Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right

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Because if you really do care about meritocracy, I think you want to make sure that it is a true meritocracy. In high-trust environments, where stakeholders trust leaders to recognize problems and follow through on commitments, change is relatively linear: “Assess the Present”, “Tell a Story”, “Experiment Carefully”, and “Iterate, Celebrate (successful outcomes) and Reiterate”. Inclusion focuses on creating an environment where diverse employees feel valued and can fulfill their potential, requiring the dismantling of barriers. Lily is a thought-leading voice on LinkedIn and I was hoping they would have more intriguing and creative ideas on how best to push for and reward DEI initiatives. I find myself working with people who know very little about DEI and haven't been exposed to the large body of literature on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

For example, they broach the topic of compensating ERG leaders for their work but fall short of actually imploring businesses to think of the double burden of ERG leadership and provide monetary compensation to said burden-holders. You could say, "Okay, let's try to start a movement with these employees that raises the visibility of the challenge of the inequity with the goal of that movement being to make more people understand how that policy's broken. Because I think this is something that's deeply prized by incoming talent and younger generations, and yet they're coming into this sort of antiquated system and then they're trying to challenge the system. If you are taking an outcomes based approach to EDI, how will you know when you have achieved your outcomes? Inclusion is the achievement of a felt environment that stakeholder populations trust as respectful and accountable.

I'm interested in thinking more about their outcomes-driven approach as well as how I can narrow/deepen my own focus to be more effective in my own work in an interconnected community. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There is very little discussion of a lot of buzzwords associated with DEI, and as such the book truly boils down a lot of topics into interpersonal dynamics.

If we are not collecting data at the outset to gain a baseline and then regularly reassessing where we are at in achieving our goals, we won't be able to determine if we have achieved what we set out to and are ready to move on to the next step. Zheng is the first practitioner I have seen use an organizing framework to meaningfully and measurably impact change in organizations! They hear the talking points and they're like, "Well, less for me, or now this is another thing I have to do or it's still side of desk. A common recommendation is for recruiters to note the demographic representation their organization lacks and look for identity-based communities with that representation.

Lily Zheng's DEI Deconstructed is a compelling must-read for leaders who want to stay accountable, make change, and create better workplaces for us all. I really would love if we could make this work boring as all hell, because I think that's what it is at the end of the day.

Though meant for practitioners and facilitators, I thought it was incredibly interesting and thoughtful from a layperson perspective and gave me a lot of insight into the field, what it can accomplish, and how much further it still has to go. But I think the outcome that emerged was a spike in employee voice for marginalized groups, especially Black employees. For example, you can be an executive that triumphs DEI-focused change within an organization, but please leave the teaching and coaching to those with the lived toolkits. And the approach that I see a lot is treating DEI and the body of work that makes up DEI as sort of the purview of a certain kind of person. Zheng does an excellent job outlining power dynamics, roles people play in social movements, and the differences in approach needed to take at organizations depending on the level of trust in the environment.They don't pretend that it is easy, but they do show what is possible while acknowledging that this work is constantly evolving; and we must evolve along with it.

Lily also explains different terms and gives great statistics to reinforce the effectiveness of different interventions. I've been following Lily Zheng for years on LinkedIn to get their DEI insights, and their book is even better. And so some of the tension is that the new societal pressure to make inequities go away is butting up against these long standing, sometimes decades long hierarchies within organizations, within institutions, within government, within academia, within industry that have unspoken rules about who it is that deserves to be on top.

This topic can either be approached in a detrimental or a positive/correct manner, but there’s really no definitive way to execute it. I see too often people having these really ambitious intentions, setting out really to make better organizations and make better teams, become more inclusive people. This book will be something I refer back to and use to evaluate other DEI books, initiatives and trainings. I think what I've tried to do in the last few years is to take a different approach than what I've seen in the industry.