The Value Of Personal DEI

How embracing DEI can enhance your career, relationships, and life

Highlights:

• Connecting with diverse people leads to personal growth and a richer human experience.
• DEI brings diverse thinking, better decisions, problem-solving, and innovation.
• Seeking diverse relationships enhances navigating differences, team performance, and trust.
• Inclusive cultures lead to higher innovation rates, team performance, and better business outcomes.
• Diverse relationships result in positive evaluations, early promotions, and higher compensation.

 

By now, most leaders are familiar with the business case for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). There is a plethora of arguments supporting the value of DEI for their companies, including how DEI improves the bottom line. But before any business can implement an effective program that eliminates barriers and mitigates bias, individuals need to understand how they will benefit from DEI on a personal level, not just an organizational one. I refer to the arguments supporting the value of DEI to individuals as “the personal case for DEI.”

In my thirty years as a DEI expert and consultant, I have seen how personal DEI – greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in one’s personal life – enhances people’s careers, performance, and relationships. Here’s what personal DEI can do for you as a leader and for everyone with whom you work.

Enhanced Personal Growth

Let’s start with personal growth. Diverse relationships with people from different backgrounds and perspectives positively challenge you to move beyond your comfort zone into your growth zone and become a better person today than yesterday. They also lead to a richer human experience by exploring diverse cultures, including music, art, food, religion, language, clothing, history, and more. If experience is the best teacher, diversity creates the best classroom!

For example, I vividly recall an experience when I studied abroad and did not find the food to be to my liking. I had become accustomed to my mom’s home cooking! During the semester break, rather than teaching me how to cook the favorite dishes from my culture, my mom gave me invaluable advice: Ask someone from another country to teach you a dish from their culture. When I returned to campus, I learned recipes from cultures across the globe, which also prepared me to navigate those cultures years later as a business professional.

Greater Diversity of Thought 

DEI enables you to tap into the diverse thinking of others to make better decisions, generate better ideas, improve problem-solving, and foster greater innovation. A harrowing example of what can happen when you don’t have diverse perspectives on your team is captured in numerous books and movies about the Cuban Missile Crisis of the John F. Kennedy presidential administration.

President Kennedy had several intelligent men around the table advising him about how to deal with the emerging crisis of Soviet missiles being erected in Cuba. The term groupthink is derived from the situation that emerged in those meetings. Dissenting views were drowned out by the race for a speedy and unified solution. The group began to think as one, and it nearly brought the U.S. to war with the Soviet Union.

The practical takeaway here is that you want your team members to all be committed to a common purpose, but you also want there to be enough difference that you don’t all think the same way.

“It’s making sure you have little risk of being blindsided by something that a diverse team would have known about and would have identified as an opportunity or a risk. I think it brings far greater confidence to the decision-making when you know you are being supported by people who have far more diverse points of view,” says Francois Hudon, a former executive with the Bank of Montreal.

Expanded Network of Relationships 

In her TED talk, “The Politics of Fiction,” Turkish storyteller Elif Shafak argues that we increasingly find ourselves immersed in “communities of the like-minded,” that is, surrounded by others who reflect our social and cultural identity. The danger of being encircled by people who are like you is that you can become more prone to produce stereotypes and assumptions about those who are not like you – cast projections onto those outside of the communities to which you belong.

When you are more intentional about seeking diverse relationships, it not only enhances your ability to navigate differences in your personal life but also in your professional endeavors. For example, researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Akron found that “workers with more diverse personal relationships were, not surprisingly, better at building a racially diverse network on the job. These individuals utilized this broader network to pursue extra tasks beyond their basic responsibilities and appeared to be more trusting of their supervisors.”

Increased Range of Opportunities 

Diverse work teams are known to be better at assessing risks and gathering accurate facts, and companies with inclusive leaders report higher innovation rates. According to a study by Deloitte, inclusive leaders increase team performance by seventeen percent, increase decision-making quality by twenty percent, increase team collaboration by twenty-nine percent, and increase feelings of inclusion by seventy percent.

Another study by the Australian Institute of Company Directors found that organizations with inclusive cultures were two times as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, three times as likely to be high performing, six times more likely to be innovative and agile, and eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes.

It’s a no-brainer that having a larger and more diverse professional network will lead to higher-performing teams and present a wider spectrum of opportunities, but it all starts with increasing the diversity of your personal relationships, and this must happen on your own time.

More Positive Evaluations, Earlier Promotions, and Higher Compensation

On a regular basis, I introduce people that I believe should know each other. For example, I recently connected the CEOs of two companies that are strategic partners to my firm, BCT Partners, with the hopes they could jointly pursue a contract. I was proud to find out that they won the contract by working together. I make these kinds of introductions for any number of reasons: there is an opportunity people could pursue together; both people share a common interest; one person has knowledge, skills, or abilities the other person is in search of; and the list goes on.

While it is not my intent to derive a benefit from making these connections, it is often the case that I do derive a benefit, whether it is because they involve me somehow in their collaboration or because of the future goodwill it engenders with both parties. There are several terms that refer to this valuable role I often play including broker, connector, and even a Latin phrase, “Tertius gaudens,” which means “the third who benefits.”

Interestingly, the benefits of making these connections go even further than I imagined. Research has found that individuals with relationships that are rich with opportunities to connect with people would otherwise be disconnected, “receive more positive evaluations, earlier promotions, and higher compensation.” In other words, personal DEI can lead to improved career performance, advancement, and even earnings.

Expanded Civic Engagement and Positive Outcomes for Others

One of the personal values I learned from my parents when I was young is that of service to others. From volunteering with various charitable causes to participating in activities at our church to engaging in community service programs, my parents taught me that helping others is not only an opportunity; it is a responsibility.

I’ll never forget an occasion when I had already committed to volunteer with a local charity, and it required me to get up early. The night before when I told my mom I was no longer planning to go because I preferred to sleep, she immediately gave me a very stern reminder that less fortunate people were depending on me.

Let’s just say I was up bright and early the next morning! More importantly, that experience, and so many others during my years growing up, reinforced the importance – the value – of helping others. Little did I know that personal DEI also has a positive relationship with community service.

A Princeton University study entitled “Do Differences Make a Difference?” found that “increased exposure to diversity is positively associated with civic engagement” and that “individuals are more likely to perform activities and services in order to improve outcomes for others, and in doing so, they are making a difference in their homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and communities.” Therefore, if you are like me and you are constantly questioning what more you can do to improve the world around you, personal DEI is an answer.

These are compelling arguments for the value of personal DEI. This suggests that while you do not have to have the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive relationships, you can significantly benefit from having diversity, equity, and inclusivity in your relationships. It also suggests that while you do not have to understand all cultures, you can significantly benefit from seeking an understanding of different cultures. 

It all starts with improving your personal DEI, and that must be something for which you are regularly willing to commit time to connect with people who are different than you.

Dr. Randal Pinkett, the author of DATA-DRIVEN DEI, is an entrepreneur, innovator, and DEI expert. He is the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of BCT Partners, a global research, training, and data analytics firm whose mission is to provide insights about diverse people that lead to equity. An international public speaker, Dr. Pinkett is the author or co-author of Black Faces in High Places, Black Faces in White Places, Campus CEO, and No-Money Down CEO. Dr. Pinkett was also the Season Four winner of the reality television show, The Apprentice.