What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Frustrated Diversity Officers
The time has come to finally get it right
The conversation around social justice in the business setting has rapidly changed. It’s not nearly enough to give lip service to diversity any longer while continuing to recruit and hire as usual. Being called out for virtue-signaling without any meat behind your words is the new PR kiss of death.
Prior to 2020, diversity hiring initiatives were often given a soft pass when they hit roadblocks due to geographic, financial and cultural considerations. As long as your company was making progress toward diversity hiring goals and had a robust policy in place for handling incidents of overt bias, you were doing okay.
That was then.
The killing of George Floyd this spring and the massive public momentum of the Black Lives Matter protests have ended any and all pretension of working toward diversity and inclusion in name only. Silence is the new complicity, and the mandate is clear.
It’s time for American institutions, including the business sector, to do the hard work of searching their souls on where they stand on social equity.
The silver lining? Companies now have a very real opportunity to rebuild their cultures and their hiring practices in ways that will profoundly move the bar on corporate diversity.
“Now is the time for companies to raise their voices, make bold choices, and show an honest commitment to social justice,” writes Ilit Raz, the founder and CEO of Joonko, an HR tech platform that specializes in helping companies find qualified candidates who happen to not be white and/or men.
This is indeed the mandate facing American businesses large and small. “It’s disheartening we have to remind Corporate America that lives matter and racism is intolerable,” Raz continues. “It’s time to call out corporate executives and raise awareness to their foundation to inflict real change upon decision-makers.”
Businesses across the spectrum do seem to be interested in making a difference — at least if we take rising demand for Chief Diversity Officers at face value. As of late July, Glassdoor was home to 55% more open job listings for CDOs than the platform had listed a month prior.
But hiring one is just the beginning. CDOs need as much help as they can get from the entire organization. And for businesses that don’t have the luxury of hiring a CDO, the hard work still remains to be done.
Diversity and the bottom line
Building a more representative workforce has tremendous value beyond enhancing your company’s image …although public perception is vitally important right now. Corporate America learned a harsh lesson this spring. It’s absolutely no longer enough to throw your support behind a hashtag. People want to know what you’re actually doing to change the culture and reinvent your company.
Companies panicked early on when faced with BLM, knowing they had to make some kind of public statement but not entirely sure what else to do beyond that. And they took their licks when consumers clapped back and accused them of virtue signaling, epitomized by the single black square on Twitter for #BlackOutTuesday.
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“To many activists and even consumers, the square is seen as a cop-out and counterproductive to spreading resources related to the nationwide protests,” writes Terry Nguyen. “For institutions like the Guggenheim Museum, which did not invite the first black guest curator in its decades of history to a panel about her work, a post appears meaningless if there is no commitment to change.”
This commitment is a critical component. Too often diversity initiatives are given low priority or, worse, not actually expected or even encouraged to succeed.
The frustrations of the CDO
“Early in my tenure as a CDO,” writes Nadia Owusu in Catapult, “despite having been charged by higher-ups to facilitate workplace conversations about topics like white privilege, unconscious bias, and intersectionality, I was told — often by those same higher-ups — to ‘tone down the incendiary language.’”
She hears similar stories from others in the field, to the point where she sometimes wonders if they really wanted her to succeed at all.
That attitude has rapidly become obsolete. Damped-down diversity lip service no longer passes the sniff test. It’s clear change needs to happen. It’s also clear that a wholesale change in corporate thinking isn’t easy – but it is possible.
“Often as a CDO, you really have seven jobs in one. You’re PR, most recently a pandemic specialist,” said Tiffany Warren, CDO for Onmicom Group, in a CNBC interview. “My number one job has been ‘counselor in chief,’ not only for our agencies in our networks, but certainly my fellow colleagues in diversity, equity and inclusion.”
It’s not about quotas and compliance and good PR anymore; it’s about cultivating a workplace or a learning environment where diversity is sought out, valued and supported. This is the job of the CDO in corporate America, but in smaller companies the work falls to the CEO or others on the leadership team.
Why a change of heart isn’t enough
It’s a cruel reality that at the very moment companies most need someone in the role of diversity officer, they are struggling to afford it. For younger companies in particular, handing out c-suite titles isn’t exactly a priority. Yet these smaller organizations have an advantage; they don’t have the massive task of tearing down and rebuilding a deeply entrenched culture.
Big or small, corporate America has to make this happen, and we should look to those who are getting it right, like David Kenny, CEO (and now also CDO) of Nielsen.
“We all must be anti-racist,” Kenny said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “And we need to create the space to have open and honest dialogues about these issues.”
Kenny now starts annual reviews talking about inclusion metrics, instead of tacking it on at the end. When the topic is front and center in your team’s mind, they will focus on it and change will happen, he says. “We talk about: How are you doing with your team? How diverse is it? Who got promoted and who got hired? I read the engagement survey data to see what each team is telling me about their leader,” Kenny explains.
Perhaps ironically, we can look to the tech industry itself (often cited for exclusionary hiring practices and toxic bro culture) for affordable tools to help CDOs succeed. Joonko’s diversity recruiting technology solution, for one, is currently being used by companies like Intuit, Adidas and American Express, to help ensure that their recruits not only meet the job requirements but can also enhance their team’s diversity.
We can do better
Getting serious about diversity is not a trend. It’s part of the new normal. A company that isn’t ready to commit isn’t ready to be successful in a post-pandemic world. This year opened up a wave of awareness. It’s time to fix the exclusive nature of too many companies and organizations, and we need to summon the collective will to do the hard work ahead of us.
