Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:57 pm
A slapdash or insincere approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) won’t achieve leaders’ intended goals, while a strategic, integrated approach is likely to bear fruit over time.
Academy of Management Scholar Quinetta Roberson of Michigan State University said that it’s a mistake to create an isolated department or silo for DEI that doesn’t influence the organization’s other divisions.
“Organizational leaders are talking about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and they’ll say the words, but then when you look at what the implementation looks like, it’s incongruent” Roberson said. “Maybe they’ve gotten rid of their chief diversity officer or any kind of responsibility structure to make sure that it works.
“They don’t have any kind of diversity strategy or metrics to measure progress, but instead, you find this very transactional approach where they say, ‘We have diversity training,’ or something like that, and it’s not really substantive; there’s the communication about DEI, bit that’s all it is, talk,” she said.
“That’s very representative of how DEI is handled at many organizations, while others have a piecemeal approach to DEI, that is, ‘Let’s put some things in place,’ but there’s no consideration of how it links to the work or how it’s going to improve the organization.”
Organizations with a diversity program worth emulating tie in their DEI initiatives to their core strategic plans, business, mission, and codes of conduct.
“You have the ones that do take a more strategic approach to DEI and don’t have it siloed; they don’t say, ‘Here’s the work of the organization, and here’s DEI’ and they operate separately but rather something that is more integrated,” Roberson said.
“They’re leveraging DEI just like they leverage every other thing in order to make the organization faster, stronger, more productive, or better in some way,” she said.
