At the FAIRER Conference, Mark Lomas, Head of Culture, Lloyd's of London, answers some of our most pressing questions about the DEI landscape. Watch or read his interview below.
I think there are a few things that make a really inclusive leader. At the absolute base of it, it comes down to trust – being able to develop trust in your teams and them to trust you. I think for me it also starts with curiosity, so you have to be curious about what motivates people.
You have to be open and honest with them, and I think a truly inclusive leader really does go out of their way to gather views from a range of people in their team but is also honest and transparent about having to make the decision, what they've taken into account and where they've arrived. To do that really effectively, people need to feel the ability to express their opinion, particularly expressing when they disagree, and they need to know that's safe and you need to generate the type of environment to do that. When you do that well, you get a really good state of inclusion in a team.
I think there are a few things. Number one being very, very clear on your aim. What are you aiming to do and how is that aligned to the broader business strategy? I think the second is being clear on the components of that strategy. It will be different for different organisations. And then how you're going to engage people in that strategy, how you're going to measure the impact and how you're going to communicate it. And critically, giving a time frame in which you expect to achieve those milestones along the way.
I think the biggest challenge DEI faces at the moment is professional capability – the ability to deliver business outcomes.
Number one, we start to see an erosion of this rhetoric that DEI must die. To do that, DEI has to professionalise, so ensuring that those D&I practitioners really have a strong grounding in technical skills. Number two, really align to delivering those business outcomes, and that we can see that proved time and time again. And then I think, for me, also it's how organisations reflect where their D&I professionals work, which, I think, to be most effective, is at a strategy level.