I Will Not Fumble This Question Again

“How is DEI addressed in your company?”

That was the question I was asked a while back by the leadership team of a DEI Consulting Firm when they were interviewing us for a possible engagement. I fumbled… I talked about the fact that we are a small and newer business, that the founders and partner at the time were all older white males, that sales to this day is a white and male-dominated space, that our roster of executives is diverse, and that we can purposely match on DEI criteria.

It felt like a fumble, like I was making up excuses. While it was certainly honest and factual, it started to make me think about what more I could do.

BOxD | Better Organizations by Design offers a simple test of five questions to assess your and your organization’s DEI readiness:

1. What are the reasons why DEI matters to your organization? What is the motivation behind setting a DEI strategy?
2. Is there a collective internal vision that is results-oriented and identifies DEI goals and actions?
3. Are your company's C-suite, HR, and Finance leaders bought into DEI so far as time, people resources, and money are concerned?
4. Does the culture of your organization allow everyone to explore their own biases in a safe, transparent way?
5. Do you have a solid understanding of your workforce data to know where you stand versus where you want to be?

BOxD suggests that if you answered ‘I don’t know’ to one or more of these questions, you may not be ready to set a successful DEI strategy.

I certainly fell short of having clearly identified and documented DEI goals and actions, and I committed myself to identify those and making them part of the overall vision.

The most interesting question to me was the first one, the reasons and the motivation for setting a DEI strategy. It brought me back to my fumble, as my initial thought back then was that it is 'the right thing to do.'

But, there is so much more I can do, especially when looking at it from different angles:

(1) Current Demographics. Zippia did the research using a database of 30 million profiles, verified against BLS, Census, and current job openings data for accuracy:

• 29.5% of all salespeople are women, while 70.5% are men.
• The average age of an employed salesperson is 41 years old.
• The most common ethnicity of salespeople is White (60.2%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (18.5%), Black or African American (10.7%), and Asian (6.8%).
• In 2021, women earned 88% of what men earned.
• 7% of all salespeople identify as LGBT.

Zippia also shows that those stats have not changed much over the past ten years. And the stats get worse, like in many other professions, when narrowing them from all salespeople to only sales leaders:

• 26% of all Sales Managers are women,
• 8.1% are Hispanic or Latino,
• 3.5% are Black or African American, and
• 3.9% are Asian.

As a matchmaker in the fractional sales leadership space, we can play an active role in changing those stats, one position at a time.

(2) Clients. As a matchmaker between fractional executives and businesses, we are asking clients for the criteria they would like us to use. And in addition to qualifications and past successes, we hear criteria like:

• “We need someone who can speak the lingo of an old, white male banker.”
• “We need someone that stands for our DEI values.”
• “We need someone that personifies the underrepresented communities we are trying to reach.”
• “We need someone with a personal experience in the military or veterans’ community.”
• “We need someone that fits our expressive, quirky culture.

The reason for us to have a DEI strategy is to support our clients in reaching their goals. Creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive sales team will enable our clients to better connect with their specific customer’s needs, ultimately leading to better sales outcomes.

(3) Making the Business Successful. Having a DEI strategy allows us to be purposeful, have the broadest and deepest talent pool for sales leadership, and follow in the footsteps of other great companies.

Nenuca Syquia puts it this way: “No matter how you slice it, if you opt-out of DEI then you’re risking massive attrition and leaving more than half of the talent pool on the table… at this point, we have enough data to show that designing your organization for inclusion is decidedly not just bonus stuff, and it gets companies more than just brownie points.

And let me tell you, the leaders of the companies I partner with know this. They know which economy they’re playing in. They know that the team with the best players wins.  

To get the best players, the leaders I work with know that you have to make your company a place where people can (and want to) contribute at their peak. A place where amazing people want to stick around.”