Editorial
Before the news of numerous companies jettisoning their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) leaders and departments, there was already an ongoing identity crisis in the diversity office. The names of the departments have gone from Diversity to Diversity and Inclusion, to DEI, to some variations that include Diversity, Inclusion and the term Belonging. Occasionally, you might see the term equality. For example, in numerous bold statements, Salesforce uses the word equality. Salesforce has embraced the term equality, while in other organizations, this language often is intentionally deleted from references to any diversity work. How do we understand this phenomenon?
Researching Diversity Language
To find out what business leaders and non-leader employees think all these words mean and which terms they prefer, I did a survey, and the overall results were as follows:
Diversity: Respondents defined it as companies trying to bring diverse groups of people into the company.
Inclusion: This meant the company is working on figuring out what to do with all those different people.
Equity: Viewed as a nice idea, but no one was clear what this meant, and some people found it most problematic, due to worries about favoritism.
Belonging: This was a mix; we saw some comments about people liking it, and others wondering who or what an employee is supposed to belong to.
Equality: There were more emotional responses to this term. Employees wanted equal opportunity, and some employers were very fearful of the term, citing the work they have done to create merit-based systems would be harmed by any efforts to create equality at work.
We also found that use of any of these terms was raising concerns that organizations were favoring one group over another. When diversity is discussed, the majority groups can have concerns about their own place in the organization as things promise to change. Additionally, companies, universities and communities are working to ban the use of diversity, inclusion and equity departments, personnel and more.
Given that the goal of all these efforts is something other than favoritism, maybe it’s time to change the language to a more overarching and business-focused term. I am not trying to suggest a lessening of the importance of diversity, but rather a change in language that really does denote fairness and equal opportunity for everyone. The goal is creating language that suggests a level playing field.
Related Article: Corporations Are Reevaluating Their DEI Programs
The Story of Business Capital
There is an abundance of research focused on understanding various types of business capital and how to leverage them to create competitive advantages. For example, most companies have financial capital, technology capital and human resources capital. Additionally, every organization has relational capital, and although most never measure it (thus, they are not managing it), relational capital is perhaps the most important for strategy, long-term competitive advantage and differentiation.
Maximization of relational capital means improving relationships internally and externally with ALL types of people. Is this not what we are trying to do in all the diversity-related initiatives?
Leaders want to create an organization that understands their diverse client base, employee base, potential client base, potential employee base and potential community partners. One measure of optimized or maximized relational capital value is the types of groups in which an organization has relationships, and the second measure is the quality of those relationships. A third measurement exercise would involve assessing which relationships are strong and which are weak, and then developing strategies to fix problems.
If this were the job of a department, the Chief Relational Officer would be responsible for more than just diversity; this job would be focused on looking at relationships with different subsets of employees, examining resources provided to these people, making sure relationships with everyone (majority and minority groups) are positive and helping the company grow. They would help employees learn how to sustain strong and positive relationships with each other and with partners, vendors, suppliers, community members and customers.
The Chief Relational Office language would serve to put all people and employees on the same playing field. It does tend to focus more on equality, but not in a way that alienates anyone because the focus is on equal opportunity, equal access and equal relational value.
Related Article: Building a Robust and Diverse Leadership Pipeline in the Face of Resistance
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Relational Capital is Powerful
Relational capital is not a new concept; I have looked at it in regard to other sources of capital in numerous studies, and the research continues to find that higher levels of relational capital have positive effects on organizational outcomes.
This is a time to radically change how we think about diversity, and the current model of creating various compilations of the same terms and changing out which one comes first, second or third — all without a clear purpose (at least from the perspective of the employees and perhaps other stakeholders) — will likely not herald in the type of new attitudes, behaviors, measurement systems and more that are needed. I invite comments on making some bolder changes, starting with how we label the groups responsible for relational capital — beyond diversity.
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