Making the Choice to Be Inclusive
Forbes recently published its list of the top large employers for Diversity. In the accompanying article, there was a pull quote from Camille Chang Gilmore, global chief diversity officer at Boston Scientific.
What a wonderfully succinct and clear statement about the state of corporate America. Diversity is a given in today’s America, and how fortunate we are to live that reality. It’s these diverse perspectives, experiences, and individual identities that make America so wonderful. However, this societal truth about today’s America is not reflected yet it today’s corporate America. Creating an environment that enables diverse people to thrive together is perhaps the most important job of today’s top executives.
The word that really spoke to me from the Forbes article, however, was Belonging. It spoke to me because, at Lippe Taylor, we use the same end point as our guiding light: Belonging is the word we use as well. We are a company that has long led the industry in one aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Namely — women have known for decades that Lippe Taylor is a company where they can reach the top and build their careers. We are woman-founded and women-led with the vast majority of our top, senior positions being held by women. We launched the SHEQUALITY initiative for women to reach executive agency positions from our own conference rooms. Women have always known they belong at Lippe Taylor. It’s this same instinctive feeling that we are striving to engender for every person who walks through the door.
With racial diversity, we are making progress, but we are lagging our own goals. Our diversity numbers still hover above 70% white, while our aspiration is to achieve 35% racial diversity. Our processes and environmental factors are evolving, and with the help of experts like Johns Hopkins multicultural guru, Joe Colon, we are improving. Finally, our efforts to understand and create an inclusive environment for Neurodiversity are something I believe will again lead the industry.
After conducting an internal review, I can affirm that pay equity is no longer a goal for our company, it is our current truth. People of all genders, races, and sexual orientations are paid equally for equal roles. However, diverse representation at senior levels is still a goal for us. In that way, equity remains a goal for us, much as Chang Gilmore said.
Having touched now on Diversity, Equity, and Belonging, there remains one final piece of the puzzle: Inclusion. In the Forbes article, inclusion is called a choice, which is such a powerful word. Having the power to choose implies great autonomy and authority. However, while some aspects of the DEI effort are squarely in the domain of business leaders and company executives, this choice is one that must be exercised by every person in the company, every single day. Companies can introduce policies and programs until they’re blue in the face, but if people in those companies don’t make the conscious choice to include others, people will never feel that sense of belonging.
There are operational choices we make at Lippe Taylor that are designed to support and encourage inclusivity. Things like having a one P&L structure, billability policies that encourage collaboration over profitability, and reinforcing our Plus(+) Model for integration every moment of the day. These all make it so there are no organizational barriers to including people. That doesn’t mean we’ve achieved our aspiration of all employees feeling that sense of belonging. It just means we’ve eliminated operational barriers like not people worrying about blowing up budgets, “buying time” from other departments, stepping on toes, crossing swim lanes, or any of the other nonsense that creates disincentives to include people. However, being inclusive is still a choice that every person has to make every day. We’re all busy — there’s always the temptation to think “I could include that person, but it will probably be faster to just do this without them.”
That’s a temptation we have to avoid. We all become better when our teams reflect a diversity of perspectives and lived experiences, even if the process takes longer. Inclusion is a choice, and it’s one that will become even more important to make every single day as we begin returning to the office. Research from Microsoft found that our virtual working world created a shrinking of personal networks. We spent more concentrated time working virtually with a small number of people. Weaker connections — people we used to see occasionally in the office, fell by the wayside. It’s those weak connections in particular we need to be mindful of including. Every person in our company can learn and grow by just being included in something new.
So, the next time you have the power to choose: should I include this person or not? I urge you to choose inclusion. And, even after taking this step toward inclusivity, I urge you to view their engagement and ask yourself: am I unwittingly excluding this person, even though I invited him/her to this meeting? At Lippe Taylor, you will have our support and our praise for choosing inclusivity. And, as a company we will become much stronger as the sum of those choices — made every single day by every single employee, accumulate into that effervescent flow state of belonging for everyone.
