We've written before about what a daunting task it can be to find a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging subject matter expert who truly meets the needs of your organization.
In fact, you might find it so daunting that it can be tempting to throw in the towel. "You know what, we'll just do it ourselves," you might think. "How hard can it be?"
1. You don't mind spending many hours each month staying abreast of new scholarly research, cultural trends, and best practices in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work... and, of course, how this work maps onto organizational challenges and their resolutions.
2. You have a deep understanding of adult-learning best practices. When it comes to really effective DEIB learning, subject-matter expertise is just the beginning. A truly great provider will meet your learners where you're at using peer-reviewed best practices for e-learning modules, to make sure that everyone accessing the content feels understood.
3. You don't expect any hard questions to come up. DEIB work can be deeply personal and vulnerable for participants, and facilitators need to be skilled in answering not just academically difficult questions, but in helping their learners really "go there" emotionally: to sit with their pain, and greet them with empathy. This is the sort of personal transformation that leads to organizational change.
4. Your commitments to DEIB can wait, maybe even up to a decade. Good work takes time, and developing a DEIB training that truly results in habit formation and behavior change can take many years, from conceptualization through iteration and refining. Add another couple years if you'd like a training that's cross-culturally valid, and another year or so on top of that if you'd like assessment instruments that are developed in conjunction with a scientific advisory board.
If you're reading those last four bullet points and thinking, "Hmm, maybe this is more work than I'd realized!"... you're not alone! You have this in common with many of the most powerful and recognizable brands in the world.
The truth is that developing a culturally responsive DEIB training program takes years and many hundreds of hours of subject matter expertise and operational support. For most teams, this lift is more than they can sustain on their own... and it focuses on an area outside their core strategy and operations!
I have worked with teams of world-class surgeons, law partners, venture capitalists, and non-profit leaders, all of whom had two things in common:
1. They were passionately and concretely invested in moving the needle on the DEIB commitments they'd made to and behalf of their organizations;
2. Their communities were best served when everyone at their organizations got to spend time in their "zones of genius", rather than re-inventing the DEIB wheel.
I'm not sure when I last spoke to a CEO who remarked that what they had in excess was time and effort. And the bad news is that developing your DEIB programs from scratch takes time and effort.
The good news is that there are many organizations out there doing amazing work. Our methodology, for example, is backed by over 15 years of research, and has been tested by over 300 organizations. We've put the time and effort in so that you don't have to, and so that you and your teams can spend time doing what you do best... after joining our Beloved Community as we share with you what we do best: high-quality e-learning around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
To learn more about our DEIB offerings, check us out here!