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

by Lily Zheng

It’s clear from the extensive research that neither rigid identity denial nor rigid multiculturalism can lower discrimination and prejudice.

Only a few kinds of interventions worked to do the bare minimum of reducing individual prejudice, let alone changing behavior.52 These interventions include cooperative learning, working together to achieve a task or goal; perspective taking, thinking and acting from others’ perspectives; social norms, framing inclusive behavior as widely common and normal; and self-affirmation, affirming positive depictions of the self to protect against feelings of threat.

Accountability is achieved only by centering outcomes.

This chapter is titled “To What End?” My own answer: diversity, equity, and inclusion achieved as outcomes at scale. In every workplace and organization. In every community. In society at large.

One consulting firm argues that any public action taken by a company is likely to be performative allyship if the company’s leadership team lacks representational parity, lacks metrics tracking DEI goals, or continues to exhibit discrimination and bias in its internal operations.

This is the harsh reality for any organization that really, genuinely cares about achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion as outcomes anytime soon: goodwill and trust, and the patience these engender, has long since eroded. And so, when you say “we will make an effort soon,” or “we commit to,” or “in 202X, we plan to,” all people will hear is blah, blah, blah. Cynicism is a way of protecting their expectations in a world where optimism has left them hurt and disappointed too many times to count.

Employee survey data from 2020 shows that, while the actions of employers during the summer of 2020 meaningfully improved employees’ perception of their company’s DEI work, that halo effect quickly diminished.

We just need to disassemble big challenges into clear and simple problems that can be readily measured and readily solved.

If stakeholders trust organizations or individual people, actions are given the benefit of the doubt. If they lack trust, actions are more likely to be seen as performative—regardless of what the actions are or what they achieve.

Power is the potential to influence.1 Power is the possession of control, authority, or influence over others.2 Power is the ability to control people and events.3

With power, organizational priorities, goals, and strategies are set, and with power, individuals navigate conflict, self-advocate, and collectively organize.

I typically ask folks to dive deeper into what they mean when they say, “I don’t have (enough) power.”

Scholars of power typically understand it as an umbrella term encompassing six distinct variations:5 1. Formal power: the right to request behavior from another 2. Reward power: the ability to promise (monetary or nonmonetary) compensation to influence behavior 3. Coercive power: the ability to threaten punishment to influence behavior 4. Expert power: the ability to influence behavior by possessing greater expertise or ability 5. Informational power: the ability to influence behavior by possessing greater information 6. Referent power: the ability to build rapport and influence behavior through charisma

Expert power isn’t just attached to skills and competencies but can also be inferred from simply possessing particular social identities and experiences.

Informational power is also increasingly accessible as organizations navigate crises and unexpected situations. While informational power is short term compared to expert power, any solution to pressing problems has a high likelihood of adoption regardless of who it comes from in time-sensitive situations.

While each of these six types of power boosts the power of all others when they exist in tandem, referent power is, in my opinion, the greatest force multiplier.

Power without charisma is brute force. Charisma is what turns crude power into influence.

it’s more important in the process of understanding your organization to answer the following questions accurately: • What is the process by which everyday decisions are made? Big decisions? • How does decision-making differ for people situated at different places in the organization? • How does the organization respond to crises or emergencies, and what aspects of the normal decision-making process change, if any? • Where in the organization is power situated?

Formalization describes “how the organization works” is enshrined, institutionalized, and documented in a permanent and accessible way.

To understand the formalization of your organization, ask yourself these questions: • How commonly are standardized formal processes used to achieve outcomes in the organization? • To what extent do all members of the organization understand the formal rules for operating in your organization? • How does the organization react to individuals or entities who do not know or follow the formal rules?

The more commonly standardized processes are used, the greater the shared understanding of formal rules, and the harsher the sanctions for those who do not follow these rules, the more formalized the organization.

Organizational complexity describes how organizations divide their functioning into jobs, internal groups or entities, and locations.

To get a rough handle on the complexity of your organization, you can ask yourself the following questions: • What is the ratio of managers and supervisors to individual contributors? • How many discrete responsibilities are listed in job descriptions? • How many different groups of internal stakeholders must coordinate for an organization-wide initiative?

The higher the manager-to-individual contributor ratio, the greater the discrete responsibilities in job descriptions, and the greater the number of stakeholder groups required for coordination, the more complex an organization is.

If structure describes “how things work,” culture describes “how things feel.” It is a shared but often unspoken understanding of the assumptions and expectations for behavior and thought within an environment and manifests in the form of rituals, myths, and stories that embed a core set of unspoken rules.23

In some organizations, structure and culture complement each other, mutually reinforcing the behaviors and outcomes the organization wants. But more often than not, they clash—the structure dictates one thing that the culture undermines, or the culture holds up an ideal that the structure disincentivizes.

Power distance refers to the degree to which a large distance between the most and least powerful is accepted and normalized.

In high-power distance cultures, hierarchies are normalized and seen as desirable; there are few attempts to change power imbalances that exist. Those with more power are seen as deserving that power due to their greater responsibility, and those with less power are seen as needing to meet the needs of those with more power. In low-power distance cultures, hierarchies are less normalized or seen as undesirable; there are many attempts to challenge and rebalance perceived power imbalances. Equal power dynamics are legitimated through moral or ethical arguments, and those with less power expect to be consulted or have a role in decision-making.

You can gauge power distance in an environment by asking the following question: • How comfortable do people with the least power in a given environment feel shari...

In(ter)dependence refers to the degree to which people perceive themselves as part of a larger whole.

You can gauge independence or interdependence by asking the following question: • To what extent do people in a given environment act to share their personal views versus deferring to the widely understood views of a larger group, especially when the two diverge?

Uncertainty avoidance speaks to the degree to which uncertainty or ambiguity is avoided or embraced.

You can gauge uncertainty avoidance in an environment by asking the following question: • What happens when people in an environment encounter something new or unknown?

Failure avoidance relates to the degree to which failure and imperfection are avoided or embraced.

You can gauge failure avoidance in an environment by asking the following question: • How do people react when a person fails or exposes another’s failure?

While strategy is typically defined as the rationale or intentions behind those in and with power, in keeping with the spirit of our outcomes-centered approach, I am choosing instead to situate my definition in something more observable. When I use the term, I am referring instead to the choices themselves that people with power make.

You can gauge any strategy of people in an organization by answering the following questions: • What choices do people make, and when do these choices appear to conflict with what is normalized by the organization’s structure or culture? • If choices are strategies, what are people trying to achieve through them, and why? • Strategies can complement or conflict with each other. Where do you see people making the most complementary choices in the organization, and where do you see people making the most conflicting choices?

Strategy, structure, and culture are the trifecta that collectively explains how organizations get from intentions to outcomes.

What is the process by which everyday decisions are made? Big decisions? • How does decision-making differ for people situated at different places in the organization? • How does the organization respond to crises or emergencies, and what aspects of the normal decision-making process change, if any? • Where in the organization is power situated?

How commonly are standardized formal processes used to achieve outcomes in your organization? • To what extent do all members of the organization understand the formal rules for operating in your organization? • How does your organization react to individuals or entities who do not know or follow the formal rules?

What is the ratio of managers and supervisors to individual contributors? • How many discrete responsibilities are listed in job descriptions? • How many different groups of internal stakeholders must coordinate for an organization-wide initiative?

How comfortable do people with the least power in a given environment feel sharing potentially critical or negative feedback? • To what extent do people in a given environment act to share their personal views versus deferring to the widely understood views of a larger group, especially when the two diverge? • What happens when people in an environment encounter something new or unknown? • How do people react when a person fails or exposes another’s failure?

When you’re able to reverse engineer outcomes in the context of an organization’s structure, culture, and strategy, you start to gain insights into how you might use power to create different ones. The first step in this process?

They often act first with the understanding that their workforce wants to see something different from them and that closed-door interventions—even effective ones—don’t inspire confidence or regain their workforce’s trust. They often encourage the formation of groups like employee resource groups, DEI councils, and advisory groups explicitly for the legitimacy they bring, start engaging these groups in the decision-making process, then start the much slower work of learning as individuals and as a leadership team. Over time, they try through a blend of better communications, tweaks to decision-making practices, and relationships built with new stakeholders to rebuild trust. This continues until the next big crisis—during which the changes implemented in the organization get put to the test.

This is what we are doing.

Making “antiracist” a positive status symbol without aligning on how people can attain it simply sets up a circus for people already committed to antiracism, without doing anything to incentivize changed behavior from those routinely committing racist acts.

We should scrap these labels because there’s no compelling or consistent way to define them, their pursuit and avoidance tend to drive unhelpful behaviors, and they don’t do us good at scale.

Actions motivated by the avoidance of a negative label or the achievement of a positive one are easily decoupled from real outcomes.

In a survey of White men’s responses to DEI work, almost 70% shared that the biggest obstacle to their participation in DEI efforts was uncertainty around whether they were even “wanted” within the work itself.

But us exploring what “systemic” really means helps us be as specific as possible when we ask the question, “what role do individuals play in changing systems to reduce harm and achieve DEI?” To that, I answer: individuals must be stewards of the system within the environments they hold responsibility in.

Every single person is responsible for creating positive outcomes and reducing or eliminating harm, but that responsibility isn’t the same for every person.