By Michael Hyter, Chief Diversity Officer, Korn Ferry
Last spring, as streets across the US erupted in protests over police brutality and racial injustice, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar global organization asked if I could help his firm improve diversity and inclusion. It’s a call I’ve gotten before—and many times since—and my response is always the same: nothing is going to work until the root causes that created your current situation are addressed.
Coming from a chief diversity officer, that may sound harsh. But this is not a new conversation. Corporate leaders have talked for literally decades about expanding opportunities for Black talent only to have those efforts vanish once the headlines go away. Sure, hiring picks up for a time and a few folks get promoted, but lasting change remains elusive.
This time is supposed to be different. Without real change, companies risk losing employees, customers, and money. To be fair, we are seeing some progress. Organizations are aligning diversity and inclusion to metrics and performance. They are committing shelf space and funding to Black-owned businesses and products. In short, there is a much more formalized approach than in the past.
Formalizing, however, is not the same as operationalizing. Making diversity part of an organization’s cultural fabric requires inclusive leaders. And the truth is that most organizations don’t have them. Data shows, for example, that organizations spend over $8B a year on diversity programs, yet their senior leadership teams don’t reflect the diversity of their workforce or customers.
Leaders can’t just delegate responsibilities to their Chief Diversity Officers—they actually need to lead the effort personally. Korn Ferry recently developed a model for what it takes to be an effective inclusive leader, identifying specific skills and traits that can be assessed, coached and put into action to achieve diversity goals.
The five competencies are:
- Builds interpersonal trust
- Integrates diverse perspectives
- Optimizes talent
- Applies an adaptive mindset and
- Achieves transformation
Our analysis found that while many leaders exhibited some of these learnable skills, few leaders across industries, professions, or countries possessed all of them. True social and economic justice must be rooted in inclusion. It’s not enough for the CEO or even the C-suite to be inclusive, leaders in every area and at every level of the organization need to understand the importance of inclusion as a strategic priority and build teams and structures to achieve it.
In practice, that means shifting to new ways of conducting talent review discussions, assigning developmental opportunities, and evaluating job requirements and success profiles that are free from unconscious bias. Indeed, many of these systems have historically been designed with one type of employee in mind—a white, able-bodied male—and keeping them perpetuates the same D&I issues that prevents organizations for being more inclusive and welcoming for all talent. This largely stems from a traditional view that good talent naturally rises to the top. But failing to address what headwinds different people face within the culture results in the same less than acceptable outcomes.
Pledging to hire and advance Black talent, as well as invest in Black-owned businesses, is encouraging. But confronting systemic social and economic injustice requires a truly systemic approach to learning new ways of leading. The aim isn’t episodic change, but to enact behavioral, cultural, and structural changes that are sustainable. We don’t want an uptick for two or three years. We want to create an upward trajectory over the next 20 or 30 years. That’s what true inclusion is all about, and it’s the only way for diversity initiatives to work.
