How can we develop an inclusive culture in order to increase diversity at senior leadership team level? Lexie Sims, director of executive search & diversity, equity & inclusion consulting, The Good Board, offers her advice.
Understanding and addressing diversity and inclusion is ever more at the forefront of organisations’ agendas.
Some will pay it lip service. Others will embrace it and make it a core element in their approach to appointing purpose-led business leaders to deliver their strategic and commercial goals. The golden question then, is how do organisations need to go about achieving this for sustainable business success?
Understand that HR cannot solely be accountable or responsible for building an inclusive environment. People managers can spearhead the initiative, but it must have allies and buy-in from senior managers otherwise it will fail.
Ensure that the people at the top of the organisation are on board early and that you have the time and resources to make this initiative successful. There are plenty of case studies you can draw on to prove that diversity and inclusion boost commercial success.
Conduct a thorough diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) audit of your organisation. This assures that you have a fact-based foundation to develop your plan in building a more diverse and inclusive environment.
Employees and customers respect honesty. Publish details of the current state of play, your targets and action plans, showing how you plan to meet the objectives. Include a timeline and communicate updates regularly.
It is critical that you are transparent about you are trying to do – and therefore publicly accountable. If the organisation is not on track to meet targets, admit and communicate this – explaining how and when you intend to combat this; where you've been successful, be sure to publicise it.
Ensure that your succession plans and high-potential programmes have robust processes that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion so that you can start to increase diversity from within. Connect senior people with mentors – and, in turn, ask them to mentor an employee at a lower level.
For this to succeed you will need to ensure that all mentors and mentees are trained in how to provide mentorship across cultural boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
When an employee is promoted from the succession list to a more senior role, provide a transition coach so that you are securing their success in this role and shoring-up the whole chain.
For external senior hires, ensure that DEI expectations are built into all procurement bids and contracts with external executive search firms. (Remember to look at the executive search firms’ own inclusion numbers and policies at senior level; that will tell you a lot.)
For in-house recruitment, train all internal interviewers in inclusive hiring and ensure that preliminary interviews are conducted by two individuals with a final approval interview conducted by a senior officer.
Ensure that new hires are set up for success. It’s all well and good encouraging diversity, but if you don’t have the right environment to support diverse candidates, you are not setting people up to succeed.
For example, start by creating a specific and personal on-boarding plan for each senior hire.
Remember that you don’t have to start your DEI initiatives from scratch. There are plenty of organisations doing things really well already. Reach out to them. People love to talk about their successes – invite them in to do just that.