You want to facilitate change in your organization. You want to show you are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In many ways, your DEI work is a change effort. As with any change initiative, you will have people who are ready for it, people who are unsure about it and people who are not ready for it. So, how do you bring all of your people together to create authentic conversation about DEI? Consider the tips below to get started.

Three Ways to Create Authentic DEI Conversation

Step 1: Build Trust

Change is hard, and talking about DEI may feel difficult for your staff, too. What if they say something wrong? What if they disagree with something that is shared? What if they are excited and someone else shuts them down?  What if the conversation turns political or, worse, what if they share their experiences or observations and nothing changes?

Most of us have been taught not to be vulnerable at work. We have been taught to avoid talking about topics like race. To begin having authentic conversations about DEI at work, we have to first build trust within the organization.

To build trust for impactful DEI conversations, try to:

1. Be open and transparent about your goals and expectation: Ensure the purpose of the conversation is clear. Explain how you would like people to contribute. The less vague you are, the more likely staff are to participate.
2. Build deeper relationships among staff: Expecting staff to share authentically when they do not have strong relationships with their peers or supervisors is not realistic. These relationships must be in tact prior to the conversations.
3. Model vulnerability: As a leader, it starts with you. When staff see that you are struggling with the same challenges they are, they will trust your intentions more. Be open about your own equity journey, your successes, and your challenges with DEI.

Step 2: Plan the Conversation

As with any training and development initiative, it’s important to have a plan. Scheduling a meeting to discuss DEI efforts or topics with no plan in place may result in fear, hurt feelings or frustration.

What does a plan for effective DEI conversations look like?

• Focus the conversation on a single DEI challenge: Are you focused on diversity in hiring? Creating a culture of belonging? Ensuring more equity in promotions? Focus your DEI conversations around your most pressing goals and initiatives to stay on course.
• Set goals: What do you want others to walk away with after the conversation is over? A better understanding of the Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) experience? A list of possible ways to address the challenge? Set goals that represent what you want the conversation to achieve.
• Write the questions: With your DEI challenge in mind, write questions that help you discover new information and achieve your goals. Start by asking the questions that are easy to answer and feel safe for staff to answer. This will build comfort within the conversation. As staff become more comfortable, you can move to the more challenging questions that may leave others feeling uncomfortable, which is often necessary to drive change.
• Design the experience: Many of us are operating in a virtual or hybrid world right now, and people tend to be quieter in virtual spaces. How will you facilitate a conversation about DEI in a virtual environment? Consider using breakout groups, shared slides for collaboration, and anonymous polls to gather feedback and work toward your goals when having DEI conversations online.

Step 3: Maintain an Open Dialogue

A wise researcher once told me never to ask for data you don’t intend to use: If you lead a DEI conversation, your people will expect to see a change. But as leaders, we know change can be complex and takes time to achieve.

Maintain an open dialogue with learners and let them know where they can continue to share their experiences and contribute their ideas. Continuously communicate what you are learning and what you are working on and, as you implement changes, be transparent about what is going well and what isn’t. This dialogue will be easier to do if you’ve built trust (step one) and planned the conversations around specific goals (step two).

Next Steps

Having authentic DEI conversations might sound like an “easy fix” to creating an equitable workplace, but it can be difficult to bring people together and prompt them to share their experiences and ideas in a meaningful way when everyone is at a different place on their DEI journey.

If you are struggling with your DEI efforts, try building trust, planning DEI conversations in an intentional way and maintaining an open dialogue as you proceed with any changes.