It’s one thing to say diversity, equity, and inclusion are priorities. It’s another to set meaningful DEI goals and hold yourself accountable to them.
One often overlooked quality that can help with both goal-setting and measuring progress is vulnerability — at every level of an organization.
To collect meaningful data, employees from underrepresented groups must be willing to share their true experiences at work. If you’re going to turn data into an actionable plan of improvement, you have to be willing to admit where you’re falling short. All of that requires openness and honesty if you’re serious about achieving measurable change.
“This is a vulnerable piece of work that we have to all be committed to doing, where we’re sharing pieces of ourselves and our identity,” LinkedIn Learning instructor Tana M. Session. Session told an audience at Talent Connect 2022.
Vulnerability can be uncomfortable, but pushing past it can create a culture of inclusion where all employees feel like they can bring their authentic selves to work. In a breakout session, Tana and Megan Hogan, chief diversity officer for Goldman Sachs, described how vulnerability can be a game changer for those that want to create a DEI plan that gets results.
1. You have to be honest about where you’re starting
You have to know what’s not working before you can create a plan to fix it. How many of your senior executives are women? Are your Black employees leaving? To answer those kinds of questions, track your workforce composition by factors such as age, race, and gender.
And don’t forget about intersectionality, Megan said, referring to the term that describes people who experience multiple types of marginalization. If you’re only looking at data surrounding the hiring and retention of women in your organization, you may think your organization is doing fine. But if you drill down to data about LGBTQ+ women, you may find that that is where your spikes in attrition are coming from, Megan said.
When you assess your starting place, it may not be pretty. “I will have the CEO and his entire executive team and he’ll tell me, ‘I don’t know how we got here,’” Tana said. “And I’ll say, ‘What do you mean?’ And he’ll say, ‘Everyone here is white. How did that happen?’”
Once those awkward and honest conversations occur, however, progress begins.
2. Employees need a safe space to share
To know how inclusive your workplace is, you have to have input from employees. But not everybody is willing to share. “Oftentimes,” Tana said, “when we do these surveys, we have a category that we call ‘I Choose Not to Disclose.’ We know on average about 15% of the employees on these surveys will not disclose any demographic information about themselves because they are concerned — especially if they’re part of a small community — that they will be easily identified.”
To alleviate those concerns, you have to build trust. Explain to employees why this data is important and show them that DEI has the buy-in of company leaders, as well as their direct manager.
When Goldman Sachs launched a global self-identification campaign, “we really had to dig deep,” Megan said, “and think about what the value proposition is for our employees to disclose sensitive information about themselves.” Their solution was having senior leaders share why this initiative was important to them. Or, as Megan put it, “Having someone talk in a video that, ‘I may be a cisgender white man, but diversity, equity, and inclusion are very important to me, and understanding who our talent is and their lived experience is important to me.’”
The results of this global campaign were impressive: 98% of survey participants self-identified. “If I talk to any organization,” Megan said, “they usually hit around 70%. So, 98% is huge.”
3. Vulnerability has to come from the top
If you want employees to disclose personal information, show them that top leaders are willing to be vulnerable too.
“When we saw a rise in anti-Semitism in 2020 and 2021, we encouraged our CEO to talk about anti-Semitic hate messages he received when he first became CEO,” said Megan of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. “By him talking about it at a town hall, people said, ‘Wow, even the CEO of Goldman Sachs can be vulnerable in front of all of our employees talking about something that was very personal to him. I, as an individual, can talk about those stories too and build connectivity and commonality across difference with my employees.’”
4. Expect to feel vulnerable when findings are disclosed
Once you have data that shows your company’s true marks on diversity, some leaders may feel uncomfortable sharing it, or they may want to limit who sees it, maybe by keeping it internal rather than making it available to the public.
Create a plan for sharing the findings that makes stakeholders as comfortable as possible.
“Some of my clients,” Tana said, “were very open and willing to put this information on their website because they wanted to have that high level of accountability from future employees, customers, clients, and investors.” On the other hand, she has seen other company leaders say they would share all of their data once they have made more progress.
Neither approach is wrong, Tana said, as long as the data is used to hold the company accountable to its goals and analyzed to find ways to improve. “They know their people and their culture better than I do,” she said, “and, more importantly, I want them to feel comfortable, because once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.”
5. Build comfort before rewarding DEI efforts
One strategy that is gaining traction is tying DEI goals to compensation and rewarding company and team leaders for meeting them. While that could be a good long-term plan, Tana and Megan both recommend against implementing that tactic immediately after making diversity a priority.
“That’s going to feel punitive and we don’t want that,” Tana said. “We want them to come on this journey with us, but we have to recognize that everyone is on their own journey of acceptance and understanding.”
Plus, to think an organization will reach all of its diversity goals in a year or to expect no dips and backslides is unrealistic when a DEI strategy is new, Megan pointed out.
Once goals are set, give employees a couple of years to get comfortable having the tough conversations that are necessary to build an inclusive environment. Then, meet with your managers and identify goals that they can be compensated for in the future.
Final thoughts
Bringing vulnerability into the workplace isn’t easy. “For years,” Tana noted, “we said we don’t talk about race, politics, or religion in the workplace, and now we’re saying, ‘Let’s respectfully talk about everything.’”
Such talk can go a long way toward creating a greater sense of belonging among employees. In 2020, a year rife with challenges and instability, managers seemed more willing to share pieces of themselves, Tana said. She’s hoping that does not change. “That was such a great pivotal point,” she said, “for us to really think about what does diversity mean for your organization? How do we want people to feel?”
Just as importantly, Tana continued, “how do we make certain that the things that they experienced before, like microaggressions, unconscious bias — those types of things don’t continue to happen?”
Creating a safe space where vulnerability is practiced and respected can be a good first step.
Courtesy LinkedIn Talent Blog. By Tamara E. Holmes. Article available here.
