Why your CEO can’t be your Head of Inclusion

A startup team looking at a series of post it notes and a presentation together.

Unless you have built your company from the absolute beginning as an organization designed for equity, your CEO cannot be your Chief Diversity Officer or your Head of Diversity & Inclusion.

If you have investors or are a public company, the CEO is obligated to increase shareholder value, which often means the financial value. There's some really radical thinking (OK, not that radical...) you could do about saying that shareholder value includes the positive human rights and responsibility of caring for your employees and building an equitable and just workplace. 

But let’s be honest: human rights and dignity are usually not the focus of the leaders who run P&L functions, let alone the CEO. A CEO’s top priority is (almost) always going to be maximizing financial returns.

Putting it bluntly?

The CEO is always going to choose their fiduciary duty to shareholders over equity for their employees. If you actually want to make the work of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) a priority in your company, you need someone whose primary objective is individual and collective employees' well-being and the search for equity and justice. 

The need for a dedicated role

Often, founders who are marginalized or underrepresented themselves can make some progress along the way (because they have lived experience to understand this work better), but at some point, the CEO stops specializing in the company's operations. And so often, that means that without dedicated staff or team to carry out the vision of inclusion or equity for a company, it simply is no one's job. It becomes something that people do in their extra time, which is not the same thing as having a cohesive strategy to push the work forward. 

When you don't have a dedicated person focused on DEI, you often find yourself with many advocates who do piecemeal parts of a cohesive program of work and usually have to focus on the low hanging fruit. I’m not here to demean the work in the slightest (because they’reoften fighting a tough, uphill battle alongside their core job). But when you don't have someone in a strategic operations role focused on this work and coordinating those efforts, it just isn't sustainable--for the individual(s) or the company. And it certainly isn't going to align with bigger goals or a better outcome. 

Often, it is already marginalized and underrepresented people taking on additional work in this, so you're talking about both a less transformational strategy and a situation where any progress is hard-won and created on the backs of workers who need to be benefiting from these programmes - not primarily driving them, and especially not without compensation.

The question is, do you care more about the work? Or about the credit going to you?

Here’s how it should work: The CEO is ultimately accountable for and to the DEI program's success, but running it isn't their day job. Dedicating time to something is not the same thing as doing an entire C level job of it. 

We often talk about lived experience being critical - and it is. But you also need strategy development skills, strategic execution, stakeholder management and the ability to build a vision and a plan that people want to follow. There's a set of required, specialized expertise within this field. You need to know gender and queer theory, critical race theory, and disability & accessibility and have all of the abilities expected of a standard executive. That's where a dedicated D&I pro comes in. Your founder or your CEO might be passionate, and they might have lived experience. But they don't have the rest of the niche toolkit they'll need - let alone the time.

Every CEO's journey requires them to give up the work they are not built for and hire an experienced executive to run work that’s important but they don’t have the expertise to own. There needs to be a candid and honest discussion and the recognition that this work will fail if you do not give it up and give it to a dedicated leader.

You need people to be doing the audits and overseeing that work operationally; you need to be looking at wellbeing management, supporting communities in crisis , and building programs to transform the future of the company. These are things that a CEO just doesn't have time in the day to do if they're doing their primary job competently. 

The resourcing matters.

If a CEO isn't willing to allocate resources, their employees will become further marginalized. This is the most common form of corporate gaslighting, and causes employees to  lose trust: they hear promises that aren't fulfilled in their day-to-day experience.

If we were talking about this in terms of sales or marketing or product, no CEO would ever think I can be the CEO and the CTO at the time. I think any CEO's belief they can also be the Chief Diversity Officer represents hubris and a devaluing of the position as a set of specialized knowledge.

I'm not someone who says “abandon all hope ye who enter” at any point. But I think it's essential to have a good set of expectations based on both the history and the will to create transformational change. So a company that's gotten to 30 or 50,000 employees before implementing a D&I strategy? They will struggle with the transformation, but it is possible with the correct investments and resourcing.

It's the same way with any other obligation you have; the longer you wait to pay it off, the more interest you have to pay, and the most specialists you’ll likely need to get involved. 

If you have one person for a 4000 person company at the end of the day, you're not prioritizing D&I, and you should be honest about it: because you will get the talent you deserve. There are lots of people who want to work at companies that don't actually prioritize this work. 

Let them.