Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Deconstructed | Lily Zheng | 470

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you are joining us on our podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Lily Zhang. Lily is a sought-after diversity, equity, and inclusion speaker, strategist, and organizational consultant who specializes in hands-on Systemic Change to Turn Positive DEI Intentions into Positive DEI Outcomes for Workplaces and Everyone in Them. There is a book that Lily has authored that is DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. And I could get into a long list of accomplishments, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to dive in. Welcome, Lily. How are you?

Hey, hey. Great to be here, Peter. I am doing well.

Great. So you're in a fascinating space, right? So let me just sort of set this up sort of high level. So in my work with authors, thought leaders, experts, et cetera, there's always an evergreen element to their work and what they do that is true regardless of what happened in the newspaper today or the stock market went up or it's the Great Recession or whatever. Mm-hmm. But then there's things that happen outside of their control that oftentimes will make their work more in demand, more intriguing, or less so in some cases.

Mm-hmm.

DE&I actually falls into that bucket where there's lots of things going on outside of your control that are making more and more people lean in going, I don't think we're doing this right here, or what you've been feeding us in the past is pretty, pretty terrible or non-effective. So give me, just maybe touch on that for a moment if you would.

Absolutely. So, you know, the analogy that comes to mind is, you know how tsunamis work, where right before the big giant wave hits, all the water recedes and goes away, right? So you see the seabed, and then of course the tourists walk in and go like, "Oh, that's a starfish," and then they get hit in the face with the 20-mile wave, right? Now, it feels to me like DEI is that, but all the time, every week.

No.

I say that because we can go back through the last few years, and there are so many examples. Talk about COVID When COVID happened, what was the first thing companies do? They slashed their DEI budgets. They ended their trainings. They closed their contracts, right? There was just like, oh, we're going to focus on the real stuff now, right? Not the fancy, fun, nice-to-haves. We're going to focus on the need-to-haves. And then what happened in 2020? The murder of George Floyd.

Exactly.

Tsunami wave, right? Suddenly everyone was saying, "Where are the DEI practitioners we laid off? Come back, please help, please help." Now, this happened so many times. It happened when the Trump administration banned DEI trainings and then the surge back, right? Every single time there's a, you know, race-motivated police killing, DEI surges. Every time there's a hate crime against Asians, DEI surges. Every time there's a new report, every time there's a new finding on discrimination against women, on disabled folks, for queer and trans folks, right? Like, our industry is defined almost by this sort of constant push and pull of corporations saying, Well, we don't need that. That's just fluffy, nice to have. And then the world reminding everyone, oh yes, absolutely, we need this stuff, right? We even just started seeing it in the last couple of weeks again, companies saying, well, a recession's coming.

Yeah.

What are we going to do? We're going to cut our DEI budgets. And it doesn't—

But isn't it largely, not largely, but a lot of it is optics because there's a fear that a company can't say, oh, look at all the lovely things that we're doing, whether they're actually impactful or not. And I think And maybe this is where you were going, we're now moving into this different level of DE&I where it's like, you know, and your interest book, it's about the outcomes, right? Not about teaching people that look like X that they have to hire people that don't look like X. Like that was compliance training from the 1970s that has stuck around because it's cheap, it's cost-effective, nobody cared, nobody was getting in trouble. But how do you make the connection to it being a strategic business driver? Because that's where you get attention, right? As opposed to compliance and regulatory and all that sort of fun stuff.

Right. So like I've been mentioning, DEI has been very trend-driven over the last few years. And I think that's, that's a major weakness of it because what we want to be doing is consistent long-term work that drives consistent long-term impact, right? And every piece of research we, we see says that the short-term flashy initiatives just fail. They're a waste of time, they're a waste of money, they're a waste of people's patience, right? And so what we need to be doing, and there's research that supports this from the business literature, there's research that supports this from the sort of critical theory literature, is we need to be engaged in these long-term efforts to shift workplaces towards greater equity, greater inclusion, and yes, greater diversity. And we haven't been doing that because, I mean, hard work is hard, right? Unfortunately, it's the biggest truism of the world. And all work worth doing is difficult. But companies don't want that, right? A lot of leaders I talk to are frustrated. They're just saying, we're getting bad press. We need to do something quick. We need to do something immediately. We need to bring in a practitioner tomorrow.

We literally need the hack, right? We, you know, if you were to write an article, 5 Things to Do for Every CEO to cure their DEI.

Oh, I could get it published tomorrow if I wanted to do that. Yeah, yeah.

Right? But to actually do the work and change the way we think and the way we behave and the way we believe and the systems, processes, et cetera, is much harder. I want to shift for a moment, if we could, into sort of the business side of this, right? This is what you do. This is your practitioner. Give me a sense of the connection and the importance of the thought leadership that you put out into the universe to the overall state of your business, right? Because obviously maybe you'll make some money on a book. It's, that's highly unusual, right?

No one does that these days. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Prince Harry maybe, but does it, right?

Whatever.

But the importance of you putting out really thoughtful, high quality, maybe even controversial or contrarian or whatever thought leadership and how that feeds the business side for you?

Hmm, that's interesting. So for me, it's never really been about a direct thought leadership to business pipeline. Maybe if someone's super cynical and looks at my business model, they could say that. The idea has been that I want, through my thought leadership, to upskill everyone in DEI because I want us to spend less time on the baby steps and more time actually working on the hard stuff. I think we spend a lot of time getting caught up in what I think are non-issues in the DEI space, right? Like, what are the 10 most inclusive words you can say to your colleagues of color? I don't care. Like, I don't care, right? Like, those lists change every day. So don't pay me to tell you 10 inclusive words.

Upskilling is a business, right? And what I mean by that is that You're making the case that the old ways of dealing with DEI are ineffective. I think that's— it's an easier time than ever to make that case. I think it's fairly obvious to anybody that sort of has their eyes open. But now if that means that I need to train, retrain, skill, upskill a subset of my population as an employer, whether it's, you know, Gen X like me that came up in a certain world in a certain way and now things have changed, whether it's, you know, Gen Z, it doesn't matter whether it's certain functions that have issues with this. That's a business. That's, that's sort of the connection there. Right. So it's, you know, most organizations aren't going to just say, read my book. How are you— give me a sense of how you're helping organizations do that, go through the changes that they need to go through to get to that upskilling?

Sure. So to talk about my business, I focus on a few things. My main let's say, service is helping companies, mostly corporations, assess their workforce and to understand exactly what's happening beneath the hood. And so I help them understand their employee engagement, their employee retention, their employees' feelings of belonging, their promotion rates, their access to opportunity. And looking through all that data, I, I help them diagnose exactly what challenges are, are happening, right? So it's, it's quite possible that I talk to clients and everything's hunky-dory and things are peachy and everything's great. More often than not, I find that there are issues, right? I find that there are cultural issues, leadership issues. I find that certain departments are doing better than others. And then from there, that data allows us to get to work, right? My entire thing is connecting problems to solutions, not just throwing solutions out into the ether and hope that people benefit from them, right? Like, data is at the core of everything that I do. So I help my clients collect that data, understand that data, and then take action based on it.

If you're enjoying this episode of Thought Leadership Leverage, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com. /ltl and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So I love the data piece because whether your domain expertise is DEI or something else, for many of the other thought leaders listening today, Often this approach to problem solving I love because a lot of times a client might come to you and say, do you got a program for that? You got to like, what do you got for that? And you might say, yeah, I got lots of programs for that, but we're not, we haven't yet connected and aligned around what the problem is, why it is what it is, and what the best way to solve it is.

Exactly.

I think that as thought leaders, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and say, wait a minute, you wouldn't go to your doctor and say, hey doc, my knee hurts. I'd like for you to replace it. No doctor that practices would say, you're right, I trust your opinion because you know your knee better than I do. There's just—

But that's what they do in DEI, right? That's the state of the industry. And I'm not, you know, this isn't the first time I've said this and folks who follow me will know it. Like, I am the first person to critique that. Like, the fact that our industry is more about selling solutions at times than actually understanding what problems they're solving is going to be the end of us someday, right? Like, if we don't grow up, if we don't mature as an industry and professionalize and standardize and become more effective in delivering services that work, that actually solve problems, that hold both our clients and ourselves accountable to creating the impact that we promise, then we're all in deep trouble, right? Like, there's only so long we can keep spinning our gears before people go, this is just a waste of everyone's time, right? DEI practitioner, like, get out.

Well, and I think, you know, you're onto something there from the standpoint of regardless of your domain experience, from a thought leadership standpoint, anytime something comes out, so like the Great Resignation was a thing that all of a sudden happened 6 or 8 months ago. Quiet quitting, which we used to call being disengaged in the workplace, it's just a rebranding word.

We still call it that.

Yeah, no, I'm with you.

I hate the quiet everything. And now they're coming up with like, I don't know, like, what is it? Quiet Quiet hiring or something? Yes.

So I mean, these are new names for old problems, right? So regardless of what it is, so where I was going is so like quiet quitting becomes a good, you know, a big thing. The Great Resignation, work from home becomes a good thing. And all of a sudden out of nowhere, everybody hangs a shingle and says, I'm a work from home expert in, you know, May of 2020. Really? What were you doing at the beginning of 2020? And I think That's always the way the market's going to go is people run to where they think there is opportunity. Then they realize like, wow, it's not as easy as I thought. And then they go back. And then the true practitioners, like folks like you, are left to sort of bang your hand on the table and say, no, this is not the way to solve this problem properly. And to some degree, call BS on a lot of the industry.

Right?

But I'd love to get the courage to do that.

So DEI is a really interesting space in that we have, like many industries that are fledgling, lots and lots of new practitioners. There's so many practitioners that have entered since 2020 that have just started doing this work. Now, it'd be really easy for me to say, oh, all the newcomers, they don't know what they're talking about. Industry veterans, they know what we're talking about, right? It's not really fair to them. I think one challenge that we're facing is that there is no way for new practitioners to get good at our work. Like, I remember when I was a new practitioner, I had to go into companies and basically pretended to have more experience than I did to get people to give me a chance to actually gain experience to do this work. There's no effective DEI certification. There's a handful, their effectiveness is kind of middling. There's no DEI degrees, right? It's just a bunch of people who care a lot about making better organizations. Some of us come from an organizational change background, some of us come from activism, Some of us come from education, learning and development, HR. It's just a— it's a hodgepodge of different levels of experience, different backgrounds, all coming together to try to make better organizations. And one thing I tried to do in my book is it's not just a resource for companies to hold themselves accountable. It's a resource for the industry. I want what I have been doing over the last few years has been to build this body of learning and knowledge that anyone can tap into so that you don't get that excuse of, well, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, okay, everything on my LinkedIn is free. Like, and I post multiple times a week and all of it, like, there's no fluff, right? Like, people have posted multiple times, Lily, you're giving away industry secrets. And I'm like, good, right? Like, our industry needs this stuff. Like, pick it up. Learn what you need to learn and then get to work because we have stuff to do.

But I think that path, again, when you look at some of the greatest business books ever written or just by commercial sales, so take 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't know what the data— I think it sold 40 million copies in the last 30 years.

I would believe it.

Right? When you read that book, it's not like, well, we've given you 7, There's 15 habits. You gotta pay for the rest. Everything's in there. Everything's really clear. So there's this people that have this scarcity mindset of, well, if I put all my stuff out there, they won't hire me. And it's just total nonsense, right?

Mm-hmm.

The more that you put out, there's a subset of the universe that never would've been your client that could benefit from taking in and internalizing and being—

Absolutely.

Aware of your work. Great. Doesn't cost anything. Give it to them. And it actually increases the demand and it actually increases the, the need for your services. To do the implementation, execution, whatever. I mean, most answers to most business problems can be found in a $25 book. The reality is the understanding of ideas is a big difference than implementing and executing them right now at this moment in my organization, which is where you partly—

The how is infinitely more important than the what. And yet so much of our industry in DEI at least is hyper-focused on the what. There's so many businesses focused on what to do, why you should care, right? How to have basic empathy. And I'm like, look, I'm glad that you're able to sell your 60-minute empathy building sessions, but I don't want you to be in business. I'm sorry, right? There's actual work to do. And I want more of us to be focused on the actual hard elements of this work rather than just turning a quick buck on people's ignorance over and over and over again, selling solutions that don't work, and then turning around and selling the same solutions to the next person who asks for them, right? Like, that's not good for the future of our industry. And we're seeing it in real time. Sometimes when you talk to employees and you say, we're DEI practitioners, they look at you and they say, I've taken 5 trainings and none of them did shit.

Right.

So why should I care about you, right? And like, we're seeing this in real time, like this loss of trust in our industry. So either we get our act together, we become more accountable, more effective, or, you know, in 5 or 10 years, practitioners will start saying, hey, how come no one's signing up for my class anymore, right? Because, because you conned all the people that, that were willing to be conned, right? And everyone's seen through it. Like, I, I don't want that to be how the industry ends.

No, I love it. I think if you can't get the work to a point where it's observable changes in behavior, it's just noise, right?

It's just noise.

Yeah. And we don't have the financial resources for it, the time, the energy. There's so much that we all want to do in our days that we don't want to do things that don't lead to outcomes, that don't have impact, that are just wasted. I mean, there's time to go lounge on the couch and binge-watch Netflix.

Absolutely, right? Why go through a 90-minute hair-pulling unconscious bias training if it's not actually going to fix anything? It just makes everyone miserable and pissed off. When we can watch Netflix, right? Like, I would prefer to watch Netflix.

Yeah, I'm with you.

Yeah.

Well, on that note, this, this has been highly informative, and I appreciate your, your passion and your dedication to sort of the, the not being afraid to call out what you're seeing and, uh, getting, getting folks to focus on the work and then sort of exploring the business models as well. So thank you so much, Lily. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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