, because the organizational approach focuses on creating systems, it overlooks individual contributors who don’t have the authority to change those systems. Mitigating bias with processes that require operations like inclusive criteria, panels, and a broader data pool, it could forget to research strategies for how people from underrepresented can navigate their professions even when those systems fail. Even as it seeks to foster inclusivity that benefits everyone, the organizational approach can end up suggesting the only people who can create inclusivity are the leaders who change their systems. Worst of all, by failing to address what individuals from marginalized communities can do to thrive despite exclusionary environments or eliminate them altogether, it can imply that their professional future relies on the choices of the leaders with the power to change their organization.

In both the individualist and organizational approach, DEI might have unintended consequences.

Encouraging individuals to abandon their exclusionary behavior foregrounds excluders. Motivating leaders to create inclusionary systems highlights leaders. Whether trying to confront the individual actions or organizational systems that marginalize, both approaches run the risk of ignoring the marginalized. Trying to change people from groups who’ve been centralized in society or leaders who are centralized in an organization, both DEI approaches can have the unexpected consequence of further centralizing those already used to being centralized.

Changing Course

But what about the people who are most impacted by exclusionary behavior? In all the conversations about making more inclusive individuals or organizations, how many of the strategies are directed, specific, or even loosely relevant to people from marginalized communities? How can DEI avoid continuing to marginalize the same marginalized communities it seeks to benefit?

How might we provide strategies that help people negatively impacted by exclusionary behavior uphold their dignity? At the same time, how can we ensure that quest for dignity simultaneously leads to career advancement? When seeking to change individuals or organizations, how might we move beyond trying to get the exclusionary to stop excluding and leaders to start leading inclusively? Rather than concentrating energy on trying to change hearts, minds, and systems, how can DEI also foreground personal and professional development for people from underrepresented groups to increase their likelihood to influence, advance, and flourish in the workplace even if that workplace doesn’t make any changes to be more diverse, equitable, or inclusive? In short, as it advocates on behalf of people from underrepresented groups, how can DEI also make them their audience? In this work, a majority of audiences are from majority member communities. At the same time, how can DEI also centralize those who are most often marginalized?

What do you think? Let us know your tips for psychological endurance, self-care, constructive confrontation, calling out/calling in, and self-empowerment that have professionally benefitted you even when exclusionary individuals and organizations haven’t changed? What best practices go beyond the individualist and organizational approach to provide advice directly to people from marginalized groups?

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Actions Speak Louder

If you don't know what I have been up to, then you have been really busy. My new book Actions Speak Louder is set to hit shelves May 31st. I have been delighted to share snippets and gems from the book with teams around the country but also with you all online!

When teams are trying to take action around inclusion, most get stuck either doing nothing (and just talking about things)  or they are doing so many things, that nothing is making a real impact.  Today I urge you to start with actions and change as you go.

Many times it is hard to predict what you need without taking the first step of action to record results. Actions Speak Louder! Start today!

P.S. There is a special group of people I get to host each week for a month all about Actions Speak Louder! If you would like more info, comment below #thedeibook.

Some immediate ways Uplifting Impact is overhauling workplace culture:

• Professional DEI Certification Program
• Uplifting Impact Podcast
• “How to Be an Ally” Virtual Summit

Being an #ALLY is ongoing work. Any uplifting impact we make now, no matter how big or small, will build a better world for future leaders and generations to come. So, let’s keep working together to affect change. Subscribe to continue these Uplifting Conversations!