The Scope of a DEI Role
Something is on my mind lately: Can the scope of your DEI role ever be truly narrowed down? Or is a DEI role one that fills all gaps and serves all needs? Let’s explore.
In my book, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: How to Succeed at an Impossible Job, I talk about how important it is to get clarity on the scope of your DEI role. Are you focused on internal (employee-related) DEI work or does your scope extend externally to how customers and partners are welcomed, included and treated? Does it also include how inclusive your product is or how you contribute to the equity of the broader ecosystem of your industry? Understanding what exactly your scope is becomes important because it helps you focus your work. It helps you know what is your responsibility to change and what lies beyond. It helps you allocate your time and identify who your stakeholders are.
But, in reality, can the scope of a DEI job ever be so tightly defined?
I ask this question following observations and conversations with many DEI professionals. Often they thought their role was limited to internal employee topics (inclusion of employees, supporting ERGs, fair hiring, equitable promotions, training managers on DEI, etc.) But soon a global pandemic, a PR crisis or some bad business decision challenges that reality.
Why?
Everything is connected. In a modern workplace in 2023, the lines are blurred. Your stakeholders for an internal role (employees and especially leaders and members of ERGs) often do not recognize such a distinction. Especially if your internal role has no counterpart focusing on the external. By default, you are the point of contact for everything related to DEI. Your role fills the void and sometimes that void is incredibly big. Perhaps we can borrow and adapt a term from the project management professionals: Scope Creep.
Scope creep in project management refers to changes, continuous or uncontrolled growth in a project’s scope, at any point after the project begins. This can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled.
So how does the situation typically occur?
In what scenario do you, in your internal role, suddenly find yourself taking on external work? I’ve noticed this happening in a few different ways:
Your organization makes a strategic business decision that fails to consider DEI in some way and causes a crisis. Typically this percipitates an external statement and an internal commitment to do better. Often, that response is owned by a comms team that may be skilled in crisis management but not necessarily DEI. So you or your team are called in to fill the gaps. How? Likely you are called in to support (or entirely manage) both.
And on top of that, the reaction of internal employees to such a business decision becomes another responsibility to manage and support. This layered situation could derail your week (or month) with urgent and sometimes around-the-clock unplanned work to manage and coordinate.
What does this look like in real life?
Let’s talk about some real-life business decisions. Netflix faced severe internal and external backlash from the airing of the Dave Chapelle stand-up special: The Closer. As a result, there was a walkout by employees as explained in this article. On top of that, several Trans employees at Netflix resigned over the special and the lack of support they felt from management.
While this was happening, I gave it a lot of thought. I felt sympathy for the DEI employees who may have felt a professional obligation to tow the party line and even defend decisions they don’t believe in. A common corporate mantra “Disagree and Commit” is listed among Netflix’s values. I wondered if perhaps the internal comms and even the I&D team were asked to write that email. Ultimately, I recognize that there can be a real and true conflict between authentic DEI work and corporate decisions. There will always be times when we are asked to stand behind our employer, perhaps at the expense of our own values and personal feelings.
Another recent situation comes to mind: the public campaign by John Green and others to pressure Johnson & Johnson to reconsider the patent of an expensive and life-saving Tuberculosis drug. The response by J&J on twitter was interesting. To me, it read as a cold corporate response verging on gas-lighting. I can only imagine what the dialogue was like internally among employees, ERGs and the DEI teams — how much discussion and disappointment was spawned by the response. Even though I don’t know what it was like to be in that situation, I felt empathy for those who may have experienced an internal conflict.
So where does this leave us?
Sadly, I don’t think there’s a blueprint to avoid this. Even if a DEI role is positioned well at the executive level, and has a scope including both internal and external DEI… the teams are often still left out of the loop for critical business decisions (layoffs, business expansions, restructurings, new partnerships, acquisitions). And yet these are exactly the type of decisions that have serious DEI ramifications. Oftentimes the decisions are signed, sealed and delivered before the DEI staff is informed (along with everyone else). And when the backlash comes? The DEI team is called in on short notice to clean up the mess which includes: meeting with ERGs to hear their concerns; devising a remediation plan including a public statement or partnering with an NGO to give back…. or simply signing off on the decision retroactively, giving it the DEI stamp of approval post-decision.
So, how do we keep our integrity and motivation in all of this?
I do not have a clever solution to this problem of trying to successfully narrow your scope and set others’ expectations correctly. Instead, I think succeeding in this work is about acknowledging the elephant in the room. No matter what our job description says, the DEI team is an internal changemaker and, sometimes is also an external fixer. In this situation, I think the best thing we can do is take a moment to acknowledge that our scope expands and contracts, often due to decisions, behaviors and societal situations wholly beyond our control. If we acknowledge that there might be chaos around the corner, it feels slightly less like a surprise. And we can manage our time with a bit of inward grace, especially when our plans get derailed and work suddenly changes.
And, meanwhile, it’s important to do some personal soul-searching. If an organization is asking you to significantly compromise your values and integrity in order to do the work, here’s a reminder: You do not have any obligation to fix a system that is beyond broken, especially if no one in leadership is seriously willing to provide the tools to fix it.
