8 Things You Should Do About Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Feeling overwhelmed or unmoved by talk of equity, diversity, and inclusion is no excuse for paralysis or inertia. Human beings are hardwired for fairness, so you are already well prepared to take these eight easy steps.

Check out the demographics of the country. They speak for themselves. The success of your efforts depends on your ability to harness the power of equity (all people having fair opportunities to achieve their full potential) and committing to diversity and inclusion.

What’s Fair? Fair is not what you think it is or what I think it is. Fair is whatever is necessary to get a person, a community, or a population to the best possible outcome.

With that in mind, here are eight things you should do to get real, get moving, and get up on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

• Identify why EDI is valuable to you personally. You need to do a little self-reflection. Think about the role that diversity plays or doesn’t play in your personal life. In what three ways does it add value to your life? If it doesn’t play a role, what are you missing? If everyone around you is just like you, trust me — you have yet to tap into important parts of your humanity.
• Identify your social identities and write them down. Social Identity is how you view yourself based on the groups (e.g., age, race, gender, class, physical ability, religion, education, etc.) to which you belong. What are your identities and how do they affect the way you experience the world and other people?

• Assess your personal networks. What does your personal network say about the value you place on diversity? Is there anything you can and will do to diversify your most personal, authentic relationships? Make a plan. Be specific. Tell someone your plan as a way to hold yourself accountable. Then reach out, take the risk, and connect in a real way with someone who is different than you and different than anyone in your current network.
• Take the IAT and forgive yourself in advance. The Implicit Association Test measures attitudes and biases you have towards certain social identities. It is not an assessment or judgment of your character or morality. We ALL have implicit biases. Identifying them is the first step to being conscious of them and ensuring your decisions, behaviors, and actions are never tainted by your biases. The IAT is free and available online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.
• Identify why EDI is valuable to you professionally. Think about why equity, diversity, and inclusion is important for your career, your work products, and your work relationships. How will committing to EDI in your decisions, behaviors, and actions make you more successful, more innovative, more effective, and happier in your work life? How will you use EDI to connect with your audience, partners, community, or team?
• Assess your professional networks. Look at your LinkedIn network, specifically your 1st-degree connections. Who’s there? Who isn’t? Make a plan to diversify your professional network based on missing social identities. Ask for help to meet and connect with those new connections in authentic and meaningful ways. This is not about checking a box. It’s about being in relationships that allow you to have a broader world view, enhance your human experience, develop empathy, and have a diverse network ready to use as a tool to support your EDI commitment.
• Identify your privilege. Privilege and oppression reflect how society assigns disparate value to all of us based on social identities and how we, consciously or unconsciously, assign value to ourselves. To understand your privilege, read: Why I Won’t Give You Ten Tips to Manage Your Privilege. https://medium.com/@natalie4health/why-i-wont-give-you-ten-tips-to-manage-your-privilege-a-5-minute-read-a7404fd80d1c?source=linkShare-9b406b901428–1478798863.
• Leverage your privilege. People with privilege are uniquely positioned to be heard, acknowledged, and believed by others with power and privilege. You can assume risks that others without your privilege can’t afford to take. Connect with people who share your privilege. Talk about it. Explore it. Challenge it. Use your privilege to call into question inequities and bias. Identify opportunities to use EDI to make you bigger, faster, smarter, stronger and better at doing what you do. Regularly consider who experiences the benefits and burdens of what you do in the world. Then, dare to co-opt systems, question the status quo, and use your super powers for good — because make no mistake, privilege is a super power!

Circle back and let me know how it goes. You can do this!

Want to know more about human beings and fairness? Check out this article: https://medium.com/@natalie4health/american-fairness-is-m-i-a-7c9fc21427c6