The Inclusion Imperative

How Real Inclusion Creates Better Business and Builds Better Societies

About the Author

Diversity consultant and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Stephen Frost is past head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London Olympic Games.

Stephen Frost provides a brilliant, if somewhat long and repetitive, case for a new approach to diversity and inclusion (D&I). Drawing on his experience leading the Diversity and Inclusion team of the “London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games” (LOCOG), he implores you to stop forcing diversity upon your workplace. Stop creating a separate, expensive and often annoying parallel organizational process. Instead, weave diversity and inclusion into your business plan so it aligns with and supports your business objectives. Instead of compliance and policing quotas, use evidence to convince your colleagues that diversity and inclusion are the right values to carry out and the best course for your business. The 2012 London Olympics were the most diverse and inclusive in history; the congruence of those two factors is not a coincidence. getAbstract recommends this inside account of how the London Committee developed its proven, flexible methodology to any leader seeking concrete, immediate applicable ideas and tactics for diversity and inclusion.

Take-Aways

Workforce diversity – by race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors – is increasing in most nations and regions.
Diversity just happens – often with little or no effort – in most organizations.
“Inclusion” can be challenging, but usually results in heightened creativity, better decision- making and a more resilient organization.
When women, gays or people of color must act like straight white men to get ahead, their psyches and performance suffer.
“Diversity 101” emphasizes compliance and enforcement. It doesn’t work.
Diversity programs at the “Inclusion 2.0” level promote mandatory training, mentoring and integration, but they aren’t sustainable.
“Inclusion 3.0” aligns to business results; it asks for participation, but doesn’t require it.
Leaders join Inclusion 3.0 willingly for business and ethical reasons.
Inclusion 3.0 emphasizes differences in perspective, not sameness.
Don’t separate diversity and inlclusion (D&I) from mainstream business operations – integrate it so it adds value, but not cost, distraction or aggravation.

Summary

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)

Welcome to “Diversity 101” and “Diversity 2.0” – the elementary levels. Diversity 101 emphasizes compliance and enforcement. It doesn’t work. Diversity programs at the “Inclusion 2.0” level promote mandatory training, mentoring and integration, but they aren’t sustainable.

“Every four years, more countries than are members of the United Nations assemble in a global city to compete on the sporting field.”

What if diversity could help you achieve your business goals and provide a competitive advantage? What if doing the right thing could be the best thing for your business? Welcome to “Inclusion 3.0,” in which you don’t have to do anything, and no one makes you fulfill quotas or forces you into training. You work with a D&I team that tells you very little while asking questions and listening a lot. This team learns about your business goals, comes to understand them, and aligns its diversity strategy and initiatives to help you achieve them. Diversity 101 and 2.0 represent net costs to organizations. Inclusion 3.0 emphasizes the bottom line and convincingly claims to create societal and shareholder value.

The 2012 London Olympic Games

London won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, in part because it promised openness – an event for everyone, as reflected in the motto “Everyone’s 2012.” Few expert observers expected London to prevail. Paris, which offered a slick, more technically impressive approach, seemed a lock. When London’s Olympic planners learned they had won, their elation gave way to dismay. How could London follow Beijing, with its unlimited budget and million-person workforce? How could it live up to its promises and not embarrass the nation?

With only a few years to stage the world’s largest, most complex event, many advocated a pure focus on execution, without the distraction of nice-to-haves – such as diversity goals.

“It is the largest peacetime event in the world and the most complex to organize.”

Stephen Frost, the new “Head of Diversity and Inclusion” for the London 2012 Games, had limited authority and little time. All previous Olympic diversity programs operated separately from the real business of staging the Games. No Olympic management had included D&I teams. Previously, diversity folks suggested quotas to the people responsible for creating an excellent event. Due to resistance and entrenched attitudes, the Olympics themselves, while showcasing diversity, featured a mostly homogeneous leadership.

“We didn’t have an ‘equalities’ agenda, we had one agenda, a business mission…to stage the best Games we could.”

Compliance and enforcement are the easiest buttons to push in diversity and inclusion. The simple way to meet the 2012 Games’ D&I commitments would have been to place a handful of disabled workers in staff and volunteer positions, sprinkling gay and lesbian workers throughout, including women in leadership positions, and making the Games accessible to people with a variety of disabilities. With all the pressure to build venues, hire tens of thousands of people, manage suppliers, deal with the media, sell tickets and stay within budget, why complicate matters by fulfilling a grand vision of diversity and inclusion?

“We learned that anyone can lead, with or without authority and this empowered almost everyone to maximize their contribution to the overall mission of the Games.”

The answer is simple: because diversity and inclusion is a lever – a tool to use in meeting all of a firm’s other objectives. D&I helps relieve pressure on other demands and plays a vital role in making organizations the best they can be – that is what D&I accomplished for the London 2012 Olympics.

“Diversity and inclusion are leadership issues because they do not have universal acceptance: they are leadership issues because while diversity is a reality, inclusion remains a choice.”

London could leave a true “legacy” by using the Olympics to become a better place for more of its citizens, and by giving the Olympic and Paralympic movement a new standard for inclusion. Diversity and inclusion could be a powerful tool for making London’s event the most welcoming ever, despite its relatively small budget, democratic constraints that did not exist in China, and a catastrophic international financial crisis that made execution much more difficult.

A Culture of Diversity and Inclusion

Real inclusion brings struggle and demands persistence. When you open that door, be prepared to face the difficulty of hearing different ideas and opinions, and to make room for a broad range of thinking in decisions and execution. Working with like-minded people means faster, less- contentious decision making – a more comfortable arena for most people. Working with diverse opinions and exercising broad inclusiveness strengthens decision making and actions, and usually enables you to accomplish organizational goals faster.

“Why would demographic diversity per se be a proxy for talent diversity? People’s talents are not, as far as I am aware, perfectly correlated to their ethnicity or sexual orientation.”

Avoid thinking that after you’ve trained all your managers about diversity, you can check off a box and watch diversity happen. Or that once you’ve provided mentors to, for example, promising women leaders, they will ascend to the executive ranks and bring diversity to the boardroom.

Diversity 101 and 2.0 fail, largely because they keep D&I separate – positioning it as a program, not as a solution. Avoid using quotas and training hours as gauges; devise metrics that track D&I’s impact on business performance. Don’t equate diversity with talent. You cannot assume that the more diverse your workforce, the more talented it is; no such correlation exists.

“Quotas are in many ways a rearguard action, a crude, insensitive intervention and another barrier to the free flow of talent.”

Conduct fewer training sessions, offer fewer lectures, and abolish quotas and other diversity enforcement. Abandon the idea that D&I means someone wins and someone loses – a “zero- sum game.” Don’t hire or promote less-qualified people; create new opportunities for diverse candidates based on their skill and talent. Ask your colleagues about D&I: Let them air their objections and concerns about diversity, and even express their curiosity, to get the issue out in the open. When you confront tough cases, ask them why they won’t support diversity and inclusion.

Listen to their responses and address their concerns. Win converts one by one and, rather than policing their results, use peer pressure to keep people on path. Track leaders’ progress and share it for all to see.

“It is easy to be diverse, without being inclusive…It is easy to be inclusive without being diverse.”

In the pressure cauldron of the London 2012 Games, powerful leaders questioned any effort at accessibility that went above and beyond requirements. By arguing that every ramp, every extra wheelchair space and every automatic door creates a win-win for everyone – from harried parents pushing strollers to the older spectator with knee trouble – Frost’s D&I team convinced skeptics that inclusion “expands the pie” without making winners or losers. Ultimately, everyone’s goal for the Games was to make them excellent. Few reasonable people would define excellence

as anything that excluded large parts of the population. Convince your colleagues in your organization of the imperative for inclusion by connecting it to your firm’s higher purpose.

“Diversity and inclusion were a central part of the bid. London had made a virtue of this, promising to make London a Games for everyone and it contrasted markedly with the French presentation, which showcased technical excellence and one white man speaking after the next.”

Build a culture of diversity and inclusion by avoiding the role of “auditor.” Consult, listen, engage and build trust by demonstrating inclusion’s real value. Talk to other leaders about what D&I can do for them. Help them see the issue from the point of view of a diverse member of society. For example, the LOCOG D&I team showed photos from Beijing – one from the perspective of a typical fan and another through the eyes of a wheelchair user. Both had premium seats, but the first fan got a perfect view of the action while plants and a protruding sill blocked the disabled fan’s line of sight.

“A key test for us was whether a family on welfare support, without any current job, could afford to go to the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. They could and they did.”

The Beijing planners had good intentions, but inclusiveness “doesn’t just happen.” It requires thoughtfulness from everyone, not just the D&I team. Diversity and inclusion must be embedded in the actions of everyone who executes a business. Let your colleagues join the effort for their own reasons, whether driven by the lure of another advantage or because they believe it is the ethical thing to do.

Costs and Returns

In the US alone, employers spend $64 billion annually to replace people who quit their jobs due to “unfairness and discrimination.” That figure grows exponentially when you add the costs of employee disengagement. If you can’t be yourself at work, your productivity will suffer – when women, gays or people of color must act like straight white men to get ahead, their psyches and performances suffer. The hiring firm gains window dressing, but loses the diversity of ideas that accompanies “real inclusion.” Don’t hire for how well a candidate might fit in; instead, select the opposite, someone likely to offer a different opinion, shake things up and reduce “groupthink.”

“Diversity is not a universal panacea, it is problematic.”

The return on investment in Inclusion 3.0 includes fielding a workforce that relates better to your customer base, broadens your range of potential talent, creates positive “conflict,” results in firmer decisions, and builds your organization’s reputation for ethical business.

Your success depends on stakeholders outside of your organization, not only those within. For example, your supply chains represent enormous risk and opportunity. Suppliers were a major factor in the London effort, and no D&I initiative could have much impact without their cooperation. The D&I team asked internal leaders to voluntarily sign a “Leadership Pledge” affirming their commitment to D&I hiring, procurement and staging the Games – notably, in accessibility. Ultimately, 96% signed the pledge, including internal members of the team and supplier organizations, politicians, and other key stakeholders within and without the LOCOG. Such commitments empower everyone, not just leaders, with authority to guide D&I efforts and to hold their peers accountable.

Tactics and Tools

LOCOG D&I implemented a range of tools that have direct relevance to D&I initiatives in any large organization:

Add “access now” – Avoid policing, but offer advantages to target groups. In London, the D&I team “guaranteed interviews” to any disabled person or any “person with long-term health ” The team took flak for providing this advantage, but pointed out that it guaranteed only interviews, not jobs. Interviewees had to qualify; the guarantee attracted many who might have regarded the Games’ claims as only more talk about inclusion with no concomitant action.
“Talent pools” – The D&I team tracked groups of talented people to keep valuable diverse candidates under If they didn’t make the top of the hiring list for one position, they might meet the needs for another job. When you’re hiring, don’t throw out the names of your runners-up and start all over with the next cycle. Keep your diverse candidates in an online pool that everyone in the organization can access. Market them throughout the organization. To keep them engaged, communicate with them regularly about job openings.
“Action on inclusion” – Like the rest of the organization, the D&I committee was based at London’s Canary Diverse candidates, largely concentrated in poorer East London, weren’t likely to travel there, so D&I went to them. By attending events, staging job fairs, advertising in ethnic publications, and being present in local neighborhoods where diverse candidates lived and worked, the D&I team attracted many candidates it would otherwise have missed.
“Attitude over age”– The Olympic and Paralympic Games radiate youth and vitality; that sends an unintentional message of exclusion to older people who might wish to participate. LOCOG created advertising and events aimed at engaging older workers as staff members, suppliers and Concerts involving older people onstage and partnerships with older- worker employment networks ensured inclusion of older workers.
Better hiring processes – Using strategies that included group interviews (to diminish bias), better-worded job descriptions, one-on-one coaching and early applications for the disabled, D&I led a comprehensive program that reached and welcomed diverse candidates and prepared them for successful The program encompassed contractors and their hires as well. D&I provided all “reasonable accommodations” (food, accessibility and venues for religious observance) to encourage people to apply for and serve in staff and volunteer positions.

“Even the most well-designed diversity program will fail to shift the trajectory of the organization if it remains removed from where the real profit and loss incentives or other strategic levers…actually lie.”

The success of the London 2012 Games proved that implementing D&I makes sense. Inclusion brought the costs of the event down – saving, according to Frost, “$150 million” in procurement costs alone. It accelerated deliverables across the board, attracted a widely diverse spectator base, and employed by far the most diverse staff, volunteer and supplier roster in Olympic history – without ever compromising on quality of talent.

“If you want to change the world…you should start with your own organization.”

London leaves a legacy for the city and the world: Its success included everyone.