9 Signs You’re Choosing the Right Diversity Consultant

Whether your business is a large enterprise or a midsize organization, the change, turmoil, and tumult of recent events make managing your organizational Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) efforts a strategic imperative that can hold both considerable risks and rewards. Your executive leadership, Human Resources (HR), or D&I team may be in the market for a consultant to help you move the diversity needle in ways your employees, customers, board members, and other essential stakeholders can see and feel.

However, not all diversity consulting is created equal; and choosing the wrong expert can do as much damage as selecting the right one can do good. Make no mistake; it’s a highly visible and high-stakes proposition. Get it right, and the opportunities can prove abundant — as can the consequences if you get it wrong. Here are nine signs that you’re likely in the presence of a competent Diversity & Inclusion consultant — nine things a high-value expert will know, inquire about, advocate for, evangelize around, assist you with, and be able to bring to your organization’s strategic Diversity & Inclusion work.

1. One size doesn’t fit all. For some, it’s people; for others, it’s profits. Different things will move different groups toward action or advocacy when it comes to the case for Diversity & Inclusion. And one is not more legitimate than the other. What will influence your employees is different from what will move your stockholders, hiring managers, or customers. The good news is that Diversity & Inclusion offers a host of advantages while providing measurable business value on a variety of fronts: social justice and organizational values, the strength of the customer or employee-facing brand, civility and effective teaming, customer capture and retention, employee engagement, and innovation advantage.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will help you build a dynamic case for D&I as it is a living, breathing, malleable, and agile thing that should be responsive to whatever an audience finds compelling. A strong D&I consultant won’t illegitimize your business case as too altruistic or too strategic, just as you shouldn’t judge the appropriateness of the business case that moves your stakeholders. What’s important is that you identify one that does.

2. Diversity & inclusion are not the goals; diverse and inclusive belonging is. Diversity is simply the presence of differences. Some organizations still struggle with this. Others, without much effort at all, are already there, helped along by changing demographics. Inclusion occurs when you normalize the presence of these different groups. Nowadays, an increasing number of organizations are arriving here as well. But neither diversity nor inclusion is the end game — diverse and inclusive belonging is.

When people experience belonging within their organizations, it means they are not merely present, and their presence is not simply tolerated. When people belong, they are invited to inform and influence the environment by making it, in part, their own. People have a place and purpose as unique as they are, and the environment, in turn, is made richer by these feelings of belonging and the deep engagement these feelings foster.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant knows that belonging and the deep engagement it encourages are the impetus that activates big innovation, boundless creativity to solve problems, and a new universe of ideas. While more complex and labor-intensive than pursuing states of diversity and inclusion, the limitless dividends make belonging where your business wants and needs to be.

3. All Have Skin in the Game. Who owns the organization’s D&I program? Who’s accountable for its outcomes? And who does it really serve? For Diversity & Inclusion to live, breathe, and infuse your organizational space with its endless advantages, everyone has to play. Everyone needs to engage. It’s not only for the benefit of employees of color, or women, or LGBTQ employees, or your employees with disabilities, while you excuse, exclude, or make sacrificial lambs of others. The same system of inequality that creates glaring disparities for some creates inequities for all, resulting in significant disadvantages for the enterprise. Effective D&I programming occurs when everyone is invited and charged with learning more than they think they know about others and themselves.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will tell you that D&I can’t just be an HR or employee initiative — everyone has work to do. Whether it’s leveraging their own privilege to tear down the subtle but strong structures of institutionalized racism, or learning not to shame and blame someone else for their group-level privilege, everyone in the organization has work to do on making and holding space for differences. And that includes the board of directors, the executive leadership team, all lines of business, suppliers, and business partners. To succeed and bear fruit, D&I has to be as ubiquitous as the air everyone breathes.

4. A serious Diversity & Inclusion strategy doesn’t begin or end with a class. A training class cannot be the crux of your organization’s D&I work. Training is only one piece of what should be a broader integrated strategy that encourages the growth of diversity, inclusion, and belonging at all levels and in ways that go far beyond the civility of peer relationships. Nonetheless, organizations often rely on training because it’s tangible, easy to measure, and efficient to deploy. It’s an easy box to check off — and a necessary activity. But by itself, an ineffective one.

A three-hour class will do little to move an organization’s D&I needle, and it can actually do more harm than good if it’s left unsupported (and thus unsustainable) as the sum total of your D&I efforts. It is equally true, however, that Diversity & Inclusion can only begin at your organization’s point of readiness — no more, no less. And when it comes to readiness, your organization may not be as far along as hoped, making a primer on respect and civility all that your organization is ready for.

This is where a good D&I consultant may surprise you. Sometimes what’s best is not a massive, large-scale training roll-out for all employees across the system. Sometimes, your D&I efforts should begin with something altogether smaller — a more intimate, closed-door conversation in which the executive and most senior leaders discuss what organizational D&I is, what the pathway can look like, the value of traversing that road, and the commitment that road will ask of them. At the end of the day, even a world-class trainer and facilitator will leave — only able to midwife D&I into your organization. It is the top organizational leaders who must nurture, parent, and bring it to maturity — and the leaders’ readiness to do so, not academic diversity theory, is the first thing to be understood.

Whether your organization is just beginning its D&I journey or a long way down the road, the right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will support the organization along the dynamic edge of its unique learning and growing capability. The right consultant can be trusted not to take your organization so far out to sea that its D&I work cannot be supported or sustained, while not letting it lounge in the shallows either.

5. Focus on changing behavior — not on changing hearts. As for Diversity and Inclusion initiatives that encourage interpersonal change between teammates, it is simply not realistic to believe that a morning D&I session on respect will do anything to undo the lessons learned from our upbringing, the media, underexposure, or anecdotal traumas. Arguably, this notion isn’t even intellectually honest. The scars and residue of experience — historical and contemporary — live in the heart, and that’s not the domain of training — but behavior is. In your D&I training, focus on what people do, not what they think, and not how they feel. Not only is shifting thoughts and feelings through organizational training unrealistic, but its efficacy isn’t knowable, making it a poor D&I objective.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will tell you that while you cannot change hearts, let alone legislate them, you can establish expectations around what your employees do, say, fail to do, and fail to say. To break down barriers between people, a qualified D&I expert might suggest focusing on building relationships so that diverse people can work together on a project of real strategic value, where each member can uniquely contribute to the success of the team. A competent D&I expert might encourage interpersonal learning and new ways of relating across differences by installing a coach to facilitate this group’s work. While a seminar can’t build heartfelt bridges between people, repeated positive exposure and episodes of connection can. Using training to shift the hearts of people is the stuff of wishful thinking. But sometimes, where supported and intentional behavior change goes, the heart follows.

6. Our common ground. “Opinions are like bellybuttons; everyone has one.” And we all have implicit biases, too. Though they sit in our unconscious and, thus, out of our awareness, we all have suppressed attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes we associate with groups — and these are on top of the biases, of which we are well aware. It is where these unconscious biases reside that makes them dangerous. Even the best-intentioned and well-meaning person can’t manage prejudices in themselves that they do not see. An implicit bias’ position — outside of our awareness — belies how powerfully it can drive our behaviors and choices. Unchecked within the workplace, these biases can show up as a hiring decision, a promotion, an internal investigation, or other tangible and life-altering impacts on careers.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will tell you that implicit biases don’t make us bad and hateful people. They are part of our brain’s efficient functioning, but this cognitive process is not often trustworthy, especially when it comes to judging other people. This unreliability, combined with the fact that we’re not aware when we’re using them, can create real inequities at work. However, when we become more aware of our implicit biases, we can now check our decisions and, more importantly, what they’re based on. Am I making a hiring decision based on someone’s merit, or is my decision driven by an implicit stereotype I associate with a particular group?

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will understand that for all the mischief implicit biases can create, they can be a great place to begin the D&I conversation because, despite our diversities, it’s at least (and ironically) one thing we all have in common. Assessments that can identify our biases in matters of race, gender, disability, nationality, and a host of other attributes are easily found and readily accessible on the internet. Although we will find that we have different biases, we all have them. A good D&I expert can help you leverage this commonality because it gives everyone a reason to join the conversation.

7. Learn the Language! Privilege. Bias. Bigotry. Microaggressions. Racism. These words can be scary as they are swollen with pain, history, ignorance, and lived experience. So afraid of getting it wrong, shamed, and blamed, some people are taking their first awkward steps into these difficult conversations. Silenced and ignored for so long, others are shouting these words from the rooftops. Whether it’s finally declaring one’s painful truth even though it makes some uncomfortable, or tentatively asking a question so that one’s intent isn’t lost in the process of one’s learning, these conversations can be hard to have. So it’s no surprise that we often avoid the topic altogether.

Nonetheless, Diversity & Inclusion work has a unique vocabulary that is worth learning. While semantics aren’t important, the phenomena behind these words can be potent teachers and bridge builders. They can give us the language to describe and name experiences that can otherwise be unknowable when they aren’t your own. Intersectionality, for example, would explain why two women — one black and one white — will experience womanhood in vastly different ways. Microaggressions explain the frustration a person of color might feel when they make suggestions in the boardroom that fall quietly into the carpet, only to witness the room erupt with enthusiasm when the same ideas are offered from a white guy moments later. As for bigotry and racism, the first defines an ugly but impotent attitude, while the other, infused with power, can walk, talk, and act. One is not at all illegal, while the other can be. And still, both can violate company policy. And then there is privilege; more of us have it than we think. In fact, the question of who has it and who doesn’t can change as quickly as an employee moving from one department to another.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant knows that words have power; even more so, they have nuance. A skilled expert can leverage the language of D&I to create more dialogue, more understanding, more common ground, and more positive and lasting change for your business as it navigates the complexities of this journey.

8. Optics are important. Most human differences are invisible. Some cannot be discerned at all, while others are just ambiguous. No matter where your organization is on a Diversity & Inclusion maturation and readiness continuum, all organizations can claim at least one form of diversity because it is the result of all variables that make up the human experience: diversity of thought. The more of it an organization has, the more positive possibilities can follow. While diversity of thought is invisible, it’s a good thing. Meanwhile, visible diversity, along with the invisible, is much better. Harvard Business Review reported that organizations with visible diversity — that is, diversity we can see — as well as invisible diversity are 45% more likely to capture larger portions of the market, and 70% more likely to enter new markets year to year. These statistics prove that behind the optics of a diverse workplace, there is real business value.

Some organizations rely too heavily on diversity of thought to evidence their overall D&I effectiveness. But look at some of the same organizations vertically — that is, by hierarchy — and it is easy to see that most of the visible diversity is often sitting at the lower and nonmanagement levels. What started as a positive story about the organization’s inclusivity can quickly become a gratuitous, self-serving exaggeration. The truth of the matter doesn’t need to wait on some in-depth exposé though. Increasingly, employees, customers, and other stakeholders are sophisticated enough to look for visible and vertical diversity themselves. And what they see (and don’t see) can lay bare what looks like an organization’s willingness to spin what really isn’t there, along with their inability to pursue what could be.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant can assist in closing this gap in ways that are real, strategically valuable, and measurable. They may suggest building Pull-Through development strategies that can put more diverse and qualified employees in the leadership pipeline. They may point to creating an Employee Resource Team that looks for opportunities where the organization can show versus tell its D&I story. An experienced consultant can show you how to become more visually sensitive to what your clients see when they look at your organization. The right D&I consultant with these insights can help you tell a diversity and inclusion story that is authentic and true.

9. It’s chess, not checkers. A long-term, integrated Diversity & Inclusion approach requires input, support, and collaboration across the organization. By themselves, activities like multicultural days, potluck lunches, and the random webinar on respect are nice, easy, and of low-investment. Still, they are largely ineffective at moving the business needle. While well-meaning, these activities don’t create equity or lasting dialogue and discovery; they don’t change the trajectory of an employee’s career or help capture an untapped segment of the market. What’s ironic is that an organization would be better off not doing anything than doing something disingenuous, unsupported, and unsustainable.

The right Diversity & Inclusion consultant would rather walk away from the business than assist you in doing something with no lasting impact. The right D&I consultant wants to support you in taking a thorough, thoughtful, and integrated approach that supports your business in meaningful ways.

Arguably now more than ever before, and despite it being new or uncomfortable, organizations must lean into the work of Diversity & Inclusion. Passive neutrality is no longer an option, while untold value awaits organizations who choose to actively engage. These organizations may be looking for expertise in the marketplace to help shorten their learning curve and accelerate their positive D&I journey. Highly skilled Diversity & Inclusion consultants are out there and are keen to help. But they will not want to be the heart and soul of your D&I work. Instead, the right Diversity & Inclusion consultant will wish to serve as a partner and catalyst to help you win, by discovering and optimizing all that can be achieved with and through the diverse, inclusive, and deeply engaged people of your enterprise.