The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

According to a survey by Glassdoor, more than 50% of people think their companies should be doing more to increase workforce diversity. It all started in 1964, more than 50 years ago, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The act, of course, applies to employers. Yet after all of the civil unrest we experienced in 2020, how many times did you hear a CEO or spokesperson for an organization say that they are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture? Probably too many to count.

When Collins Aerospace, a unit of Raytheon Technologies (Raytheon has 181,000 employees and 61,000 engineers), recognized their organization’s culture was not inclusive for women in leadership roles, they reached out to Leading Women for our expertise and advice.

In 2020, organizations became acutely aware of the importance of DE&I due to the social unrest and volatility swirling around them. Many are now attempting to figure out how to be supportive of their diverse employee population. What should they put their energy and resources towards that will actually have a positive impact? This is the question that many organizations are struggling to answer, and few are getting right. As the CEO of the global advisor Leading NOW, I speak to CEOs, CHROs and CDOs every day, and the most common thing they say is, "We've been hiring diverse employees for years, but our efforts really haven't changed anything…now what should we do?"

In 2020, organizations became acutely aware of the importance of DE&I due to the social unrest and volatility swirling around them. Many are now attempting to figure out how to be supportive of their diverse employee population. What should they put their energy and resources towards that is actually going to have a positive impact? This is THE question that many organizations, regardless of size, are struggling to answer––and few are getting right.

Continuing our blog series and 4 Steps to Making a Real & Lasting DE&I Impact, we covered step #3 and how to build inclusive leadership across your business. We explored how creating a culture of inclusion can start to address our diversity challenges and ensure that all talent is welcomed, valued, and developed. The next part of the prescription addresses the ‘E’ in DE&I, which I feel is the ‘Cinderella’ of the equation. Equity is critical to long-term success, but often the poor relation when it comes to share of company attention, action, and resources.

There has been much written about the business case for a more inclusive workplace as organizations embrace diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. In our latest blog series, 4 Steps to Making a Real & Lasting DE&I Impact, we addressed why the traditional business case has not delivered the outcomes promised, the importance of level-setting with a cultural assessment, and then building a road map to reach your inclusion goals. Next up, let’s talk about building inclusive leadership across your business (#3 of the four steps). There is no single training session that is going to solve what I believe is the omnipresent challenge––or opportunity––of our time.

In a recent blog, I addressed how to change the culture of your company to be more inclusive for all, and the four steps organizations must take to make a real and lasting DE&I impact: Assess Current State Align Leadership & Develop Your Roadmap Engage & Develop Your Team Members Deploy & Embed Revamped Mechanisms These four steps are critical to your DE&I journey and cannot be overstated. Remember, to make real progress, people, and the organizational cultures they are part of, must change.

Last week, I discovered that the arthritic hip that I had been protecting from too much exercise over the past 12 years was, in fact, not arthritis at all. It turns out that it is an inflexibility in my lower back that would have benefitted greatly from a decade or so of much more exercise than I was doing. The discomfort in my hip, knee and ankle was a compensation for the inflexibility in my back… An inflexibility that I should have been actively managing for quite a while now.

A Catalyst for an Inclusive Culture We all know that mentorship can help pave the way for career success on the road to leadership. We also know that leaders drive culture. But for a culture to truly be inclusive, leaders must model inclusivity in all that they do. For organizations and leaders who recognize the value of creating an inclusive culture, but struggle to fundamentally shift their culture to one of inclusion for all, one proven and profound method is a formalized Reverse Mentoring program. Reverse Mentoring enables people in more senior positions to gain insight from having regular, semi-structured conversations with team members who are likely to see the world from a different perspective. The process aids in better decision-making, higher retention rates for diverse talent through greater job satisfaction, and giving invaluable exposure to under-represented talent, nurturing allies and advocates within senior ranks. Simply put, Reverse Mentoring is really about inclusion. In addition to having a positive impact on your company’s culture, Reverse Mentoring will liberate the power of all humans to generate the desired business outcomes needed to compete in today’s business environment.

DE&I (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) is a part of every conversation I have these days––not just because I am leading the commercial strategies for Leading NOW and it’s my job to advise organizations how to be inclusive for all, but rather because organizations are finally realizing what our research has proven all along––that building a diverse company culture starts at the top with leadership. And while organizations have tried to increase diversity in their workforce, leaders are now recognizing they’ve been missing the mark by spending a lot of money and resources without capturing the true value of diversity.