Shift workloads so that a senior-level staff member can take on responsibility for DEI and have the capacity to do so by passing off some of their other responsibilities to another colleague.
Form a voluntary, representative, rotating DEI committee from among staff. Ensure that staff feel comfortable raising concerns or questions with those on the committee.
Shift job descriptions so that one person on each team serves as a trained DEI focal person or, if your organization is large enough to warrant it, hire a full-time DEI staff member.
Solicit input from across the organization to develop a DEI vision and a plan with concrete and measurable steps on everything from recruitment to training to staff development, and track performance.
THE CEO’S ROLE
The CEO needs to lead DEI efforts and do so in a way that brings along all staff and gives them an active role in shaping the process and outcomes. I’ve found that treating DEI as a key component of our culture (and not as something separate to it) helped me better understand that it is central to building an inclusive and representative organization. It has not been an easy process. I had long been one of those nonprofit leaders who thought that my organization was doing pretty well on culture, including DEI, and was taken aback when some staff asked what more we were going to do to make our organization more diverse and inclusive. It felt like a challenge to my commitment to positive change. And it was—as it should be.
The real test of our commitment to the values we espouse is how we respond when we recognize that our organizations do not fully reflect them. Failure to respond appropriately can turn this conversation into a challenge to the leader’s authority. This is a fear of many CEOs new to the process, but the challenge to authority usually comes when the process is poorly handled, not as a result of the process itself. That’s an important difference.
DEI processes can be particularly fraught for organizations when a big divide between leadership and staff already exists. Often leadership wants to focus on external engagement and impact, thinking that’s where the organization can make the biggest contribution (and perhaps unconsciously or otherwise wanting to avoid tough internal discussions). Staff, on the other hand, may want to focus first on the internal manifestations of inequity—things like how a lack of diversity or unequal compensation impacts staff well-being. Their argument is often that the organization needs to “clean house” first before looking outside (but may also sometimes be more focused on prioritizing their own concerns over those of the community they serve).
CASE STUDY
How a Mishandled Approach to Racial Justice Issues Led to an Exodus of Staff
The divide between leadership and staff proved damaging for the Guttmacher Institute, a prominent reproductive health and rights research nonprofit based in Washington, DC. It showed how a badly handled process can disrupt an organization.
Over several years, staff on Guttmacher’s public policy team made a number of complaints about racial tokenization, verbal abuse, discrimination by leadership against employees of color and people with children, and retaliation against staff who raised some of these concerns. These complaints went largely unaddressed by leadership.
During a meeting soon after the murder of George Floyd, these grievances came to a head as staff made a number of requests for internal changes to better support Black staff and other employees of color. Their demands included looser deadlines, better-designed leave policies, and more racial equity training. Leadership resisted these requests, arguing that the focus should be external rather than on internal problems in the workplace, and downplaying the direct connection between racist violence and the need for greater equity within the organization. A senior leadership team member became frustrated that staffers kept talking about “workplace problems” instead of “police brutality.”
On the other hand, a number of staff believed that managers took advantage of the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission and allowed workplace abuses to go unchecked. Leadership’s refusal to acknowledge and address these issues—and their insistence that those raising grievances were “self-centered”—led to great turmoil and eventually a significant exodus of staff. In the end, more than 80 percent of Guttmacher’s public policy division left over an eleven-month period, including every caregiver and the only two staffers of color.4
This case is illustrative of the divide that often exists between leadership and more junior staff. Too often, leaders take the approach that if their organization is doing good, it must be good. They focus outward—on the community served, and programmatic outcomes, failing to recognize (or choosing to overlook) that their organization is not sufficiently representative of that community and other marginalized groups, or sufficiently inclusive. And sometimes staff (or a small group of staff) focus disproportionately inward—on the internal makeup of the organization and the DEI process, and don’t give enough thought to the primary responsibility to deliver change to the community being served. Of course, the two objectives should be able to coexist and reinforce each other, and that’s what a good DEI process seeks to achieve.
As CEO, you can and should play a critical leadership role in advancing DEI in a few specific ways: prioritizing DEI within broader organizational goals, balancing involvement with ceding power to colleagues, modeling behavior, striking the right balance between internal and external focus, and ensuring the process doesn’t unduly disrupt your mission. You don’t have to have all the answers, but you are responsible for creating the context for solutions. When we embarked on a substantive DEI process at the Freedom Fund, I was clear that it had my full backing.
But you also need to step back and create space for others. While you, along with the board, are the ultimate decision-maker, DEI won’t be embedded in the organization unless you allow staff to buy into the process and express their needs and priorities. If staff feel like they will be expending energy voicing concerns, experiences, and ideas only for the senior leadership to intervene at the end and undo the whole process, they are less likely to engage. The best way to handle this is by supporting colleagues to lead the internal process. At the Freedom Fund, we established a representative DEI steering committee, with a high degree of autonomy and a remit to consult broadly across the organization, reporting in to the senior leadership team.
DEALING WITH DISCOMFORT
These processes, done properly, do shift power within an organization, and that can be confronting for some leaders. Sometimes, the issues staff raise may be surprising or upsetting to hear. As relatable as you may aim to be, problems around diversity and inclusion in the workplace do not always trickle up to leadership. Sometimes staff don’t feel comfortable raising them or assume nothing will be done. Sometimes managers hide these issues from senior leadership in order to save face. Sometimes what you might perceive as a culture of positivity actually compels staff to keep things to themselves. And unfortunately, sometimes you might close your mind to these challenges, unwilling to listen or unsure of how to address deep-rooted issues. Whatever the case, it’s all the more important that you recognize and acknowledge these concerns and issues, despite how far they may be from your own experience.
The process of imagining a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization often means considering changes to organizational traditions, structures, practices, and values. You may instinctively go into “protective” mode, raising concerns about how such changes would impact effectiveness, ability to raise money, relations with the board, and other practical concerns. I’ve certainly had to work hard to check my sometimes-reflexive responses along these lines. This is why the strength of your organizational culture is of such importance. A good culture will better support a thoughtful, ongoing process.
As I’ve also learned, the CEO’s role—its boundaries or the fact of you occupying it—may be questioned, by discussions of things like adopting a less hierarchical management structure and the need for better representation of marginalized identities in leadership. This is when it is critical, as a truly mission-focused leader, for you to step away from concerns about self-preservation. Your ultimate goal is to seek what is best for your organization and mission, and to be open to change, if change means a healthier and more impactful organization.
All of this requires quite a bit of introspection: you won’t be ready to lead an organization committed to DEI unless you are consciously learning and reflecting with humility. This means committing actual time and energy to read about, examine, and discuss your relationship to systems of power and privilege. You might choose to join a reading group or find a mentor who can help you work through these issues. While you don’t need to feel like a DEI expert, you cannot leave the educational or practical work to other colleagues, specifically women and people of color, who are often expected to take on the undue burden of DEI work in the workplace.5
As the main representative of the organization, the CEO has a responsibility to embody its values and aspirations. You should take the role of modeling inclusive language and behavior seriously, both in interpersonal interactions and public communications, admitting shortcomings and being willing to be held accountable for mistakes and harms caused.
WHEN DEI PROCESSES GO WRONG
Believing in the importance of DEI is quite different from effectively operationalizing it, as we’ve explored above. Even with the best will in the world, embarking on a broad-ranging process can be a profound challenge.
A number of nonprofits have experienced significant turmoil during their DEI process, and some have even imploded.* This is not the norm, and many of those organizations, but certainly not all of them, likely had problematic cultures to begin with. Regardless, given our first obligation as leaders is to the mission and the people we serve, we must understand how these processes can strengthen our work, not derail it.
There are a number of scenarios in which addressing DEI can be particularly challenging, even for organizations with a healthy culture. In one scenario, fundamentally divergent views exist within the organization—from board members all the way to junior staff—about what diversity and inclusion mean. While DEI is about tackling injustice and inequality within our organizations, that straightforward declaration carries a lot of weight. To some it might mean issues of discrimination and different treatment within their nonprofit, such as tackling microaggressions,† reviewing recruitment policies to ensure a wider pool of candidates, and making leadership more diverse and inclusive. To others, the statement might speak to the fact that structures in our society have systematically excluded and discriminated against people of color and other minority groups, and their concern is that this is being replicated in their organization. And to others, a strong focus on DEI may feel exclusionary, and make them feel like they don’t fully belong to the organization.
Our perspective can shape the language we use. Many will talk about barriers to inclusion as systems of oppression and structural impediments resulting from, or leading to, racial privilege* and white supremacy.† Others will feel defensive and even distressed by that language and the accusation (to their mind) of their active wrongdoing. And some, in turn, will be upset at that reaction, and see it as white fragility—defined as a defensiveness among privileged white men and women, which cannot be accommodated as an acceptable viewpoint. The reality is that the terminology used can carry a lot of weight and can’t always be readily adapted to the sensitivities of all those involved. Often the most important first step is to help everyone involved get to a shared understanding of the language and concepts to be used, as a step toward more substantive engagement.
In other scenarios, there is broad buy-in to the importance of a process, but the process itself is badly managed by the board or leadership or staff or all of them, resulting in increased dysfunction. You can easily find many examples of such dysfunction, some of which are described in an Intercept piece titled “Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”6 I have mixed views on these examples. I tend to believe that if a DEI process exposes conflicts in an organization that are powerful enough to derail it, then there is a good chance that significant problems with its culture (including around exclusion and discrimination) already existed, had long festered, and were probably undermining the organization’s effectiveness in any event. But that won’t always be the case, and quite clearly badly run processes, such as those that are focused only on difference and not interested in encouraging inclusion and a sense of belonging for all, can be highly destructive.
While DEI processes can be challenging and sometimes disruptive, that’s not a reason not to engage in them. (In fact, “disruption” can often bring about productive changes in the long term.) Rather, these challenges highlight the critical importance of the CEO being invested in the whole process, ensuring the necessary resources and support are available and that a good culture is in place to help the organization get the most out of its DEI efforts. To make this discussion more concrete, I’ll conclude this chapter with an overview of how we have approached all of this at the Freedom Fund over the last couple of years in the hope that some of this may be of use to others embarking on this process.
THE DEI PROCESS AT THE FREEDOM FUND
Every organization is different and will need to consider specific nuances of their sector and structure to best advance DEI. At the Freedom Fund, we started a multi-stage process in 2020 to identify what we needed to address to ensure our organization was properly diverse and inclusive.
Consultation: We began with an internal staff consultation process to collect the thoughts and experiences of staff through small group discussions and surveys. We analyzed the findings to identify themes and trends and presented them at a staff-wide meeting, during which staff had the opportunity to ask questions and share reflections. Key areas for growth fell into three themes: communication, organizational culture and values, and empowerment and agency.
Staff recommendations included:
development of DEI-related policies and an action plan,
increasing board and staff diversity,
making decision-making and communication processes more transparent and consultative,
addressing inequality between working conditions for team members based in our London and NY offices versus program countries.
Quick wins: Through this process, we also identified many changes that we saw as “low-hanging fruit”—straightforward action items that we were able to take up quickly—e.g., changes in hiring practices, increased support for employee mental health, and changes in formats of meetings.* We formed a DEI steering committee composed of volunteers from across the organization who serve rotating terms.
Digging deeper: We were pleased with the progress but felt we needed to bring in more expertise to dig deeper. We sought out and engaged a DEI-focused consultancy to take the process forward and help us build on what we had learned thus far.
