How Institutional Complicity Threatens DEI Initiatives

There's a good chance, if your workplace has attempted #diversity, #equity, and #inclusion work, that it's at times fallen into the trap of admiring your problems rather than solving them. I've seen this dynamic play out nearly a dozen times. An organization kicks off an inclusion campaign with a big event spotlighting employee experiences and raising awareness about exclusion. It's a big lift from employee volunteers, but it feels more than worth it. People's eyes are opened, and their appetite for change is huge. Committees get formed. Initiatives are launched. Tasks get divvied up and slowly start moving. The following year, to mark the anniversary of their efforts, leaders organize another event. Executives attend and speak out about their commitment to DEI. Employee volunteers once again make a big effort — whether to share their stories, publicize the event, or show up in great numbers — to help it succeed. Attendees there are broadly supportive. They nod solemnly at remaining barriers, cheer loudly at successes, and leave feeling satisfied about their commitment. But behind the scenes, the committees are slowing down. Change is taking longer than it should. At some point, leaders might try to put on another event. Executives might still be willing to show up. Attendees might still be excited to commemorate and celebrate. But the volunteers don't materialize. No one wants to share their story. No one wants to put in that unpaid labor yet another time. Behind the scenes, the committees have been disbanded or abandoned as their efforts to end exclusion have all hit major roadblocks to changing an organization that seemed more excited to talk about their problems than actually fix them. This is how DEI efforts die in real life; not from a social media firestorm (though those don't help) but from the slow suffocation of real change in favor of empty performances. These artifacts are about as similar to DEI as shed snakeskin is to the snake itself: pretty, but destined for the compost heap. Escaping this trap of admiring our problems — be they racism, sexism, ableism, inequality or otherwise — requires that we shift our focus from events to interventions. For every action we take, we have to ask ourselves: "what issue is this working to solve?" "How will this effort fix a problem?" "How is it incomplete, and what other work is required to follow through?" Measurement and accountability are absolute requirements. If you're working to end exclusion, then you measure progress by measuring inclusion, whether people's feelings of respect, value, and safety, or through proxy metrics like retention and engagement. "Number of event attendees" is irrelevant. If your interventions make a difference, scale them up. If your interventions don't move the needle, put your effort elsewhere. It can be easy in this moment to treat public commitment to DEI as the end-all-be-all. But impact, both then and now, is what matters most.

Why dismantaling DEI should worry every Leader I've been watching the current narrative around diversity with growing concern. DEI teams disappearing, programmes being stripped back, and a subtle shift in organisational priorities that feels eerily familiar. Then I picked up Matthew Syed’s "Rebel Ideas" and the CIA story hit me hard. Pre-9/11, the CIA had created what they thought was excellence. Their recruitment targeted a specific profile: predominantly white, male, Ivy League graduates. On paper, they had the "best" talent. The devastating reality? - 90% of officers couldn't speak the languages of regions they monitored - Teams shared identical backgrounds, education, and thinking patterns - Critical intelligence was missed because "different" informants weren't deemed credible - Groupthink led to catastrophic blind spots Sound familiar? It should. Because right now, as organisations dismantle their DEI initiatives, we're sleepwalking towards the same trap. When we remove the structural support for diversity, we default to what's comfortable - hiring people who think like us, look like us, sound like us. This isn't about politics. It's about survival. The evidence is clear: diverse teams make better decisions, solve problems more effectively, and see threats and opportunities others miss. But maintaining diversity requires intention and structure. Without it? We're building modern-day CIA blind spots in our organisations. I've seen this firsthand building the Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence at EY. When you bring in different perspectives, you don't just get different answers - you get questions you never thought to ask. To every leader considering scaling back DEI: please read those first 40 pages of Rebel Ideas. Then ask yourself: What critical signals might your homogeneous team be missing right now? History has already shown us the cost of perspective blindness. Let's not pay that price again. #Leadership #CognitiveBlindness #DiversityMatters #OrganisationalChange #DEI

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗗𝗘𝗜 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝗹 (𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀) I once watched a company celebrate its new DEI initiative with fanfare: glossy materials, dedicated team, ambitious targets. Two years later, the same leadership team made a critical hiring decision. The role went to "someone who fits our culture." The DEI team wasn't in the room. They found out later, like everyone else. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗜 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗱: 𝗗𝗘𝗜 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺. When inclusion becomes a standalone function; disconnected from how leaders actually think, decide, & behave, it remains performative. A department. A dashboard. Something you report on, not something you live. I've worked with organizations across continents, & the pattern is consistent: real change happens only when DEI stops being an initiative and starts becoming infrastructure. It shows up in leadership conversations, not as a checkbox, but as a lens. 𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨? 𝘞𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨? It lives in performance reviews; where inclusion isn't an annual training module but a competency we assess, reward, & hold people accountable for. It's woven into governance, especially around AI & tech, where bias doesn't announce itself; it embeds quietly into systems that scale. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗳𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 & 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁. When a senior executive pauses a meeting to say, "𝘞𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦." When promotion criteria are interrogated for hidden bias. When flexibility is extended without penalty because we've designed roles around outcomes, not optics. I've met leaders who genuinely believed they valued diversity, until... we examined their last ten hires, their meeting dynamics, their succession plans. The gap between intention and impact was staggering. And humbling. 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 (or a mere title of a fab place to work). 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿. Fair access. Fair opportunity. Fair consideration; applied consistently, not selectively. When #DEI is ornamental, it disappears under pressure. When it's operational, it becomes the way decisions get made, talent gets developed, and culture gets built. I'm being very selective on the multiple invitations my team is receiving for blocking my calendar as a 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 #𝗜𝗪𝗗𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲, 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, else its all jazz... & honestly what would have my attention most is the intent to not just shift the needle, but, allow the same needle to burst the bubble! 𝙒𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙪𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙨@𝙘𝙤𝙧𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙚-𝙙𝙞𝙫𝙖.𝙘𝙤𝙢

A heckler in one of my recent posts trashed DEI, asking how many people really care about the color of my skin. Here's my rebuttal: racism isn't just a one-on-one problem. One of many gross misunderstandings about racism is that it's often seen as just involving two people. In some cases it is, like someone believing Black and other racially marginalized employees weren't fit for corporate leadership. But often, racism has a ripple effect. Here's how: 👉🏾 Institutional. HR, management, and C-suite executives at Company X harbor the belief that white people make better leaders, no matter the qualifications. Their leadership pyramid becomes snow-capped, or disproportionately white. 👉🏾 Structural. Individuals at other institutions harbor the racist belief that people of color shouldn't be in leadership positions, so one organization isn’t the problem. Now, you could have 50, 100, or 1,000 organizations with the same snow-capping effect. 👉🏾 Internalized. Racially marginalized folks who do manage to climb the corporate ladder can and do internalize the racism they experience. Adopting English names, favoring white applicants, and assimilation to white American cultural norms are common ways to assimilate---and get ahead. So really, it doesn't matter if millions of other people don't care about the color of my skin. Enough people in all the wrong places do. This is why we have systemic problems such as the racial wealth gap, mass incarceration, and DEI being canceled at colleges and universities. When people in power don't check their biases, bad things happen. #DiversityAndInclusion #Diversity #RacialEquity #Equality #AntiRacism Image Credit: Multicultural Council of Saskatchewan [Image description: Diagram of the four levels of racism: structural, systemic, interpersonal, and internalized.]

I can’t stop thinking about a historical contrast we don’t like to name out loud. After Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation was the law of the land. And still, plenty of institutions took their time. They delayed. They narrowed. They slow-walked. Courts had to step in again and again. There was strategy and real stamina in the resistance. Fast forward to the recent anti-DEI pressure. This time, the law wasn’t settled. The guidance was being challenged. The courts were still sorting it out. And yet so many institutions moved immediately. Offices dismantled. Staff reassigned or let go. Programs erased or renamed beyond recognition. Language scrubbed like it had never been there. No drawn-out legal fights. No visible effort to hold the line while facts developed. Just speed. And a whole lot of “we have to be careful” energy that somehow only shows up in one direction. Think about it. That contrast is hard to ignore. When institutions really don’t want to change, they’ve proven they can delay for years. But when equity work came under political pressure, many folded in months. That’s not just legal risk. That’s leadership, conviction, and what feels truly worth defending. Now campuses are sitting in the aftermath. The legal landscape didn’t collapse the way many feared. But internal trust did. Here’s the part leaders are just starting to understand, maybe. Rebuilding a DEI office isn’t the hard part. Reposting positions isn’t the hard part. Putting language back on a website isn’t the hard part. The hard part is credibility. Students noticed. Faculty noticed. Staff noticed. People watched their institutions retreat before they were actually required to. And now the question isn’t just, “Are you bringing it back?” It’s, “What happens the next time this gets uncomfortable?” That’s not a compliance issue. That’s a leadership reckoning. I’m talking with colleges and universities that are ready to move past panic decisions and start doing the harder work of rebuilding trust, aligning legal strategy with mission, and strengthening how leadership shows up under pressure. Restarting programs is administrative. Restoring credibility is cultural, relational, and strategic. And it takes a lot more courage than taking a webpage down ever did.

The real problem with eliminating DEI programs is the potential return of the mediocre white male. As companies retreat from diversity initiatives amid political pressures, we're not just losing buzzwords and HR programs. We risk reverting to a system where connections trump competence, and mediocrity thrives under the protection of homogeneity. I've spent decades watching organizations struggle with talent acquisition. The data is clear on 2 things: - Teams with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds perform better; - When companies rely solely on traditional networks, they perpetuate existing imbalances and also wind up missing candidates with the most merit. Consider this: While men represent roughly 50% of the population, they occupy 70% of leadership positions. Black Americans comprise 13% of the population but hold just 3% of executive roles. The solution is to elevate standards rather than abandon them by looking for what I call ME&I: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence across every step of the talent pipeline. There are 3 parts of your pipeline to look at: 1. Start with your search function. Examine where your candidates come from to ensure that you’re sourcing diverse candidates. If you’re only getting white males, you may be missing an excellent candidate. 2. Next, selection. Selection should start with finding the highest quality candidates, but if two candidates perform equally well, there’s value in choosing the minority candidate, especially if your company currently has a discrepancy internally. 3. Finally, integration. True integration means creating environments where all perspectives get heard and valued. Once critical mass is achieved, this becomes self-sustaining - you’ll have more of a built-in support system for employees of different backgrounds. Let's be clear: Ditching DEI programs without addressing underlying process flaws doesn't advance meritocracy, it undermines it. The choice isn't between merit and diversity. The highest-performing organizations know that having a meritocracy means you need to make sure that diverse candidates have the same chance to show their merit as others.

Writing to share a new article just published in The Journal of Higher Education with my doctoral students Alexia Oduro (lex-o), M.A.  and Marcus M. Martin:  “Nothing Will Change”: Black Staff Counternarratives on Anti-Black Racism and DEI in Higher Education 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ga6_heCB We center the voices of more than 500 Black staff who participated in the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates (NACCC) to better understand how anti-Blackness shapes campus workplaces—and how performative DEI efforts often fail to deliver real change. This work feels especially timely as institutions publicly retreat from DEI commitments while also insisting that “nothing has changed.” These narratives from Black staff make clear that much hasn’t changed—and that’s precisely the problem. Their stories reveal how anti-Blackness is built into everyday structures of higher education and what real accountability would require. Working with Alexia and Marcus on this study was deeply rewarding. Their insight, care, and commitment to equity pushed this project to be more honest and courageous. #HigherEd #BlackStaff #RacialEquity #DEI #CampusClimate #CriticalRaceTheory

I was asked by HR magazine last week to comment on McDonald's rollback of its DEI initiatives. I said two things in the piece that I’m expanding upon here: ONE. Rolling back on any DEI initiative is not *inherently* bad. Just as a sales strategy may not prove fruitful for delivering more sales, DEI interventions may not in fact deliver meaningful change for the marginalised folks intended. In both circumstances, a pivot is advisable. What’s key to determine how effective a DEI intervention is, is to have a measurement framework in place upfront, upon which to evaluate the intervention. Following the sales example: if there was no information on current revenue, or the revenue target, it would be very hard to determine whether the new sales strategy was doing anything positive.  Often, frustratingly, with DEI interventions both the starting point and end destination are missing. TWO. Despite this possibility, it seems in the case of McDonald’s - based on their own press statement on the matter - the rollback is not related to effectiveness, but rather from a position of capitulation to, or indeed enthusiastic alignment with, the right wing forces at play right now in the US. This will be concerning for marginalised franchisees and staff. Further, this is now a ‘worldwide’ policy. That a very specific US legal terrain is being exported globally is not new of course, but it is worth underlining how worrying this is. First, deploying the blueprint of any country’s inequity landscape to another is neither an equitable nor strategic move. It likely fosters legitimate distrust in DEI, by disconnecting DEI activities and strategies from the realities and needs specific in that location. This can drive backlash to DEI in and of itself. So to export strategy from one country to others when what’s exported is the very suppression of activity towards more equitable workplaces - is very alarming. In such instances I can only conclude that there is ideological alignment with what’s exported. 

The losses that people, communities and organizations are now experiencing are real. Yet I keep hearing people say, “The work is still happening — we’re just calling it something else.” Across all sectors — government, business, higher education, and nonprofits — the rollback of DEI is NOT just a matter of semantics. It’s the dismantling of institutional knowledge and the structural removal of capacity. When we minimize these losses, we deny the real harm: lost resources, lost trust, and lost psychological safety. Employee surveys show that belonging, equity, and trust decline when DEI efforts are cut — and employees from marginalized groups report feeling less safe and less supported. Leaders, we cannot face challenges unless we are willing to name them. This moment is asking us to defend our capacity to name reality, to hold onto the institutional wisdom we’ve built, and to lead with courage. Whatever language your organization uses, the real question is: Are your words aligned with what you actually believe about truth-telling, accountability, and whose experiences matter?

A common experience of women and people of color involves taking their most prominent and high-priority qualities and disparaging them in an attempt to turn these strengths into weaknesses. This tactic undermines individual potential while perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases. The strategy is simple yet effective: identify the qualities that make women and people of color stand out—be it leadership, resilience, creativity, or empathy—and then redefine these traits as flaws. Terms like "DEI hire" (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hire) are used to diminish the value of these individuals' achievements, implying they are products of affirmative action rather than merit. This approach tries to invalidate their hard work to perpetuate a narrative that they are less competent or deserving than their peers. Historically, women who displayed assertiveness or ambition were often labeled as "bossy" or "aggressive," while men exhibiting the same traits were praised for their leadership. Similarly, people of color demonstrating resilience and innovation in the face of adversity were often depicted as exceptions rather than the norm, with their successes attributed to luck or external factors rather than their inherent abilities. In today's workplace, this strategy manifests through microaggressions and coded language. Women and people of color are frequently described using terms that subtly or overly undermine their achievements. A woman who is passionate about her work might be described as "emotional," while a person of color advocating for equity and justice might be labeled a "troublemaker" or "token hire." These tactics are part of individual interactions embedded in institutional practices. Performance reviews, hiring processes, and promotional criteria often reflect these biases, further entrenching the notion that women and people of color are less capable or deserving. The impact of this strategy is far-reaching affecting the individuals targeted shaping societal perceptions and expectations. By consistently undermining the achievements of women and people of color, this strategy reinforces stereotypes and limits opportunities for advancement. It creates a hostile environment where individuals are constantly forced to prove their worth, often at the expense of their mental and emotional well-being. Furthermore, this strategy perpetuates a cycle of inequality. By devaluing the contributions of women and people of color, it limits the diversity of perspectives and ideas in the workplace, hindering innovation and progress while also discouraging future generations from aspiring to leadership roles. Change requirest us to recognize and call out these tactics whenever they appear, actively questioning the language used to describe women and people of color, advocating for fair and unbiased evaluation processes, and promoting a culture of inclusion and respect.