What Inclusive Executive Teams Are Doing Right Now
Many CEOs and their Executive Teams now feel the urgency to address diversity and inclusion generally, and race specifically. How is the Black Lives Matter era impacting your company’s Executive Team?
Executive Team engagement these days ranges from performative to substantive, with a lot of confusion in between.
Performative engagement from the Executive Team seeks to act in ways that are visibly momentous—anti-racism press releases without plans to remove bias from talent systems, adopting Juneteenth as a holiday when 90% of the executives had never heard of Juneteenth before George Floyd was killed, or tying compensation to hiring or promoting Black people without equipping White people to pursue the career and business case for diversity. Many Executive Teams want to appear progressive and responsive, but the Team’s point of view (PoV) around D&I is too underdeveloped to see the profound risks of rhetoric when the opportunity is for individual and systemic transformation.
Substantive race-related work by Executive Teams includes three elements:
Each executive is deepening their point of view as an inclusive leader. Greatheart’s Five Stages is one structure for doing so. Around race, executives who identify as other than White have a deeply lived experience of disadvantage (not all, but many), while White execs typically are very early in their racial learning and recognition of advantage. We White folks are problematically late to this critical learning. This PoV gap must be navigated openly, with the right mix of reciprocity and personal accountability.
The organization’s D&I strategy is pouring into every business unit and global site. Marketing and Sales gets to leverage D&I to win, serve, and retain customers. Finance is finding out how inclusion can improve processes and drive down costs. Product and Service leaders are learning how to design and deliver for a new mix of users. All of this needs to be aligned to the enterprise D&I work with race at its heart, and must be fueled by equitable talent practices.
Every executive is taking more responsibility for growing an equitable talent system, an inclusive culture, and a compelling organizational brand. Senior leaders must get the Board involved in this work as well. Solving for systemic racism calls for the expansive view that every kind of business strategy requires: attention to history, trends, analytics, the voices of employees and customers, reputation with investors and regulators, and values-focused communications.
When it comes to race, is your Executive Team trying to look good, or get after the needed and deep work that’s required of them? Employees and customers across many racial identities are watching for real engagement—and trust me, they know the difference.