Peter WinickFounder and CEO @ Thought Leadership Leverage

Results - Helping Thought Leaders-Dropping Bombs Ep 217-Peter Winick

4 Jan 2020 · 1 min

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1:19

In this segment, two speakers debate how organizations should define and evaluate the success of diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives, especially when significant financial resources are invested. They question whether D&I programs are implemented for genuine cultural change or merely for optics or legal risk mitigation. The conversation highlights the difficulty of establishing concrete metrics—such as hiring more diverse talent, changes in behavior, or shifts in attitudes—and uses a Jenny Craig analogy to illustrate the need for observable, measurable outcomes. They argue that without clear measurement, the individuals responsible for D&I efforts cannot be properly assessed, leading to potential decisions about retaining, promoting, or dismissing those leaders.

So the question is, what was their desired outcome? They might not have cared if anyone's trained. That might have been done for optics or prophylactically, because maybe they got sued because somebody did something bad relative to diversity inclusion.
But if you're going to spend that money, why not get it done?
I would agree, but you have to go backwards and say, how do you measure that I now have a population that I spent $5 million on that's more fluent in diversity and inclusion? I don't know. Does it mean you're hiring a more diverse audience? treating people with disrespect or you're— I don't know what the metrics are, but the proper way to do it is to say, you know, the example that I always use is Jenny Craig is really easy. So here's a Jenny Craig commercial, shows a large person, then it says some time passed and there's what's left of that large person. They're somewhat smaller. So it doesn't take a lot to deduce that Jenny Craig is in the business of making big people less big. What's your Jenny Craig? Right. So for diversity inclusion, The Jenny Craig might be, I now think, believe, behave differently as it relates to diversity inclusion. I'm hiring people that don't look like me. I'm hiring people that grew up in different countries from me. I'm hiring people that have a whole different view of the world than I do, than I would have before. And unless you can figure out what it is and how to measure it, then that guy should probably be fired. If they're doing a job of that, which we don't know, then maybe he should be promoted.