“Actions Speak Louder: A Step-By-Step Guide to Becoming an Inclusive Workplace” Book Excerpt
Below is a book excerpt from the introduction of Actions Speak Louder: A Step-By-Step Guide to Becoming an Inclusive Workplace by Deanna Singh.
This book is a step-by-step guide for making more inclusive workplaces where everyone can show up as their whole selves. DEI helps business leaders recognize how team members from marginalized communities inhabit a social space that inextricably links the personal and the professional.
In this book, readers will learn how to examine themselves and the professional realms they occupy. Through reflection exercises, they will explore their social identities and appreciate the social identities of others in ways that create a deeper sense of workplace belonging. They will challenge their culturally relative biases about what constitutes professionalism and learn tips for how to diversify their thinking. Narratives, case studies, and statistics, as well as personal exercises, will offer a detailed outline of the inclusive practices that earn support, minimize exhaustion, and maximize success.
While exploring how to create more inclusive spaces for marginalized communities, readers will also discover strategies that benefit everyone. Even those who don’t have to worry about lynching or Jim Crow laws increasingly seek employers who know how to make work professionally rewarding as well as personally fulfilling and socially responsible. In this way, DEI becomes not only a moral and ethical issue but also an essential business practice for those who want to attract and retain the most innovative talent in the twenty-first century.
Vocabulary
Before exploring DEI practices and the internal work they entail, we need to better understand some basic principles of DEI. Social justice movements strive to create diversity, equity, and inclusion in all levels of society. Most public attention goes to those that focus on securing political power, legal protections, and economic investment for marginalized communities. For example, Black Lives Matter movements focus on police reform, Me Too movements concentrate on sexual harassment laws, and marriage equality movements seek constitutional rights for LGBTQ+ people.
In some ways, DEI differs from these larger movements. Whereas they focus on broad social issues, DEI focuses on issues related to the workplace. Of course, the line between the social and the professional blurs, but it tends to focus on issues like recruiting, hiring, onboarding, retaining, and mentoring people from underrepresented groups. Social justice movements might demand equality from political leaders by insisting it is the morally right thing to do. DEI often strives to show business leaders how inclusion is also the financially smart thing to do.
Within DEI, there are many core terms. Definitions for these concepts vary, but this book will use the following definitions.
Underrepresented groups: Social demographics that have a smaller percentage in the workplace than in larger society.
When discussing underrepresented groups, this book concentrates on social identities along the lines of categories like race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, age, national origin, ability status, and military status.
Social identity can lead to certain experiences that inform thinking. Industries that want new thinking can turn to new groups. For example, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, non-Christians, first-generation professionals, immigrants, people with disabilities, and veterans make up a smaller percentage of the population, but they make up an even smaller percentage of companies. For example, women constitute 51.1 percent of the US population but only 47 percent of the total labor force.
Beyond entry-level positions, management and executive positions see the numbers of these groups shrink even more. For this reason, we will call these demographics “underrepresented groups.” For stylistic reasons, this book might use terms like “marginalized communities,” “minority members,” and “diverse talent” as synonyms. The central term “underrepresented groups,” however, foregrounds how certain kinds of thinking, perspectives, and experiences are missing from organizational decision-making because the social groups more likely to have them are more likely to be missing from those organizations.
For example, companies can do a better job of connecting with lucrative and ignored Black communities if they have team members who are from and understand those communities. Businesses trying to go global will improve their chances if they have more employees from all over the world. Organizations looking for improvisational skills, organizational flexibility, and unusual levels of resilience would improve their successes if they improved their efforts to employ military veterans.
Underrepresented groups are underutilized. Their members are overlooked, and their insights go ignored. Leaders who want to look for new ideas understand the need to search in new communities. If your team has different social identities, it increases the chances of having the different experiences that produce different perspectives. Those different perspectives yield the different thinking that generates a fuller picture, and having a fuller picture leads to the innovation that improves productivity and profitability.
Diversity: Bringing together multiple social identities to promote different thinking.
As we’ll see in chapters to come, organizations thrive when they move beyond homogeneity and embrace difference. Organizations can think more creatively, plan more accurately, and consider more thoroughly when they incorporate a wide range of perspectives. Companies that seek greater diversity are on the right track, recognizing the benefits that can come from heterogeneity, but as we’ll see, problems arise when diversity becomes the only goal.
Equity: The procedures that use proportionality to cultivate growth.
If diversity is the objective, equity is the structure that makes it possible. Many organizations that value diversity take a passive approach. They remove a handful of obstacles and expect change to come. In doing so, they overestimate the likelihood that people will overcome centuries of biases, social impediments, and the threat of violence to make diversity magically happen.
On the other hand, equitable leaders realize that to overcome the structures that keep organizations homogeneous, they need to develop formal plans, policies, and practices that foster heterogeneity. They don’t assume people in charge of hiring, management, and promotions will just “do the right thing,” nor do they trust the well intentioned to defy the status quo that surrounds them. Instead, equity creates external systems of accountability to ensure fairness can happen in the first place. Imagine diversity is like any other goal. Willpower isn’t enough. Structure is what yields success.
If you want to run a marathon, determination has its place. More valuable is buying running equipment, joining a running group, and collecting donation pledges from friends. Equity is the same way. It recognizes that if diversity is your goal, you must create external structures that encourage progress toward that aim even when resolve fails, forgetfulness abounds, and you just plain old feel like sleeping in.
If diversity is the goal, equity refers to the operations that push organizations toward it.
Inclusion: Sharing authority so underrepresented groups have influence.
Beyond diversity and equity, the highest goal of DEI is inclusion. Diversity passively removes structures that keep underrepresented people out, and equity actively produces structures that ensure they can enter in, but inclusion creates opportunities for them to move up. Diverse organizations might issue public statements, post social media messaging, and even ensure each job ad has a statement about EEOC but still fail to hire people from underrepresented groups.
Equitable companies may do the recruiting and hiring that onboards underrepresented people long enough to retain them for more than three months but still fall short when it comes to letting them advance within the organization or even get their ideas to survive up the chain long enough to make any kind of impact.
Inclusive leaders? They go further. They go beyond hiring people from underrepresented groups just to show how progressive the organization is. They go beyond recruiting marginalized people into a company only to push them to the fringes of that entity, appearing in all the publicity photos but shut out from all the meetings. Authentic allies go beyond leading organizations that include underrepresented people and give those people opportunities to reshape the policies, structures, and actions of the organization. By sharing authority, they open the door, make a path to the table, provide opportunities to speak, and actually change according to what they hear.
The organizations that are most successful are those that incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion. They value diversity enough to remove obstacles that keep people from underrepresented groups away. They go further, however, and pursue diversity through equity that reinforces these pursuits on a procedural level. Ultimately, they strive for a greater goal of inclusivity, where structures exist that ensure people from underrepresented groups have the ability to change the organization.
Working with these definitions and concepts, Actions Speak Louder shows readers how to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that benefit everyone.
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Actions Speak Louder: A Step-By-Step Guide to Becoming an Inclusive Workplace by Deanna Singh was published by Penguin Random House in 2022 and is available for sale in hardcopy, electronic, and audible formats.
This excerpt is provided courtesy of Penguin Random House and posted with permission. Book cover provided by Deanna Singh. Photos by Christina (@wocintechchat.com) on Unsplash.
About the author:
Deanna Singh, J.D., MBA
Deanna Singh wants to live in a world where marginalized communities have power. As an expert social entrepreneur, she is obsessed with making the world a better place, and she will build or break systems to create positive change. While tackling complex social challenges, Deanna gives audiences the tools and courage to imagine, activate, and impact the world as agents of change. She is described as a trailblazer and dynamic speaker who is at the forefront of social change. She is an award winning author, educator, business leader, and social justice champion who speaks to over 50,000 people annually!
Deanna is the Founder and Chief Change Agent of Flying Elephant, an umbrella organization for four social ventures. Through their work in the spheres of DEI, healthcare, children's literature, and leadership, these four varied companies are united in their mission to shift power to marginalized communities. Deanna’s current projects include serving as lead instructor for the Professional Certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offered through University of Wisconsin’s Center for Professional and Executive Development and publishing two new books: Actions Speak Louder (Penguin Random House) A Smart Girl's Guide: Race & Inclusionand, a new book for American Girl (released June 2021).
Singh earned her Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Fordham University, a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University, and a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been recognized by the Milwaukee Business Journal as one of the community’s most influential 40 Under 40 Leaders, the State of Wisconsin as a Women Who Inspires, and by Forbes as an African American Woman Everyone Should Know.
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