Should You Hire a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer?
After over a year of increased attention to the lack of diversity, equity, inclusion in the coaching industry, I have been in more and more conversations with my clients, particularly multi-6, 7-, and 8- figure companies about whether or not they should hire an internal hire responsible for DEI in their company.
Typically my answer to these types of questions is, “it depends’, BUT I in this case feel confident in saying “Probably not”.
Don’t get me wrong. I have some clients in the coaching industry who have made the choice to take on this role. And for those who have, we are working closely with them to make sure they set that team member up for the best possible outcomes. For companies who have lots of team members, layers of leadership, and multiple initiatives happening at once, it can be really useful to have a team member who’s sole responsibility is to manage the DEI and anti-racism efforts within your company but people underestimate the amount of preparation this role will need in order to be effective.
I come from an industry where having an office of Diversity and Inclusion, and team members who are specifically responsible for this role is quite common. And I’ve seen, first hand, the issues with these departments and roles.
What concerns me most as I see the evolution of DEI work in the coaching industry (not to mention the commodification of DEI and bandwagon energy towards anti-racism work), is that people are excited about their commitment to DEI, which triggers an urgency to “get it right” and causes them to default to standards of Whiteness in the process.
Here are 3 things that make me nervous about DEI hires in coaching companies that we all need to be aware of.
1. Hiring a DEI coach to be the content expert within a broader company who will subsequently own the intellectual property of the employee.
If a company hires a DEI coach as an employee of the company, that company will own the intellectual property including workshops, slides, models, worksheets, video/audio teaching, etc. This employee will be responsible for creating content based on their expertise but that expertise will then be attributed to the company, rather than the employee themselves.
If the employee leaves, they have no rights to that content, and no rights to any monetary compensation for that content even if it is repackaged and sold over and over.
2. The coaching industry has this gross trend of learning something, not actually mastering it, and thinking they have the right to sell it to other people. The work involved in moving someone through an anti-racist journey takes a long time, and requires dedicated work. It shouldn’t be offered as an add on or bonus for joining a program. This gives people a false sense of doing the work, when all they’ve done is created some community guidelines, a DEI statement, and listened to some workshops about systemic oppression.
If you’re looking to really unpack your privilege or internalized Whiteness. Please, for the love of Beyonce, hire a professional DEI/anti-racism facilitator.
3. An internal DEI hire who doesn’t have a guaranteed work contract, and institutional power is not being set up for success. When I mean guaranteed work contract, I mean that you can’t fire that person if they make you mad, uncomfortable, or call you and your team in (or out). Yup. You can’t. And when I say institutional power I mean they can actually change company policy, they have a budget, a team member, and have authority to implement changes and other team members know they have the authority to make decisions.
Do I actually need to explain why? You may have to wait for a podcast episode about all the details.
Look, it get it. Y’all are excited. But trust me when I say that you need to do the work first. You need to learn how to hold it. Hiring a DEI person requires a process that you should undertake before they get here.
If you’re considering making this kind of hire, and want help, OR if you realize your not ready for a hire, but want to take this work on in serious way, hit us up on Instagram Trudi Lebron. And if you’re a person in this role and need help getting your company to support you in this role, share this article with them, and then hit us up on Instagram and let’s see if we can help out.
