In the 1970s, seminal gay rights activist Harvey Milk literally stood atop a soapbox in San Francisco’s Castro District and delivered hopeful edicts for change through a bullhorn. His efforts led to groundbreaking local legislation that banned discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and employment on the basis of sexual orientation.
 
Any empathetic, progressively minded person walking through what became Harvey Milk Plaza at that time was likely moved by his speeches. Many spun into action on behalf of the cause he outlined.
 
Today, business leaders tasked with cultivating greater diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) among their respective staffs may feel as though they’re back in the Castro District, listening to amplified cries of inequality and instructions on how to make the world a more welcoming place for marginalized people. But there seem to be more and more soapboxes, and activists atop each of them with bullhorns of their own. And while their messages are all quite deserving of attention, sometimes the volume reaches a fever pitch.
 
“We have not made progress in gender representation in the vast majority of organizations; we have not made progress to the point that we’d like in ethnic representation. Those are two things that we’ve been looking at for decades now, and now we’ve started adding in a number of other factors,” said Khalil Smith, VP of inclusion, diversity, and engagement at Akamai, an internet security services company. “Age and socioeconomic status and neurodiversity and disability, all of these are incredibly important, and I know some of our most progressive organizations are talking about them.”
 
Ensuring all bases are covered—including those connected to the LGBTQ+ community, which Smith, understandably, given the already lengthy nature of the list, forgot to add—might be an overwhelming proposition for even the most steadfast of DEI leaders. But certain pivots can make the mission more achievable for everyone. 
 
“How can we make [DEI initiatives] simple and digestible and easy and approachable to the point where people aren’t afraid of them?” posed Smith. “Just create a great environment for people to recognize that there are biases built into some of the things that you do.”
 
His remarks were made during a recent discussion, “Identifying the Remaining Obstacles to Progress in Inclusion and Belonging,” at From Day One’s February 2023 virtual conference, "Measuring and Accounting for Progress in DEI." Smith’s fellow panelists agreed that, while so many mainstream corporations have committed to DEI and are working hard to enact change, challenges still abound.
 
“It’s become an ‘extra thing’ on top of what managers are already struggling to do, which is hard day to day; they have a lot going on,” said Teresa Hopke, CEO of the DEI-focused leadership coaching firm Talking Talent. 
 
She added that DEI is now also “a thing with high stakes,” which creates “a lot of opportunity for managers to get it wrong” and for them to be criticized over their shortcomings, perceived or actual. Many managers, she said, sometimes feel like DEI is “being forced upon them rather than it being something that is just the way of doing business.”
 
“The more we can take it back a notch and just say, ‘This is actually a systemic change that has to happen in an organization around how we are and how we do business,’ rather than, ‘This is an extra thing that we’re going to put on people’s plates,’ the more impact we’re going to see and the more we’re going to be able to see managers succeed in their role in helping us move this forward,” said Hopke.

Louis Chesney, neurodiversity product manager at RethinkCare, a platform that provides support to working caregivers of neurodiverse individuals, suggested that organizations do a better job of “allocating our monetary and personal resources to our employee resource groups, to our social corporate responsibility programs, and really help champions within organizations to tie the objectives they set out to do to company success.”
 
Measuring retention and increased productivity tied to DEI initiatives is one way to achieve this, Chesney said. But, really, he said the goal should be to “embed” DEI within the organization, in part by generating “outreach to attract talent needed to reduce latency to fill a position” and “identifying areas in the interview process that are problematic.” From the perspective of neurodiversity, that means people managers look for places where they may be “marginalizing individuals who are well-suited for a position and giving that position to someone who may have a more charismatic way of communicating,” said Chesney.
 
But before a company can even get to the point of rolling out initiatives with such great attention to detail, DEI requires buy-in from everyone, especially those at the top of the c-suite.
 
Chesney said DEI leaders have to make sure that their organization as a whole is not solely interested in “virtue signaling.” And Chevy Cleaves, chief diversity and inclusion officer of the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, a research and technology development center focused on national security, said leaders he’s worked with often “don’t understand the problem we’re trying to solve.”
 
“They feel like they should, so they say they do,” Cleaves continued. “Then it becomes difficult to reposition the conversation. They don’t understand the opportunity that we’re trying to leverage. ”
 
Panel moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company, argued that perhaps the best way to get company leaders to understand and truly align themselves with the spirit of DEI initiatives is to bring them “into the business goal conversation”—perhaps more important than ever, she said, considering the rocky economic grounds organizations are currently traversing.
 
“The way that I would reposition that is to say that it’s a value proposition,” said Cleaves. “So how much value do we want to drive? How can you make your organization a critical differentiator using diversity inclusion? That’s something different than the business case.”
 
If that should fail, perhaps appealing to the most human elements of a business leader’s character will get them on board with DEI. 
 
“The data is important, and I think we need to keep raising it, but I also think that we can’t just keep hitting people over the head with it,” said Hopke. “We have to get the hearts and the minds and the stories out there that get people to understand and feel the impact of this, so that they want to change and that they do the work to change because this is hard work. And unless people do the hard work, nothing’s going to change in organizations, and you have to motivate people to want to do the hard work, and that takes time and effort and not just numbers and data.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.