WTF is happening to DEI?

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Since taking office, convicted felon Donald Trump and his unelected partner Elon Musk have wasted no time attempting to gut diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. 

I’m completely heartbroken – and I know I’m in good company. We’re watching devastating executive orders be implemented and critical work be dismantled at the hands of fascist leadership. We’re watching private companies that are not beholden to any federal funding restrictions at all obey in advance, significantly harming their employees, vendors, and customers. And we’re watching organizations we care about deeply that do rely on federal funding (some of which employ us and/or our loved ones) torn between two terrible options: 

• Stop doing DEI work (and make workplaces unfair to most staff).

• Keep doing DEI work (and risk losing the bulk of the funding that allows them to exist and pay any staff at all). 

It feels like a no-win game. And for many publicly funded institutions, it is. But for organizations that have any wiggle room at all,  I* propose a third option.

Let’s keep doing the work, and call it something else. “DEI” was never a very useful label anyway – it’s used to describe a wide umbrella of work, some of which in fact furthers oppression instead of alleviating it.

For this to work, we have to do something that we’ve needed to do since long before Trump took office:

Let’s get aligned about what “the work” is.

Some of “the work” can’t happen right now - like history month observations and trainings that have the word “diversity” in them at places like public institutions and organizations that rely on federal grant money. It’s devastating and harmful. But to be honest, it’s not where we generally see the most impactful DEI work happening.

The most impactful DEI work that we see in organizations is largely NOT the kind of programming that’s under scrutiny right now.

I’m talking about the stuff that actually makes organizations more demographically diverse, helps them treat staff more equitably across demographic groups, and helps them feel and be substantively more inclusive to staff from marginalized groups. To the extent that this kind of work is under scrutiny, we can usually very easily call it something else — right now, I’m going with values-aligned people strategy.

I’m talking about work like:

• Building clearer and more effective processes for hiring (which is what actually helps us diversify organizations).

• Training managers to engage in productive and routine feedback conversations (which is a huge part of ensuring everyone gets helpful feedback that lead to promotions, not just people who are socially more friendly with (and more likely to look like) management).

• Articulating clear behavioral norms for how colleagues are expected to treat each other at work (so that people are held accountable for causing harm that perpetuates oppression).

• Putting strong systems in place for more transparent performance review conversations (so that people have more mobility to progress in their careers without needing to have an “in” with management). 

And so much more of the less flashy but deeply impactful work that DEI strategists do with our clients every day.

Whereas one-off workshops about traditional “DEI” topics often result in even less equitable workplaces, this kind of structural work actually results in more sustainably diverse, equitable organizations where people feel included.

I’ve been a DEI consultant for eight years, and the following has happened at least once with every single long-term client I’ve ever had:

We’ll be midway through an engagement, deep in the work, and a high-level executive (often one who was skeptical of DEI work when we first started working together) will ask me,

“Wow. It feels like you’re teaching us best practices for managing an organization that we really should have already had in place. Is this really DEI work?” 

I love it when this happens because I get to share something people usually don’t understand until they’re really in the work: DEI work, when done effectively, is mostly “best practices for managing an organization.”

Why? Because if you don’t have strong management systems in place for running your organization, you’re probably going to run it inequitably. (Not because you’re a bad person, but because you have a human brain, and human brains are full of lots of biases that are misaligned with our explicit beliefs.)

But if you do build systems, the strongest ones — the ones that result in you achieving your mission most effectively and efficiently — are usually equitable. The “diversity” and “inclusion” parts are pretty easy to incorporate from there when they don’t come as natural byproducts — which they often do.

So that’s what we’re going to focus on – keeping at it, one foot in front of the other, together. 

Want to join us? Get a feel for what I’m talking about? Great timing. I’ll be offering a free webinar series this year to show you how you can use these “best practices for managing an organization” in hiring, and we’re starting next month!

Want more? Learn about my other work – all done through the lens of helping organizations build strong foundations – here.

*I’m not the first or only DEI practitioner to propose this. I’m grateful to get to learn from and with colleagues who are aligned with this perspective, including Lily Zheng, who wrote this great article about a new framework to replace DEI.

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