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

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I particularly appreciated their focus on trust as the key ingredient for change, laying out different paths for high-trust, medium-trust and low-trust environments. In low-trust environments, their advice is to get to a medium-trust environment by having leaders cede power to the advocates and follow their lead; the leaders have lost trust so nobody will follow them, so better to follow somebody else who may have that trust. I’ll say this up front: this book is not a deep dive into critical race theory, organizational sociology, or change management, though all these and more will inform the content you’ll be reading. This is on purpose—I’ve aimed to provide a well-rounded, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive foundation that can enable any thoughtful newcomer to do effective DEI work. In my experience, you don’t need to be a subject matter expert to be an effective change-maker. You just need to have enough of a knowledge base to begin gaining experience and refining your impact. One participant of a training that focused on inclusive language for LGBTQ+ communities later told a colleague that “transsexual” was outdated and un-inclusive language. Their colleague, who had happily identified as transsexual for years, was less than thrilled to hear that her own identity was somehow “un-inclusive” from someone who wasn’t trans themself. If you are taking an outcomes based approach to EDI, how will you know when you have achieved your outcomes? 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. DEI surveys are only as good as the practitioner or expert administering them and the organizational leaders following up (or not) on their findings. Ineffective deployments of DEI surveys can result in unintended consequences, including retaliation, decreased employee trust in leadership, and unhelpful interventions informed by inaccurate survey conclusions. DEI Talks

Women of color deserve truly equitable workplaces where our success and well-being is centered. Lily Zheng's DEI Deconstructedis a compelling must-read for leaders who want to stay accountable, make change, and create better workplaces for us all." I won’t dress it up any more than that—I have no intention of selling “pragmatic DEI” as an exciting new thing to spic I think what makes Lily an expert is their intersectionality and lived experiences. They don’t say this outright, but… you can’t be a cis-hetero white dude AND be a DEI expert. BUT, there is space at the table if you do fall into this category. 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. Everything about how I approached diversity, equity, and inclusion changed in 2016 when I first read an article in the Harvard Business Review (it’s not every day I mark a period of my life with a business article but still, bear with me). The article? “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev. Both sociologists argue that companies’ command-and-control deployment of diversity programs, hiring tests, and grievance processes have failed to move the needle on the representation of women and non-White racial groups in the US. Their data are hard to argue with. While the exact dimensions of identity and social status affected by discrimination and inequity differ across the world, discrimination in the workplace is a global phenomenon.Each time I retell this story, I get the same eager questions. Was there a happy ending? Did companies finally recognize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion work and enable the many experts, practitioners, educators, and consultants to work their magic? Did a new cohort of companies triumphantly emerge from 2020, having turned over a new leaf, as a new vanguard of the diverse, equitable, and inclusion organizations of the future? Summary: “The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias” explains why bias is a part of the human condition and how interactions based in bias can affect the success of your organization. Experts from leadership transformation company FranklinCovey provide a guide to understanding and overcoming unconscious bias. But that's a quibble. This is probably a good resource for human resources/leadership/etc. who really do want to engage with DEI but perhaps don't know where to start or want to take it beyond 101, etc. That said, this should not be the only resource but may be another useful tool in the toolkit.

DEI Deconstructed has abundant resources, such as reading lists, chapter summaries, and critical takeaways. The introduction section provides an overview of each chapter's purpose, the authors give special consideration to language, and each chapter builds on the last. Why it’s a must-read: This book aims to help executives create DEI 2.0 and build cultures of belonging. “Leading Below the Surface” gathers true stories, tips and strategies for applying this leadership style. Wilkins shows the importance of starting with self-improvement and self-awareness. You’ll also learn how to practice empathy and create psychological safety for your team. Zheng's words here are valid and empowering— society calls for a sincere, significant, and long-lasting approach to DEI.Chapter 7: Change-Maker: Everyone lays out the various roles needed to actually create diversity, equity, and inclusion as outcomes of an initiative or campaign and focuses on the far-easier-said-than-done work of coalition-building as a means to make change. This is where to go if you’re looking for help wrangling the various stakeholders and constituents in your organization to engage them most effectively in change-making. This is where to go if you’re looking to find a role for yourself to make a difference in your organization without being overwhelmed. DEI training is not an effective DEI change strategy. Knowledge alone doesn’t change behavior. Action does! The current DEI approach within companies has been ineffective. A shift in structure is essential for achieving the purpose of DEI and creating tangible results. One of the brightest minds in DEI work today brings us a ‘how-to’ for inclusive leaders. You’ll be amazed at how Zheng’s straight talk and clear thinking are so deeply grounded in research. You should ‘book club’ this one in your business; it offers the path for avoiding ‘performative allyship.’” For the first time, I had to ask myself: How can I be sure that the work I’m doing is achieving what I think it is? And then, the inevitable follow-ups: How many practitioners are doing work that might be ineffective or even do more harm than good?” “How many don’t know and don’t care enough to find out?

The implementation of DEI has been causing harm to oppressed communities instead of providing relief. These individuals should not be forced to labor for solutions or take on the emotional burden to bring about reform.

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DEI Deconstructed analyzes how current methods and best practices leave marginalized people feeling frustrated and unconvinced of their leaders' sincerity, and offers a roadmap that bridges the neatness of theory with the messiness of practice. Through embracing a pragmatic DEI approach drawing from cutting-edge research on organizational change, evidence-based practices, and incisive insights from a DEI strategist with experience working from the top-down and bottom-up alike, stakeholders at every level of an organization can become effective DEI changemakers. Nothing less than this is required to scale DEI from interpersonal teeth-pulling to true systemic change. You’re not someone just looking for inspiration, and if you are, I hope you won’t take this too harshly: this isn’t a book for you. DEI work isn’t always inspirational. Sometimes it’s terrifying, depressing, or overwhelming. Many times, it can be quite dry. You are unlikely to find many stories in this book that will bring a tear to your eye, make you jump for joy, or single-handedly renew your faith in humanity. It’s not my thing (and look, no-nonsense was in the title—you’ve been warned). Throughout that book the idea that it should be foundational is behind all ideas of how to effectively make change, how to maintain those changes, how to reevaluate and how to do all these things while maintianing the trust of your members so as not to come across as performative or dismissive. As someone who is not in a DEI role, the book helped ground the idea of how it is important to understand what your role is in DEI initiatives and how it is more than showing up and being engaged in DEI workshops or trainings. So many books and trainings focus on the role of the advocate but not everyone is in a position to be an advocate nor is it effective for everyone to try to be an advocate.

All of these varieties of training have their challenges, if not in their fundamental assumptions about creating impact, then in their haphazard and inconsistent deployment. Many kinds of DEI training promise lasting attitude and behavioral changes from relatively simplistic exercises and reflections, for example, but pull their exercises from sources ranging from social psychology research and grassroots organizing work to self-help guides or simply a practitioner’s own imagination. For years, I sought out answers to these questions, and what I saw indicated that dubiously effective or even blatantly harmful practices were entrenched into widespread understandings of what “the work” looked like—including my own. As I’ll explore shortly, the “gold standard” of DEI work and interventions was too often just fool’s gold: shiny, exciting, but ultimately disappointing and of little value. I’ll share why this is the case and how to identify these “fool’s gold standards” so we can build an understanding of how those of us intent on effective work can do better. (Fool’s) Gold Standards I studied his slightly pixelated face in the Zoom window and then spoke again. You know, as much as I believe in the talks I give, there’s only so much I can do in sixty minutes . . . even if the audience for this conference is as big as you say. On the question of power, Zheng recognizes that “If we are to achieve DEI in the organizational sense, we will need to engage critically and often with power” because “power is the potential to influence or compel people or events”. But power comes in many forms, and Zheng lists several forms of non-formal power, such as expertise, information, charisma and influence, that can be deployed to achieve DEI outcomes. Action-oriented, results-driven, and outcomes-based, Lily Zheng's no-nonsense approach transforms DEI into a tangible and accessible process to galvanize your entire workforce as DEI stakeholders."

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So what is this book, then? It is my attempt to take apart DEI—the industry and the work alike—and formulate this work so that anyone can do it and do it effectively. I’ll share the heaviest, thorniest, and most complex challenges that, left unsolved, cause the best intentions to fizzle and fail. I’ve been asked many times before writing this book to write a guide and a handbook for DEI professionals. Something with enough hard practice to be pragmatic without being dogmatic and with enough soft framing to be nuanced. This is that book, and I wrote it to democratize access to the tools of change for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive who’s never thought about DEI before opening this book. It doesn’t matter if you’re an ERG (employee resource group) lead who would never think about going into the industry full-time. If you’re involved or interested in making genuine, measurable change, turning your good intentions into real impact, you’re at the exact place many practitioners begin. My goal is straightforward: to ensure that the influence you can and will make through your diversity, equity, and inclusion work is far greater after reading this book than it was before. Introduction Who I Am Summary: The values in your mission statement are meaningless if your commitment to DEI is only surface level. Wilkins’ book explores how your team can rebuild its culture and create a sense of inclusion for employees. The book also explores how some of the most rewarded business behaviors (the author cites the focus on speed, excellence and obsession with customers) make it impossible to create belonging. Why it’s a must-read: The first step to leveling up your DEIB program is understanding where your initiatives fall short. This book explores the limitations of popular approaches to DEI and can help you identify well-intended programs that often fail completely. Auger-Domínguez also presents a research-based roadmap for managing companies in a racially inclusive way.