Collective power has purpose in that it holds us all accountable on an individual level to the disparities and exclusionary biases we all hold. It allows us to put our individual powers together to unsettle these disparities on a personal and professional level; creating a work environment where everyone can feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work. Also, it’s important to recognize that we are all at different stages of our respective journeys in doing the work of practicing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). Fortunately, your organization’s leadership can create a diversity and inclusion strategy that trickles from the top down to guide and encourage employees to use their individual influence to educate themselves and others, learn from diverse voices, and come from a place of understanding for all lived experiences. Your leaders can leverage collective power to operationalize DEIB, in order to work better together as a whole. And, use their power and influence within their purview to try to connect with their employees in a human-centered way, with intention and understanding to listen to their lived experiences.
How can leadership start leveraging collective power?
Collective power really starts on an individual level. On a personal level, it’s imperative that your organization’s leadership is willing to work independently and take personal responsibility to develop an understanding of how DEIB can become integrated into their values. When we understand how diversity broadens our perspectives, we begin to put into practice equitable opportunities for diverse voices. This practice soon leads to the natural tendency to assess where inclusion is lacking and work to build a culture where everyone trusts that they can bring the best of their whole self. Leaders who are prepared to thread the value of DEIB into their personal relationships, with their friends and family, as well as in every aspect of the organization demonstrate an authentic commitment to advancing the work. They are leading inclusively in action. Collective power should not just be your organization’s way to communicate in hashtags or create emotional rally cries on your social media pages alone. Collective power isn’t performative. It is a genuine and authentic commitment to listen, learn, and find commonality with those that may not share their same lived experiences.
This is why the work starts with your organization’s commitment to actually doing the DEIB work at a leadership level. That means DEIB becomes embedded in their personal values and is maintained throughout all interactions, and aspects in their lives. Leaders are encouraged to find resources to educate themselves on the cultural and lived experiences of their employees. This can be translated into employee resource groups (ERGs) showcasing a group reading list during heritage months, sponsorship of employees with aspirations for a leadership track, and training sessions inviting colleagues to learn from each other as contributors to an inclusive work culture.
Where there are blindspots in a leader’s understanding of diverse experiences, they can engage with DEIB experts and coaches to create a strategy, with goals, tested against metrics, and measured by consistent assessments. The strategy must be a top-down, bottom-up approach. Everyone in the organization has to be receptive to doing this work at some level if you want DEIB to be reflected genuinely in your organization. Remembering that everyone is at a different stage of the DEIB journey, it’s still possible for DEIB to be advanced within your mission, vision, and values of your organization. The more your organization’s leadership can work with everyone, at every level, as a whole, the more DEIB can be operationalized and sustained.
Collective power must first be human centered. Even if your leadership doesn’t feel comfortable using their influence at a company-wide level, threading DEIB can be done on a 1-to-1 level. Your leadership should be encouraged to meet regularly with their teams; not just about the work that needs to be done, but also encourage connection and understanding of how everyone is bringing their whole self to the workplace. Whether it be a single mom raising three kids under age 10, or a young man who is navigating racial discrimination outside of the organization, recognizing the lived experiences of employees helps build empathy at a human level. There is a valuable connection that happens from even the smallest gesture of asking employees what they did during the holidays, and listening to their response with the intention of seeking to understand, learn, and discover commonalities.. Build a rapport that elicits trust, rather than looking to see whether employees fit into the traditional social networking norms like golf tournaments or ski trips. Encourage your leadership to be open to the input of varying employment levels, to be receptive and accountable to really seeking to understand their employees.
Who does it start with?
I cannot stress this enough that DEIB work has to extend beyond the purview of your Human Resources department. Therefore, collective power starts with everyone in your organization, most especially those who hold executive-level influence.
Your senior management can prove themselves to be prime examples of collective power in action. If they are new to this work, have them partner with a DEIB coach to better understand the purpose behind this work. It’s difficult for anyone to embrace anything if they don’t understand the “why” behind it. DEIB coaches can help leaders develop a DEIB strategy that works within their purview and for every department in the organization. They can help build committees, and integrate DEIB into the organization’s mission, vision, and values, giving broader purpose to the DEIB work.
Your senior management and a DEIB coach can determine a strategic approach and the timeframe for reaching your organization’s goals. They can provide an initial assessment to showcase where your organization is today vs. how you see the organization evolving over the next 5-10 years. A DEIB coach can also advise how to effectively engage ERGs, department heads, and line managers to educate and engage them in the purpose of this work. They can delineate responsibilities throughout your organization and at every level; so that there are clear DEIB responsibilities and goals. They can also engage Human Resources and recruiting firms to create a hiring and growth pipeline for diverse candidates, including the creation of apprenticeships and leadership sponsorship programs to retain diverse employees. They can provide strategies that ensure that everyone in your organization believes it is their personal responsibility to commit to DEIB in a way that aligns with the organization’s mission, vision, and values. There are endless actions that can be implemented in operationalizing the work of DEIB. It’s a matter of committing to these actions that helps to embed DEIB into your organization’s strategic plan.
How can collective power be used to create a more inclusive workplace?
If your leadership is truly committing to collective power, then they are committing to a workplace that is representative and inclusive of the collective. This is in both how your organization’s workplace looks and feels. As humans, we are not a monolith. Therefore we cannot be generalized according to our gender, ethnicities, physical abilities, and sexual orientation, as it is our lived experiences and variety of preferences that adds depth to our diverse perspectives. An organization that is authentically committed to DEIB work is going to prove inclusive of diverse experiences and ideas. People of different backgrounds are going to not only show up and stay within your organization, they are going to experience genuine belonging.
There is a consensus that inclusion helps companies advance; but there is a lot of controversy around how to create a diverse and inclusive work environment. And, in order to create a work environment that reflects everyone, you must look at your hiring composition. Representation matters because it’s what fosters a sense of belonging. I have been in situations where I have been the only woman of color in the room and I felt suffocated by difference, questioning how I could possibly belong in the space. If there had just been other people who looked like me, I would have felt reassured in identifying with others in the room, while also feeling genuinely welcomed to be there offering my unique lived experiences and diverse perspective. This is the difference between being invited to serve on a board to simply check the tokenizing diversity box and being invited to a board based on the merit of your expertise shared with other diverse board members who equally contribute the value of their own personal/professional merit.
Build a blueprint around what you would like your composition to look like reflective of the market where you conduct business; include an equitable percentage for each diverse group. Ensure the ongoing narrative for hiring is based on personal/professional merit. When you partner percentages with the conversation of merit, you welcome in a diverse group of people with a communicated emphasis on the qualifying merits for which they were hired and the valued perspective they will add to the company’s mission, vision, and DEIB values We have to end the narrative that White employees somehow are deserving of any given role with little inquiry, yet people of color, or others from different marginalized groups, are solely brought on as diversity hires. Quite frankly, that’s a discriminatory perspective that overlooks the fact that all employees are hired based on their qualifications and professional/educational background that matches a company’s hiring needs and workplace culture.
This circumvents the idea of quotas and tokenism (and might I add, nepotism). These checkbox approaches to recruitment and hiring have negative connotations, most especially for those in marginalized communities; because these approaches create segregated thinking that is the antithesis to building an inclusive workplace that fosters a sense of belonging. The checkbox methodologies don’t create sustainable results in a DEIB strategy. Your diverse employees will catch on to these practices, and likely leave due to being treated like an obligatory hire.
Reassess and evaluate your growth and development pipelines. Create professional apprenticeships, career mentorships, executive sponsorships, job shadowing, and entry-level paid internships that create points of access for diverse employees to enter your organization’s workforce and/or rise within the ranks as they demonstrate noteworthy performance deserving of professional advancement. If you want more diverse employees, acknowledge the disparities and inequalities that are embedded into the cracks and crevices of the larger systems and structures. Avoid the pedigree bias and hire employees that can show their merit through the work that they do or have done for your organization. Encourage hiring managers and company-wide communications to reflect the ways employees emulate the mission, vision, and DEIB values of your organization. Speak to everyone’s stories and celebrate their success every step of the way, in and outside your organization.
Collective power means that even when your diverse employees finish their apprenticeship or internship programs, your leadership is still taking the responsibility of supporting, recommending them, and creating opportunities beyond the confines of your organization. I personally hold tremendous appreciation for my previous executive leaders, John Lehigh, Jim Chrisman, and Brian Fennelly, who supported me in this very way both within the corporate environment of what was formerly Forest City and out in the local Denver community. They each supported me with executive sponsorship, advocating for my professional advancement, and positioning me as a company leader in the realm of public-private partnership projects.
How does collective power affect everyone in your organization?
Collective power is not just a leadership engagement practice, it is an everyone practice. Every person can embrace DEIB, as a person who works to help build an inclusive culture and as an individual who holds themselves accountable to the DEIB goals within your organization. This work spans beyond the performative status quo. Collective power is creating a culture where employees and leaders of traditionally marginalized groups feel that other people who don’t look like them can belong, inviting them and making space for them to show up as their full selves. Everyone can work together to create a place for recognizing and appreciating differences of gender, ethnicity, physical ability, and sexual orientation. Put simply, we work far better together when we operate inclusively as a whole.
