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

by Lily Zheng

to effectively achieve DEI in social impact, organizations must capture their negative social, cultural, and political externalities and understand their disparate impacts on marginalized groups.

This will require that organizations understand that, given increasing awareness of their politicized impacts on an increasingly politicized world, they can no longer take “apolitical” positions or have their impacts on society overlooked.

Organizations can either proactively find their voice and take active stances on the political issues that affect their operations and stakeholders or be forced to catch up when social movements invariably catch them by surprise.

Senior leaders with even the best advisors will make poor decisions if they misunderstand the needs of their stakeholders.

“What are we trying to achieve through DEI work?”

It aims to create organizations and societies that populations perceive as trustworthy, safe, representative, respectful, and accountable, and it grounds itself in outcomes like success, stability, health, and general well-being.

DEI is trying to change not just the hearts and minds of individuals but also the structure, culture, strategy, policy, process, and practice of organizations.

The world wants—or rather, needs—organizations that are able to own their externalities and contribute to solutions rather than problems.

“What is the role of power and the powerful in making change?”

Change is the responsibility of the powerful, and while everyone has power, that power varies depending on their role, identity, and position within organizations.

Those with the most power have the most responsibility, but their pathways to create change depend on the trust other stakeholders place in them.

With high levels of trust, they can use their power to make high-level decisions that directly change organizational systems. With lower levels of trust, however, they are more likely to succeed by ceding their power to other stakeholders to (re)build trust through collaborative decision-making.

“How should we approach identity and...

By framing all identities—including advantaged or privileged identities—as valuable sources of insight, organizations can defuse defensiveness and build familiarity and competence for all stakeholders in engaging with identity.

“What does the work look like?”

Creating systemic change through DEI requires that organizations build a strong foundation and integrate DEI across their organization’s internal and external operations and relationships.

spearheaded by a clear vision, kept accountable through transparency and widespread integration, and achieved by a structure that implements DEI at scale, a culture that supports and enables these outcomes, and choices on the individual le...

All DEI work—every survey, training, workshop, talk, discussion, and analysis—is done in service of these larger goals to achieve desired outcomes in a larger context of organizational change. If these are the sites of change, DEI work collectively constitutes a toolbox of approaches and interventions to make change across these sites.

Workers of all kinds, burned by ineffective DEI work from well-meaning but unaccountable practitioners, are already beginning to extend the skepticism and cynicism they hold toward their employers to the DEI practitioners their employers bring in.

“Effectiveness” sums up the ability of the practitioner or firm to create the outcomes they say they will.

“Approach” refers to the methods a practitioner uses to achieve their desired outcomes, and it’s here where variation is largest.

It’s no secret that I believe we spend too much time debating approach and style in the DEI space when we should be centering effectiveness.

Integrators must be subject matter experts in DEI and at least one other area of expertise and understand how the two (or more) subjects inform each other.

Building skill as an integrator requires developing effective methods to communicate expertise, build buy-in from decision-makers who may have significantly less understanding of a complex issue, and galvanize change-making efforts in messy, political organizational settings.

best integrators are able to understand how DEI expertise fundamentally transforms their existing expertise to make something new.

Aspiring integrators must be able to do more than simply possess DEI knowledge in the abstract.

Advisors must be able to ask the right questions, build an accurate understanding of complex problems, and know what recommendations to make and when.

I want leaders on every level, but especially executives and senior leaders, to recognize that DEI work is crucial not only to organizational success but also in maintaining the trust of stakeholders and fulfilling the moral and ethical responsibilities of organizations.

I want organizations to recognize that they need to comprehensively understand themselves in as much detail as possible and engage in substantial assessment, need finding, discovery, and exploration endeavors to do so.

I want organizations to fix their problems and embrace new opportunities using every tool at their disposal.

strike a balance between decisiveness and overconfidence to make the decisions only they can make.

want organizations to assess with unfiltered honesty how these efforts have gone to determine if and to what extent they have achieved what they intended and why.