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

by Lily Zheng

Every employee is responsible for creating and maintaining inclusive environments on their teams and respect in their interpersonal interactions.

With this firm grounding in impact and outcomes, we can then treat identity the way most people perceive it—not as a high-stakes proxy for harm or accountability, but as just another facet of difference that we can use to understand each other and our work better. And when it comes to accountability, no longer should we ask, “am I biased?” or “am I racist?” Instead, just ask: “Am I fulfilling my responsibilities to eliminate harm and make my environment diverse, equitable, and inclusive?”

Identity isn’t morality. Being privileged or marginalized on one or more dimensions of identity doesn’t make us any better or worse as people; it simply positions us differently and offers us different advantages and disadvantages within broader systems. It changes the power we have access to and our ability to understand experiences similar to and different from our own. But it doesn’t make us any better or worse as people.

Being fluent, or at least proficient, in identity as a language lets you speak to more people and understand a greater swath of the world, even if you don’t speak it all the time.

If there’s one reason to increase your literacy of identity, it’s to stay connected and in communication with the many communities around the world who increasingly speak this language. You don’t need to become fluent overnight. There’s no arbitrary bar you need to meet. Just stay humble, correct your mistakes, and hold yourself accountable as you continue learning.

Role clarity, not just hard work, allows us to coordinate our intentions into impacts.

critically consider the role you’re best situated to play in DEI change-making efforts alongside your power analyses; structure, culture, strategy assessments; and reflections on your own identities.

The organizer turns a group with good intentions into a critical mass for achieving specific goals.

Empathetic and thoughtful people able to see the same issue from multiple angles, the best organizers can build (at times unlikely) alliances and identify and take advantage of windows of opportunity to take collective action.

The strategist helps ensure that movements trend toward effectiveness on a macro level.

Strategists often work fully behind the scenes to coordinate those playing other roles. They take a bird’s-eye view of an issue and its full context, identifying key information about stakeholders, power dynamics, and decision points to inform the approach that is most likely to achieve goals effectively.

Backers serve as a powerful normalizing force in bringing a movement from the fringes into the mainstream and according a movement with the legitimacy it needs to become enshrined into a changed status quo.

movements fail when they fail to activate even one of the roles I listed.

The challenge with this work is that, even in the most successful movements, actually changing a system can take more time and effort than the movement-building itself. There is usually a gap between the high point of a movement, in which leadership commits to doing better, and the point at which anyone in the movement can see tangible indications of whether progress has been made or not.

without builders and reformers, the follow-through of a movement never occurs.

Managers are directly responsible for stewarding an organization’s culture. They play the difficult task of taking the high-level set of aspirational values or goals of the organization (e.g., “respect others” or “scale sustainably”) and putting them into practice on a day-to-day level.

Senior leaders have the most formal power in their organizations. They are able to formally drive change to structure, culture, and strategy from the top and coordinate the resources and political authority required to scale this change across the organization. Yet, they are the farthest away from the situation “on the ground” and require that their employees trust the organization enough to share their experiences. If senior leaders can build trust and gain the information they need, they can deploy the power they have at their disposal to change organization-wide strategies and direct those under them to build new systems or reform existing ones. In other words, skilled leaders holding the trust of their employees are most able to succeed within movements as strategists and backers empowering the builders and reformers under them to work.

With some exceptions, notably the small number of high-visibility “activist CEOs,”2 senior leaders often struggle to have the expertise, trust, and time to thrive as advocates, educators, or organizers.

apart from perhaps senior HR leaders, most senior leaders may find it challenging to act in a builder or reformer capacity themselves. As senior leaders are typically most effective in leading the organization on a high-level, they thrive within or adjacent ...

Trust and formal power really are the deciding factors with embedded DEI professionals.

They occupy a strange middle between “insider” and “outsider”: if they are leaders and employees distrust other senior leaders, embedded DEI professionals are likely to be distrusted as well.

they have the potential to be “unicorn” change-makers that can play nearly every role, bridge the gap between junior and senior employees, and realize the success of movements.

most embedded DEI professionals don’t find themselves nearly empowered enough to succeed in all of these roles.

While embedded DEI professionals have the potential to succeed in all movement roles if supported by their organizations, they are most often effective within movements as educators, builders, and reformers.

Too often, organizations take advantage of their DEI groups’ passion and enthusiasm to overscope their responsibilities and overwork their members, leading to individual burnout and group collapse.

In the real world, successful movements that achieve their objectives succeed not through just the efforts of people in any one role, no matter how skilled they might be, but through multiple people and stakeholder groups who collectively occupy all of these roles, working together.

Useful conflict is often task conflict, and focuses on the goals, process, strategy, and content of making change, while toxic conflict is often relationship conflict, and fixates on the people making change—their political opinions, beliefs, and values.

They may not always look neat or be ideologically pure, but when coalitions of stakeholders activate every role required for success, movements succeed.

Advocates bring issues into the spotlight. Educators upskill the knowledge of those around them. Organizers focus abstract goals into clear and comprehensible goals, and strategists point those goals toward effective tactics. Backers give the movement credibility and legitimacy and ultimately commit the organization to change. Builders follow through, reformers refine what was made, and when new challenges and inequities arise, so do new movements to change them. Rinse and repeat.

You won’t be able to achieve DEI until you move beyond a simplistic view of “best practices” as your default answer to DEI challenges.

Because in an organization without trust, coalitions and movements will never get enough steam to turn intentions into actions into outcomes.

when trust is honored and respected, it enables a positive feedback loop of organizational functioning and change.

In high trust environments, no matter the organization’s shape or size, stakeholders rarely question leaders’ decisions and won’t hesitate to lend their support when asked—organizations’ positive track records speak for themselves.

Each time trust is broken, the trust expended is not renewed. And when enough of these incidents accrue, the consequences start to be felt on an organization-wide level.

In low-trust environments, it doesn’t matter if decision-makers have all the awareness in the world of their structure, culture, or strategy— stakeholders simply won’t cooperate. They’ll be highly skeptical or cynical about organizational commitments, believing them only to be performative or decoupled. They’ll distance themselves from participating out of self-protection or participate in bad faith to see whether new initiatives can be leveraged or undermined for personal benefit. Movements will fizzle and fail, and each failed effort further solidifies in the minds of skeptics that success just isn’t possible, deepening a vicious cycle.

“Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree” question that can go on a survey: “I believe that when this organization (or department, or team) commits to a goal, that it fully intends to follow through and achieve it.”

How do you know if your organization is high-trust? When harm is done, it is rectified swiftly and without incident. Feedback is shared casually and proactively both up and down the chain of command. Stakeholders are patient when it comes to change, willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to each other and organizational leaders amid challenges, and expect that their interests are always in the mind of decision-makers.

Perhaps the organization prioritized rapid growth over sustainable growth, and that tradeoff had consequences that it’s now in a good place to correct. Perhaps the organization had strayed somewhat from its mission as it found its place in the market, and now it’s ready to reaffirm it. Perhaps the organization made some tough choices to survive, and now it’s ready to go beyond surviving to achieve thriving.

Chapter 3: accountability is achieved only by centering outcomes, and people are strongly motivated to protect a positive self-image.

you need to remember that this work is about solving the right problems.

This is the final step required to achieve the outcomes of DEI: a demographic mix that holds the trust of its stakeholders, an environment that is felt and perceived to be respectful and mutually beneficial, and individual and organizational success in all ways.

How do you know if your environment is medium trust? The presence of doubt. Enough to call into question the ability of organizational leadership to actually achieve what they say they will, but not so much that people assume change will never happen. Stakeholders are skeptical but not yet cynical and will often challenge the official narrative put out by an organization, whether in public, private, or both. There are two core tensions present in medium-trust environments that define them: the tension between legitimacy and power and the tension between stakeholder patience and intervention effectiveness.

Stakeholders lacking trust will be far less patient or forgiving of change-making efforts that do not immediately show results—yet, most effective and high-impact efforts take weeks, months, or years to show results.

One way to break this impasse is to ditch the overly positive tone of typical organizational commitments for a balance of earnest and honest while making organization-wide commitments to achieve specific outcomes.

An option worth mentioning is hiring an internal DEI professional to bridge employee-led movements and senior leaders formally. Though a role like a head of DEI may have any number of actual job responsibilities, the most important work they can do is formally occupy the tenuous space between formal leadership power and DEI legitimacy. If they are adequately resourced and supported, they can effectively empower non-leader change-making efforts while coordinating decision-making from senior leaders and important backers as needed. Why don’t I recommend this as a universal best practice? Because that “if” is a very big “if.” An ineffective formal DEI leader can be worse for trust than no formal DEI leader at all. Proceed carefully.

The small wins approach is straightforward: rather than large-scale efforts focused on compelling behavior at scale, focus instead on achieving relatively narrow and bite-sized goals, then communicating these achievements to the organization.

In low-trust organizations, repeated breaches of trust have caused stakeholder skepticism to degrade into cynicism. They doubt organizational leadership, organizational processes, each other, and themselves. In these environments, trust is a sign of weakness, an opening to be exploited. And so, any DEI effort that requires that stakeholders trust each other is dead in the water almost as soon as it’s proposed.

Leaders will shy away from it, their fear of open conflict from “saying the wrong thing” outweighing any value they can imagine coming from taking a stance, while stakeholders fume at the continued silence.

Because stakeholders have lost so much trust in senior leaders, senior leaders have functionally lost the means to command their workforce’s respect. This isn’t fixed by bringing in new leaders or creating new grievance procedures or any other top-down initiative.

This means that the goal of a low-trust environment isn’t just to find its own unique way to make effective change but to as quickly as possible transition to a medium-trust environment.