8 Things to Do about Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Feeling overwhelmed or unmoved by talk of diversity and inclusion is no excuse to do nothing. Paralysis or inertia could lead to someone else having your job. 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 (NOW). 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 (TODAY). 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?

• Assess your personal networks (WITHIN 3 DAYS). 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 (WITHIN 7 DAYS). The Implicit Association Test measures attitudes and bias you have based on the social identities. The IAT is free and available online at. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. Identifying your unconscious biases is the first step to being conscious and aware of them and ensuring your decisions, behaviors, and actions are never a victim of them.
• Identify why EDI is valuable to you professionally (TODAY). 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, and team?
• Assess your professional networks (WITHIN 7 DAYS). 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, a richer human experience, developing empathy, and having a diverse network ready to use as a tool to support EDI.
• Identify your privilege (TODAY). 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. Leave a comment and share it with 5 people.
• Leverage your privilege (FOREVER). 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. Deal 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!