Wisdom from DEI on the Inside

Recently, I spoke to Pauline Miller, Chief Equity Officer EMEA for dentsu, for Episode 19 of the ‘Why Care?’ podcast. Pauline has had a long and impressive career as a DEI professional, and is currently responsible for shaping and leading dentsu’s DEI strategy and execution. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her career and to offer precious wisdom from what she has learnt over the years on how to be an effective and proactive internal DEI practitioner.  

Pauline shared so many powerful nuggets of advice that I simply had to capture them and expand with my thoughts too. So what follows is a brief overview of some of the topics Pauline covered in Episode 19 of the ‘Why Care?’ Podcast.

Harnessing the power of lived experiences

Most people come into the DEI field due to their own lived experiences and wanting to make a change, and these lived experiences are important for informing how we practice as DEI professionals. Having these experiences can be a powerful tool for understanding how actions and policies will manifest in the daily lives of your employees. However, Pauline urges that you must account for and utilise the lived experiences of others around you in order to successfully practice DEI.

I have long been an advocate of encouraging people to introspect about their lived experiences myself. Avenir’s ‘Privilege, Bias or Merit?’ workshop is a key component of our inclusion programmes and is designed to help participants to realise how privileges may have impacted on their own lived experiences and to reflect on the power dynamics in their organisation. Only when people understand their own lived experiences in comparison of their colleagues’ can the ground work for substantial change be paved.

Celebrating the short-term wins

Pauline shared in the podcast episode that she discovered that one of the most powerful actions she can take in her role is choosing to celebrate the short-term wins. Often we see short-term wins as small steps on the road to our long-term goal and our attention should immediately be turned towards the next step on the road. In the DEI field we can be especially guilty of this, our long-term goals often feel paramount as they are based on complete inclusion and equity, so it can be easy to ignore the short-term wins in favour of moving onto the next action.

Celebrating those short-term wins is a simple but powerful action however. It can remind you and your team that every win improves the lives of the employees in your organisation, even if sometimes it’s only by a little. These morale boosts will help increase engagement of your team, and by visibly celebrating your work it will boost the engagement of the wider employee network with DEI programmes – which in turn makes it more likely that the employees will take your DEI teaching home with them.

All this celebrating will of course also not go unnoticed by the senior leadership and stakeholders, and will demonstrate the value and worth of DEI as a strategic imperative - which never hurts!

Encouraging continuous learning

One of the eternal truths of being human is that we don’t know everything! There is always room to grow and there’s also always a need to grow. Humans are especially complex and there is a lot of variation between us. For a long time a large chunk of these variations were swept under the rug. A ‘good’ example of this in recent history is Section 28 in the UK, this law meant that from 1988 to 2003 it was illegal for teachers to talk about anything LGBTQ+ in schools. A whole 25 years where children weren’t taught the simple fact that LGBTQ+ people exist. This generation of children are the majority of today’s working adults.

This is an extreme example of how we all still have a lot of learning left to do as adults, and how our education will not have covered everything on the vast diversity of humanity. As Pauline explains, adopting a stance of continuous learning and seeking to fill the gaps in your knowledge are the only ways to effectively grow our mindsets. This is especially important for DEI practitioners, where we have to be at the forefront of society to cultivate inclusion for the employees under our care.

Promoting the idea of joint accountability

Many people in organisations often think that DEI programmes have nothing to do with them, they may see themselves as ‘one of the good ones’ who doesn’t act with bias, or they’re a majority group member so DEI is not for them. It is very important to promote the narrative that we all have a part to play in an organisation to create inclusion, that there is a joint-accountability on each of us to ensure that bias is spotted and addressed in a direct yet sensitive way so as not to ‘cancel’ anyone for using inappropriate language. DEI strategy and policy will only work if it is upheld by every member of the organisation.  

DEI as a strategic imperative

The final gem of wisdom Pauline shared in the podcast is to ensure that your organisations DEI strategy remains a strategic imperative for the organisation. At face value, often DEI strategy can seem costly for the returns an organisation gets. If expenditure needs to be cut then we have historically been one of the first targets. For this reason it is very important to be able to demonstrate the value DEI adds to the organisation. The money saved from reducing employee turnover and increasing productivity by providing an environment all employees can thrive in, all needs to be calculated and highlighted to prove DEI strategy is vital to organisational health and must be consistently maintained.

The ‘Why Care?’ Podcast

Pauline is a wealth of knowledge and shares all of this and so much more in Episode 19 of the ‘Why Care?’ podcast. If you haven’t listened already, the ‘Why Care?’ Podcast is Avenir’s platform for promoting DEI excellence and sharing a vast library of knowledge from our guests. Collectively there are decades worth of DEI best practice from the experience of our worldwide guests. The topics so far have included sexuality, race, neurodiversity, gender, global DEI, working parents, job sharing, religion and many of the finer points of DEI best practice. All the episodes can be found on your favourite podcast streaming platform, or here on the Avenir website at: https://www.avenirconsultingservices.com/why-care-podcast-with-nadia-nagamootoo.

To get articles like this delivered straight to your inbox, as well as the latest in ‘Why Care?’, events and news from Avenir, subscribe to our newsletter here.