As 2021 speeds ahead, many of us have already broken a New Year’s resolution or are concerned we may do so at any time, if we made one. There are many reasons why resolutions tend to fail, including that they are often vague—without a specific plan to achieve the desired result—or that they may not actually be our intention but instead, something we believe others expect of us. And in these ways, many organizations’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) share dimensions with New Year’s resolutions, which are likely to have but a 19% chance of succeeding. Similarly, many DEI efforts miss important ingredients, limiting their success.

At our Lab, we aim to move organizations to a higher likelihood of succeeding at creating more inclusive workplaces by uncovering barriers to the advancement of women leaders and exploring, and evaluating, more equitable pathways. In my time working with leaders and organizations committed to DEI work, I support leaders making hard choices because, ultimately, a move toward more diversity, equity, and inclusion requires that they stop operating within the status quo. As with any successful resolution, they need the courage to change.

A Model of Change

In many ways, creating an inclusive workplace is a journey, not a destination. Our model of change shows the stepping stones, which we call “small wins,” along that journey: educating managers and workers about bias; diagnosing where gender bias could enter their company’s hiring, promotion, or other evaluation practices; and working with the company’s leaders to develop tools that help reduce bias and inequality in measurable ways. Developing tools to block bias may seem like a simple, logical task, but to succeed, leaders must disrupt patterns with which they’ve become familiar and which may occur as a key factor in their past success. 

In our work, we often refer to bias as an error in assessment. In other words, views of a successful worker may be influenced by stereotypes, and thus inadvertently result in an advantage or disadvantage based not on quality or actual talent, but based on widely held, often unexamined, beliefs. These views of what makes a valuable employee are often baked into an organization’s template of success, or implicit associations of what talent looks like. These templates can be expressed as cultural values or cultural fit. As an example, one organization valued “be fearless.” When our research uncovered that this value inadvertently created preferences for adventurous, single men, they changed. Other organizations have discovered that their value of innovation inadvertently favors the idea of an individual genius, which can be problematic in two ways. First, it ignores the value of bringing together diverse perspectives and creating conditions to unlock innovation, and second, ideas about brilliance tend to favor white men, creating an unintended disadvantage for other groups. To change, leaders must move away from valuing traditional and often-outdated ideals, such as individual genius, “ninja coders,” and rockstars; while this makes sense, it can nonetheless be difficult to do.

As the brilliant late Dr. Katherine Phillips opined, many people say they want diversity but really, they often want people who are just like them but look different. In other words, they want more diversity without having to change their habits, preferences or norms—and that is neither reasonable nor realistic. To achieve greater diversity, equity and inclusion, organizations need to change, and that can include giving up false assumptions of what contributed to their success in order to embrace new values and pathways. With one organization, it meant giving up hiring predominately from Ivy League business schools and instead creating new measures of talent that did not rely on that template of success. Ultimately, this led to a more rigorous debate of ideas and enabled the team to navigate new business opportunities and identify critical strategic insights they would have missed with their old approach to recruiting talent.

This courage to change may initially occur as more costly than beneficial, but as Phillips also asserted, it can lead to true advantages for the entire team: “Diversity makes us (all) smarter.”