Looking at DEI at the Corporate Level

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, currently might seem on the downslope of attention and popularity. But it’s been on ups and downs under various guises since first appearing in the U.S. in the early 1960s.

“We’re going through a correction, not a catastrophe,” veteran DEI expert and consultant Janet Stovall, the global head of DEI at NeuroLeadership Institute, told GlobeSt.com earlier this year. Companies rolled out $340 billion worth of commitments to improve racial equity between May 2020 and October 2022 in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, according to data from the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility.

Corporations often operate on pendulum swings, surging into areas that become popular for whatever reason and then pulling back when things get more complicated or harder. But there is a deeper question for corporations when DEI is involved. How do they treat the topic at the top of the organization? What does it say about the topic if executives with purview over it rarely have a path to the chief executive’s job?

One reason is organizational prejudice. Often, boards choose CEOs with a background in finance, sales, or marketing, and not in HR, legal or IT experience. It’s an issue of what companies value in workplace contributions — something with profit and loss (P&L) focus. “That typically eliminates a lot of people from consideration,” Ovell Barbee, Jr., an executive with extensive HR and DEI experience in multiple Fortune 500 companies and author of In The Big House: A Human-Centered & Progressive Approach to DEI and Positive Workforce Engagement, tells GlobeSt.com.

The field of HR has matured and evolved,” Barbee says. “A very solid HR leader in my opinion also should be given consideration as a backfill for a CEO in organizations that require a healthy culture, an investment in leadership, having tools in how to pivot an organization in the midst of change.”

Unfortunately, much of what DEI and HR executives do goes underappreciated. “Many chief diversity officers find themselves with very few resources,” Barbee says. “Those who are able to be effective are demonstrating great understanding of the organization dynamics in operational components” How to implement an effective DEI program that will withstand resistance and legal and regulatory review isn’t easy.

The current emphasis strictly on P&L positions is shortsighted. “My general perspective is DEI work has to take a system approach,” Barbee says. “There’s less resistance for the quick solution but a lot of those are not sustainable. You run into more resistance when you talk about a process, a policy, and people start determining, ‘How is that going to impact me?’”

Ultimately, the difficulty in seeing an advance of executives in DEI, in particular, is the political nature of the topic. “They won’t see that specifically,” he says.

To change things, what will be necessary is to take up an old practice of larger corporations, training executives by rotating them through multiple departments, including HR and DEI, for a more well-rounded approach to running an organization.