At the FAIRER Conference, Lutfur Ali, Senior Policy Advisor at CIPD, answers some of our most pressing questions about the DEI landscape. Watch or read his interview below.
It's someone who's able to inspire and inculcate ownership of equality, diversity and inclusion in the organisation, and evolve a shared understanding of what those things are. They're completely different things – we tend to lump them together, so a leader has to be able to articulate those expectations and be able to live and breathe inclusive behaviours themselves so that it inspires this in others.
A leader should put in place appropriate systems of accountability and governance so that when you set targets around issues – not just diversity targets – you create inclusive organisations. Those accountability measures need to be different, in addition to representational diversity.
Overall, I think colleagues throughout the conference today have been talking about being human, being authentic, and someone who can display vulnerability, who has the humility to be able to say "I've made a mistake", or "colleagues have made a mistake and we're learning from this".
So, that learning culture, having an understanding of different cultural competences in the organisation, respect for the differences that people bring to the organisation and ultimately, to be able to empathise and be compassionate as a leader.
These aren't soft skills anymore and they shouldn't be seen as soft skills. These are core competencies for effective leadership. But really holding people to account. They [leaders] should be able to understand and recognise where bias, discrimination and disadvantages exist, particularly those systemic ones. And take action, especially around positive action, to ensure that people who have been historically discriminated against are given the support, and are empowered to be able to be their best so that everybody in the organisation can thrive.
Success first needs to be defined: what do we mean by success? I think ED&I strategies are only successful if it's integrated and built into business priorities. If ED&I strategies aren't delivering on adding value to achieving business priorities – what do those business priorities look like, first of all?
Are business priorities being defined too narrowly? The moral, social and legal imperatives need to be built in. We mustn't define business outcomes too narrowly; they've got to be inclusive of those outputs and outcomes, as well as considering the social benefit, legal considerations and whether it's morally the right thing to do.
You could be a perfectly successful business, a great fund manager earning billions for your bank, but you could be racist, you could be misogynistic. You could have all those sorts of qualities of being biased and stereotypical, but that doesn't make for a sustainable organisation or business.
People talk about creating inclusive cultures but it ends up being around representational diversity, having a diverse panel, having a diverse shortlist. Inclusive culture is not just about that – it's more than that. It's to ensure people are benefiting, whether it's employees or whether it's your service recipients or customers.
What do they feel about the services and products that you're selling to them? That's a qualitative measure but it can be quantitative as well, if you've got the scientific methods put in place. So, it's really about ensuring that the feedback you're getting from the people that are supposed to be benefiting from the interventions around ED&I is actually informing the quantitative metrics that you've got in the organisation.
People are resistant to change. Resistance is the [challenge], the inability to move beyond the current status quo. People who benefit from the status quo will always be resistant to change. Fundamentally, ED&I challenges the past constructs in organisations and in society, and when you challenge power constructs there's always going to be a backlash against that because people in power very rarely want to give it up.
It's the whole idea about 'the need to tackle inequalities through the antidote of equalities'. That's the reason why there's this resistance, but sometimes, what research is showing us, is that there is a fear of engaging with this agenda because people don't understand it. So, creating a shared understanding around the language landscape, particularly. It's very complex. People find it difficult or fear saying the wrong thing – doing the wrong thing – so it's about storytelling, about moving from a deficits model of 'anti this', to a more positive benefits model of, 'these are the opportunities, these are the benefits of equality and diversity for your organisation and society at large.'
I'd like to think that there will be a greater emphasis on delivery of outcomes, around equalities of outcomes. We've had 20 - 30 years of focus around representational diversity. It's still important, but we need organisations across the different levels to be representative of the societies and people that they serve.
But that metric needs to shift to experiences that people have, so even though you might have a representative organisation, or a woman leading an organisation, or a black person leading an organisation, you still have endemic inequalities systemic in organisations, and that's what needs to be addressed.
That's what needs to be systemically addressed by ensuring that everything the organisation does integrates equality, diversity and inclusion. How you measure equality is different from how you measure inclusion, to how you measure diversity. So what do those new measures look like, for instance, if one of those measures has to to be around the well-being? How staff feel in the organisation? Do they feel safe enough to be able to share their thoughts, or contribute to decision- making? That power-sharing bit is quite crucial so I'd like to see a shift in staff engagement and staff involvement in decision- making.