Responding to Organizational Impacts
Black Lives Matter
If the introduction of technology and the entry of Gen Z had not forced enough of a reckoning, the galvanizing of people of color in response to the sequential murders of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement created a crisis that leaders could no longer ignore.
The election of the nation’s first black president had raised hopes that race relations in the U.S. would improve, especially among black voters. But by 2016, following a spate of high-profile deaths of black Americans during encounters with police and protests by the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups, many Americans – especially blacks – described race relations as generally bad.
As we concluded the investigations referenced in the previous section, we were engaged to address the culture clashes that Black Lives Matter highlighted the extent to which racism and bias are systemic ills that require intentional, concerted, and sustained effort to identify and change. Every organization has them, and the THE DE&l framework provides the structure and accountability to create lasting change that benefits all employees, not just those who have been historically underrepresented or oppressed.
We begin with a foundation of employee engagement. While there are many survey instruments that purport to measure workplace engagement, we formed a strategic partnership with Energage, a cutting-edge survey tool that is the owner of the Top Workplaces league table found in many major newspapers around the U.S. We work closely with Energage not only to measure engagement within an organization as a whole, but also to identify with precision the areas where the real problems lie. This allows us to customize our solutions, just as we do in all our client engagements. We are fastidious about preserving client resources, including scarce dollars, to ensure we leverage what works in an organization and offer solutions for what needs attention.
We present our analysis of survey results to the client’s leadership, and we take their temperature to determine if they are ready and willing to proceed with the hard work associated with DE&l. There are many reasons a client may not be ready, and we work with them to determine whether they are or aren’t, and what they might need to be ready in the future. This can include leadership coaching and team development to build competency in DE&I. The integrity of our process depends on the leadership’s readiness for the changes associated with this work. In fact, we have stopped engagements midstream when it became apparent that leadership was not on board. It benefits neither the clients nor us to proceed with a strategic plan that we know is doomed to fail without leadership support.
Navigating Change
Our previous work had made clear that any efforts to address the workplace chasms existing between generations, sexes, ethnicity, and race could not be bridged by training alone. Many of the clients for whom we had performed investigations had DE&I “programs.” But we found these were little more than check the box efforts involving annual online training, and not much more. Our hypothesis was that sustainable DE&I required leadership buy-in, strong employee engagement, and defined and measurable outcomes with built-in accountability. This was the birth of THEC’s DE&I Strategic Planning framework, an American Business Award-winning platform that has attracted high profile clients from around the country, including Stanford University and Georgetown Law.