Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right

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But the ideas that we're talking about are, I think are so much more larger and more important and more universal to human potential and unleashing that. Their emphasis that we need everyone continues in the next chapter, where they identify multiple roles necessary to successfully drive a DEI change in an organization. And when you look at the things that we actually were able to change through our advocacy, I can't name very many, if not zero. And that DEI competencies are embedded within manager evaluations, like all sorts of things like that. And so Lily, you and I were talking about how the book is both, I guess, hard-hitting but also accessible.

In low-trust environments, Zheng’s advice is to get to a medium-trust environment by having leaders apologize for what has gone wrong, and cede power to the advocates; nobody trusts the leaders enough to follow them, so the way to move forward is to empower others that have earned that trust. And so I want to talk about it more and talk about you and how would you introduce yourself for those who are listening that don't know you and your work and how you identify and something about why this is your life's work.It doesn't need to be this super charged thing around we're going to talk about the morality of equity or whatnot.

Zheng utilizes a great combination of academic and corporate terminology and approaches as they unpack the reasons why current DEI strategies don’t always work. So a high power distance culture is one where people are fine and accept there being these large disparities between the haves and have nots. iv) Stakeholders' roles presented in chapter 7 link stakeholders' movement and the organization's role. I've been following Lily Zheng for years on LinkedIn to get their DEI insights, and their book is even better. Lily instead starts from the basics of defining measurable impact outcomes for diversity, equity and inclusion, and then lays out strategies and tactics for moving organizations towards those outcomes.

And in the conversation Lily talks about how leaders with even the best of intentions find it difficult to achieve the outcomes that they want, what outcomes Lily advises leaders to achieve and how to measure them, and also the difference between outcomes oriented and inputs oriented DEI. I think what's going on in the US at least, and in some parts of Europe, and to some extent the world, though I think it's most concentrated in the US, is that society is becoming less and less tolerant of power distance in the sense that it's less and less in society for people to say that certain social groups are better than others. Nothing less than this is required to scale DEI from interpersonal teeth-pulling to true systemic change. Activism is the agitation of existing stakeholders and neutral parties to bring attention to a social issue. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Feedback practices, conflict resolution, and employee well-being are essential components of successful DEI initiatives. I also saw it as a very strong approach to change leadership in general and will be using it in my PD going forward. I find myself working with people who know very little about DEI and haven't been exposed to the large body of literature on diversity, equity, and inclusion.In low-trust environments, their advice is to get to a medium-trust environment by having leaders cede power to the advocates and follow their lead; the leaders have lost trust so nobody will follow them, so better to follow somebody else who may have that trust. And oftentimes when I speak with leaders who are skeptical, they're actually pretty aware of what type of person does DEI, right?

I love the questions and solutions offered at the end of each chapter and their belief in an always-learning approach. And so when I meet leaders who have some resistance to this larger idea of DEI as an industry, I say, "Okay, that's fair. I would love to hear how you articulate what is the opportunity that we all face when we consider it in that way? If we are not collecting data at the outset to gain a baseline and then regularly reassessing where we are at in achieving our goals, we won't be able to determine if we have achieved what we set out to and are ready to move on to the next step. And it was important for you to make sure it met the learner wherever the learner is, where they're at.

The way they explain all these subjects made it very easy for me to think about which people and orgs I know fall into which categories, and the questions at the end of each chapter are thought-provoking deep considerations to ponder. That implicit belief is getting really challenged by newer generations of workers, by younger employees, by queer and trans folks, by people of color. DEI Deconstructed analyzes how current methods and "best practices" leave marginalized people feeling frustrated and unconvinced of their leaders' sincerity, and offers a roadmap that bridges the neatness of theory with the messiness of practice. They guide readers seamlessly through the days where “multi-culturalism” and “color blindness” (race denial) were seen as innovative “diversity” initiatives.