Developing a Personal DEI Preference and Competence Model

In Step 1: DEI Inventory, I introduced “The ABCDEs of DEI”—21 common personal DEI preferences and competences to consider as foci for your personal DEI journey (reminder: you were not limited to the items shown in the table). You made some initial choices of personal DEI core preferences or personal DEI core preferences and competences based on your personal DEI aims using the list in Table 3.4 and based on the process outlined in Table 3.5. Now, you can finalize those choices using a very similar process, only now with the benefit of the three preceding steps to do so:

• Step 1: DEI Inventory: You have the benefit of your completed personal DEI assessment, which generated a profile and baseline of your preferences and your level of competence in specific areas. You may decide to focus on expanding into new areas of preference and/or developing in areas of limited competence. For example, if you selected the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as one of your assessments, then you may have revealed that you have a moderate, automatic preference of men with careers and women with family (according to IAT research by Project Implicit, 32% of respondents have this implicit bias). As a result, you may choose to focus on awareness of self, awareness of others, appreciation of others, and bias awareness as core preferences.
• Step 2: DEI Imperatives: You also have the benefit of your personal DEI objectives and goals, which provides even clearer direction, when compared to your personal DEI aims, for exactly what it is that you hope to accomplish and how you will evaluate results and determine impact. Much as your personal DEI aims guided you during Step 1: DEI Inventory to identify an initial set of competences, your personal DEI objectives and goals can guide you to a final set of competences. In other words, much as Table 3.5 walked you through the process of choosing initial personal DEI core preferences and competences based on your personal DEI aims, Table 4.1 walks you through a very similar process of now choosing final personal DEI core preferences and competences based on your personal DEI objectives and goals.
• Step 3: DEI Insights: Finally, you have the benefit of personal DEI promising and proven practices (“What Works” models for people and organizations), which provide insights to what has been found to work for others and can therefore inform what might work for you. You may choose to adopt one of the “What Works” models identified in the previous step. In fact, Table 4.1 also walks you through a process of mapping your personal DEI objectives and goals to an appropriate “What Works.” For example, if your personal DEI objective is related to being inclusive, then you could choose to adopt Intrinsic Inclusion™ as your model for personal DEI core competences based on its competences blueprint of four inclusion accelerators—Shared Trust, Significant Emotional Event/Relationship, Connected Understanding, and Respectful Empathy—to behave more inclusively, or you could adopt the Six Signature Traits of an Inclusive Leader, which identifies cognizance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence, collaboration, commitment, and courage as the necessary competences to be an inclusive leader.

By analyzing the results of your personal DEI assessment, reflecting on your personal DEI objectives and goals, and reviewing personal DEI promising and proven practices, you should have more than sufficient information from the preceding steps to arrive at final choices for your personal DEI core preferences and competences. This will comprise your personal DEI preference model or personal DEI preference and competence model.

Table 4.1 walks you through the entire process of how to arrive at your personal DEI preference model or personal DEI preference and competence model. If your personal DEI objectives only relate to preferences, you should select a total of three to five preferences for your personal DEI preference mode or select one “What Works” model for people (i.e., a personal DEI promising or proven practice) to define or inform your model. If your personal DEI objectives relate to preferences and competences, you should select a total of five to seven personal DEI preferences and competences for your personal DEI preference and competence model or select one “What Works” model for people and organizations to define or inform your model.

This completes the first task stemming from the personal DEI strategy framework, which is to determine the preferences you want to expand and/or the competences you want to build. The second and final task is to orchestrate exactly what knowledge you will acquire (“Learn: Engage the Head”), determine exactly what actions you will take to expand the personal DEI core preferences and build the personal DEI core competences you have selected (“Do: Employ the Hands”), and decide exactly how you will cultivate positive attitudes/attributes and increase engagement (“Inspire: Enrich the Heart”). This will all be accomplished by designing a personal DEI learning journey.

Designing a Personal DEI Learning Journey

Oftentimes, people rely on training to foster behavioral change in support of a strategic objective. However, most training constitutes an “event” and does not engage you in a meaningful and effective behavioral change process. As you develop your personal DEI strategies, I recommend a Personal DEI Learning Journey (PDLJ) as an approach to create lasting behavioral change, learning transfer, and performance improvement along your personal DEI journey. As the name implies, a Personal DEI Learning Journey is a series of activities and experiences designed to achieve behavioral change, learning, and performance outcomes specifically related to DEI. A personal DEI learning journey may include training, but it embraces an even wider range of personal DEI strategies. This approach is centered on the pioneering work of Professor Robert Brinkerhoff under the banner of “High Performance Learning Journeys® (HPLJs),” which was cited as a “What Works” model for organizations in Step 3: DEI Insights. While a Personal DEI Learning Journey doesn't fully meet the criteria of an HPLJ, which is a more comprehensive approach to designing learning journeys, it does invoke the underlying principles of an HPLJ. To delve deeper into HPLJs, I encourage you to learn more about Professor Brinkerhoff's work.

In Improving Performance Through Learning: A Practical Guide for Designing High Performance Learning Journeys, Brinkerhoff, Anne Apking, and Edward Boon identify five dimensions that must be “stretched” (suggesting flexibility, agility, and expansion) or fully leveraged to design an HPLJ. In the next section, I introduce and slightly reframe their five dimensions of a High Performance Learning Journey in the context of a Personal DEI Learning Journey. This will establish the foundation for designing your own PDLJs that embrace the spirit of HPLJs.

The Five Dimensions of a Personal DEI Learning Journey

As you have now selected the personal DEI core preferences and competences you will focus on for your personal DEI journey, the following five dimensions are instructive as you contemplate how you should design your own PDLJ to expand those preferences and/or build those competences:

1. Focus—While Brinkerhoff, Apking, and Boon officially refer to this dimension as “Business Linkage,” in their words, “Stretching on this dimension [of business linkage] is really one of focus … this linkage occurs when participants define and expand, over time, the performance tasks that they own.” Your focus could be on your needs, or the needs of your organization, or a combination of both. The key here is “being explicit in the alignment between the Learning and Performance Outcomes the learning will yield, and how those outcomes will have a positive impact” on you and/or your organization. In the context of Data‐Driven DEI, this translates into making certain you have alignment between your personal DEI objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. We began to explore this topic in Step 0: DEI Incentives and we will complete that exploration here in Step 4: DEI Initiatives.
2. Time—Consider the duration and the pace of your PDLJ. Establish a period of time sufficient for personal growth and create a cadence of activities and experiences that are suitable to your schedule.

   As it relates to the time it takes for personal change and transformation, an article by Healthline entitled, “How Long Does It Take for a New Behavior to Become Automatic,” which references a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2009 states, “It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. There's no one‐size‐fits‐all figure, which is why this time frame is so broad; some habits are easier to form than others, and some people may find it easier to develop new behaviors. There's no right or wrong timeline. The only timeline that matters is the one that works best for you.”

3. Spaces—Consider the various locations where your PDLJ can take place beyond a classroom such as your home, work, gym, car, library, movie theater, and beyond. In 2018, Training Industry published a report that found the following:1
   • Fifty‐five percent of learning take places on the job, including job assignments, special assignments, rotational assignment, stretch assignments, and job supports such as standard operating procedures, protocols, templates, and checklists.
   • Twenty‐five percent of learning is social via shadowing, coaching, mentoring, collaboration, observation (i.e., of experts), giving and receiving feedback, and teamwork.
   • Twenty percent of learning is formal such as training seminars, assignments, activities, exercises, and the like.
4. Relationships—Consider how you can align with or involve others in your PDLJ including family members, friends, supervisor, leaders, peers, direct reports, coaches, mentors, sponsors, subject matter experts, and customers. According to the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, several studies have confirmed that people learn better in groups, leading to better problem solving, more positive experiences, higher quiz and test scores, and more.2
5. Tools and Structure—Consider the tools or resources that can enhance your personal DEI learning journey including assessments, books, articles, research papers, case studies, examples/counter‐examples, podcasts, videos, blogs, quizzes, tests, examinations, guides, templates, checklists, games, job aids, eLearning, virtual reality (VR), and so on. Also consider the structure or how you frame your personal DEI learning journey with respect to at‐home vs. on‐the‐job vs. social vs. formal learning; individual vs. team vs. group learning; and in‐person vs. virtual vs. eLearning.

Once you have considered the dimensions of focus, time, spaces, relationships, and tools and structure, you are ready to design your Personal DEI Learning Journey. The next section provides a menu of choices to choose from.

Examples of Personal DEI Strategies

Table 4.2 provides a list of personal DEI strategies for you to consider as a part of your Personal DEI Learning Journey to expand your preferences and build your competences (broken down into learn‐do‐inspire/head‐hands‐heart to address all three modes of engagement).

The final construct needed to finalize your PDLJ is the Crawl‐Walk‐Run approach, which will help you organize the journey into three distinct and successively more challenging stages.

The Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to a Personal DEI Learning Journey

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” This inspired the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to a learning journey. According to Brinkerhoff, Apking, and Boon, “the Crawl, Walk, Run approach can be an invaluable framework,” especially when undertaking an ambitious learning journey. “The premise of this approach is that crawling precedes the ability to walk, and walking must be mastered before beginning to run,” and for the PDLJ to meet you where you are. The approach includes the following (with each step broken down into learn‐do‐inspire / head‐hands‐heart and each example drawing from the categories listed in Table 4.1):

• Crawl—Begin your PDLJ with “low‐hanging fruit.” Focus on acquiring entry‐level knowledge, performing easy and introductory tasks, exercises, and activities to build skills, and pursuing basic appreciation, encouragement, and storytelling opportunities to cultivate your attitudes/attributes. For example, a PDLJ centered on the four personal DEI core competences (i.e., inclusion accelerators) of Intrinsic Inclusion™—Shared Trust, Significant Emotional Event/Relationship, Connected Understanding, and Respectful Empathy—could begin with the following:
  • Learn—Books, Magazines, Articles, and Blogs: Read the book, Intrinsic Inclusion: Rebooting Your Biased Brain by Reid and Brown.
  • Do—Travel, Site Visits, and Excursions: Shadow an inclusive leader for a day to observe their behavior and/or interview an inclusive leader to gain insight.
  • Inspire—Journaling: Maintain a journal and Personal Interactions: Share the objectives, goals, strategies, and measures for the overall PDLJ with a friend or family member to provide motivation and accountability.
• Walk—Continue your PDLJ with intermediate‐level knowledge, tasks, exercises, activities, and opportunities. The prior personal DEI learning journey could continue with the following:
  • Learn—Books, Magazines, Articles, and Blogs: Read articles on Intrinsic Inclusion™ by Janet B. Reid, PhD, and Vincent Brown in Psychology Today.³
  • Do—Workplace Activities: Participate in a workplace event or celebration sponsored by the Black employee resource group (ERG).
  • Inspire—Journaling: Maintain a journal and Storytelling: Share the key takeaways and lessons learned from experiences thus far with a colleague.
• Run—The final phase of your PDLJ should be the more difficult and advanced‐level assignments. For example, the previous PDLJ could conclude with the following:
  • Learn—Training Programs: Attend a facilitated learning experience by a certified instructor that teaches Intrinsic Inclusion™ and provides various expertly facilitated tasks, exercises, and activities for applying the inclusion accelerators.
  • Do—Experiential Learning and Development Programs and Workplace Activities: Apply the MODE model (“motivation and opportunity and be determinants of spontaneous behavior”) after the facilitated learning experience at work while seeking feedback from colleagues who are Black and/or women (“Field Testing” chapter, “Building MODE into the Routine” section).
  • Inspire—Journaling: Maintain a journal and Communities of Learning: Join a virtual peer learning group from the facilitated learning experience that meets regularly to share stories, offer encouragement, and hold each another accountable to meet learning and development commitments.

The Learn‐Do‐Inspire/Head‐Hands‐Heart methodology helps ensure that your PDLJ is comprehensive in how it will expand your preferences and build your competences via knowledge acquisition, skill development, and attitude/attribute cultivation. The five dimensions of focus, time, spaces, relationships, and tools and structure help guide the design of your PDLJ to fully leverage different modes of engagement. The Crawl‐Walk‐Run approach helps structure the stages of your PDLJ in a way that gradually becomes more challenging.

Examples of Organizational DEI Strategies

Table 4.4 provides a representative, but not exhaustive, list of organizational DEI strategies to consider as a part of your DEI journey. They are broken down into the four groups and 15 categories of the GDEIB model. While each strategy is assigned to a primary category, many of them easily apply and support other categories.

Formatting Your DEI Strategy Statements

Here is a simple format for a DEI strategy statement:

[Action verb] [an output].

Examples of action verbs include: “learn,” “apply,” “complete,” “achieve,” “accomplish,” “attain,” and “realize.”

While personal and organizational DEI objectives are centered on outcomes, or final results that are difficult to measure or validate, personal and organizational DEI strategies are centered on outputs, or intermediate results that are easy to measure/report (refer back to Table 2.1 for a full summary of the difference between outputs and outcomes). As you saw in Step 2: DEI Imperatives, DEI objectives are defined according to outcomes such as increasing awareness of different cultures across the globe, increasing awareness of intercultural conflict styles to resolve conflicts effectively and harmoniously, being an effective sponsor and advocating for people of color, and being an ally in equal partnership with women. Here in Step 4: DEI Initiatives, DEI strategies are defined according to outputs such as the completion of educational classes, books, magazines and articles, travel, experiential learning and development, journaling, and personal interactions.

Examples of Personal DEI Strategies

Let's look at an example of how to arrive at personal DEI strategies that brings Steps 1 through 4 together.

For illustrative purposes, and continuing an example from before, let's assume that during Step 1: DEI Inventory for People you took three personal DEI assessments—the Gender‐Science IAT, the Race IAT, and the Intrinsic Inclusion Inventory™ (I3™) for People—with the following results:

Personal DEI Assessment Results

• Your Gender‐Science IAT results found a “slight preference” of associating women with science and men with liberal arts.
• Your Race IAT results found a “slight automatic preference” for white people over Black people.
• Your I3™ results placed you at the second level.

During Step 2: DEI Imperatives, you establish the following personal DEI objective and goals:

• Personal DEI Objective: Be an inclusive leader that personalizes individuals, treats people and groups fairly, and leverages the thinking of diverse groups.
• Personal DEI Goals:
  • Mitigate the impact of my Gender‐Science IAT results being a “slight preference” of associating women with science and men with liberal arts by improving my diverse 360° assessment scores by 10% with women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) over the next 12 months.
  • Mitigate the impact of my Race IAT results being a “slight automatic preference” for white people over Black people by improving my 360° assessment scores by 10% with people of color over the next 12 months.

Increase my I3™ rating from the second level to the third level by the end of the year.

During Step 3: DEI Insights, you decide to embrace Intrinsic Inclusion™ as a “What Works” model or personal DEI promising and proven practice that defines your personal DEI preference and competence model (i.e., personal DEI core preferences and competences):

• Personal DEI Preference and Competence Model: Intrinsic Inclusion™
• Personal DEI Core Preferences and Competences: Shared Trust, Significant Emotional Event/Relationship, Connected Understanding, and Respectful Empathy

This leads you here in Step 4: DEI Initiatives to arrive at the personal DEI strategy statements summarized in Table 4.5 to fulfill your personal DEI objective and achieve your personal DEI goals.

In one of the final sections of this step, “Personal DEI Strategic Plan Example,” I will round out this personal DEI strategy example by assigning corresponding personal DEI measures to gauge progress against each strategy shown in Table 4.5. As you will see, this will complete your personal DEI strategic plan.

Examples of Organizational DEI Strategies

Let's now look at an example of how to arrive at organizational DEI strategies that also brings Steps 1 through 4 together.

For illustrative purposes, and continuing an example from Step 1: DEI Inventory for Organizations (see Table 1.19), let's assume your organization completed three organizational DEI assessments—BCT's DEI Workforce and Workplace Assessment™ (DWWA™), which evaluates organizational culture and climate; the Intrinsic Inclusion Inventory™ for Organizations, which measures inclusive behaviors; and the Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Benchmarks (GDEIB), which provides a global benchmark of DEI capability and maturity—with the following findings, evidence, implications, and recommendations in “The Bridging Group: Align and Connect” category of the GDEIB (excerpted directly from Table 1.19):

During Step 2: DEI Imperatives, you establish the following organizational DEI objective and goals in Category 9: DEI Communication and Category 10: DEI Learning and Development:

Organizational DEI Objective:

• Category 9: DEI Communications and Category 10: DEI Learning and Development: Design and execute an organization‐wide training and awareness program that fosters intrinsically inclusive behaviors.

Organizational DEI Goals:

• Increase the number of employees exhibiting intrinsically inclusive behaviors by 10% by the end of the next fiscal year.
• Increase the number of managers and supervisors exhibiting intrinsically inclusive behaviors by 15% by the end of the next fiscal year.

During Step 3: DEI Insights, your organization's leadership decides to implement the following promising and proven practices that relate to learning and development:

• Intrinsic Inclusion™ to foster inclusive behaviors for all employees.
• The Rali LX platform for scenario‐based micro‐learning journeys for learning and development of employees, managers, and supervisors.
• Through My Eyes™ Virtual Reality (VR) to provide experiential learning for managers and supervisors.

This leads your organization here in Step 4: DEI Initiatives to arrive at the organizational DEI strategy shown in Table 4.6 to fulfill your organizational DEI objective and achieve your organizational DEI goals.

In the next section, I will explain how to define DEI measures to gauge progress against a given strategy. Then, in one of the final sections of this step, “Organizational DEI Strategic Plan Example,” I will round out this organizational DEI strategy example by assigning corresponding organizational DEI measures to each strategy shown in Table 4.6 and more. As you will see, this will complete your organizational DEI strategic plan.

Formatting Your DEI Measures Statements

Here is a simple format for a DEI measures statement:

[Action verb] [a measure] to [target] within/by [timeframe].

Once you have determined your measures, undertake these steps to finalize your measures statement:

1. Choose an appropriate action verb for your measures statement such as “achieve,” “increase/decrease,” “improve/mitigate/eliminate,” “reduce/close,” or simply “change.”
2. Determine a target—a mark you hope to achieve—for each measure.
3. Select a timeframe—a time period—within which you plan to reach the target.
4. Identify the data source to confirm that you have the necessary data to track your measures. For people, the data can often be collected manually by simply tracking your activities. For organizations, the data may be obtained from a human resources information system (HRIS), learning management system (LMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, customer relationship management (CRM) system, or other DEI‐related data system. Be mindful that you can only measure that for which you have the requisite data.
5. Decide on the frequency upon which the data can/will be collected and analyzed. For most measures, the frequency is often driven by the strategy. For example, if a pay equity initiative must be completed within six months, or a DEI council meets quarterly, or a training takes place monthly, then the frequency is self‐evident.
6. Identify the owner of the strategy, that is, the person(s) accountable for making certain the strategy is executed.