The Journal of Business hosted Kitara Johnson-Jones, chief people officer at Excelsior Wellness, for its Elevating The Conversation podcast in an episode that was released earlier this month. Titled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2024, the new release involves a conversation about the current state of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the Inland Northwest, a timely topic in a new era in which more national news stories talk about trends toward "DEI backlash."

The Elevating The Conversation podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and elsewhere. Search for it on any of those platforms to hear the entire conversation, but for now, here are five takeaways from the 48-minute episode. 

1. Chief People Officer is becoming a prevalent title. I knew that the chief people officer role would really start taking off in the workplace and business world. In the past, you had this chief diversity officer, and  those chief diversity officers were having challenges because the system wasn't created for a chief diversity officer.

When you think about training in the workplace, where does it come out of? HR. It doesn't matter what business, what type of organization that you work in. So you now have this chief diversity officer, and they're trying to do training for all staff. Well, the system wasn't created to work outside of HR in that regard.

People who were in that role felt like there was stealth resistance or sometimes outright resistance. It's just because the system wasn't created for that role. But what we started seeing was this trend of chief people officer, because your chief human resource officer also needs to have that diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging mindset in order to truly lead.

And in order to do any strategy work, you would have to lean more into that chief people officer role. It's really that chief human resource officer role with that added role or employee experience and engagement, which is where a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work falls under.

Even with my role at Excelsior, that title has changed to chief people officer. I knew it was coming.

2. When approaching DEI training, psychological safety comes first. You have to start with psychological safety. That's what every person needs regardless of how our social identity lines up. They need to feel like who they are and what they do matters, and they need to feel like they belong and they can bring in their authentic selves to work each day.

 That's your foundation that every leader should start with. After psychological safety, you start looking at your inclusion strategies. What are you doing to make sure that people are able to share, to challenge, to ask questions, and to see things differently than the status quo.

When that happens, then—and only then—can you start looking at different levels of diversity. And when it comes to diversity, you need to call it what it is. For example, racial and ethnic diversity. If a company is talking about racial and ethnic diversity, they should specifically say that. Because if you just say diversity, you have all these other cultures, races, and groups of people who feel like they're not a part of it, which it couldn't be further from the truth.

But if you focus on racial and ethnic diversity or gender diversity before psychological safety and before your inclusive practices, it's going to fall apart because you don't have an environment that a person from an underrepresented group could thrive in.

3. Inclusion needs to be a greater focus. We've spent so much time on diversity that we have not spent a lot of time in organizations on inclusion. And so, how do we all get along in the same space?

You would think that would be high on the spectrum, but it's been more of individuals focusing on personal and interpersonal communication--in other words, your unconscious bias training. What research is showing is that, the focus on unconscious bias training really isn't getting the results that organizations were thinking that it was going to bring about. And oftentimes it ends up arming employees with terms to call each other out instead of coming together and calling each other in to talk and address situations that might occur. 

We're seeing a shift away from calling a particular person out, but looking at policies, strategy, and procedures. That way, you can get some standardization in the organization and a baseline of, what do you want your organization to look like?

We were doing something for the black community, I remember. And people were saying, we're going to do this just for the black community. But because of proximity, most of the African Americans around the table were in a multicultural, multiethnic relationship. And their children were biracial. 

And so now, we just have to learn how to build inclusive communities. And I think another best practice is work focusing on inclusion, team building, and cross-cultural communications. When companies do that, you will start seeing the success start to happen because we've built relationships. We're getting to know each other.

There have been lots of laws, lots of requirements, but it still hasn't increased inclusion in the workplace. And so that's what I think we're going to have to start seeing a lot of work toward: inclusion or multiculturalism.

4. Develop relationships and be ready for mistakes. Think about surveys. But also, talk to your people and create some team-building activities and make it OK to make a mistake. Leaders are going to make a mistake. I guarantee you as long as you're living, you will make a mistake. You will say the wrong thing. So, don't be afraid of the conversation.

If you build enough positives in a relationship, you can make a mistake. Because your people will know you.

But you have to be OK with someone calling you in. And what do I mean by that? Someone might say, 'Hey, my identity felt threatened as a woman, and a Black person, as a veteran ...' Be the type of leader who is willing to open up your ears and sit down and listen.

You don't have to feel guilty about it because you made a mistake. It's all about, how do I move forward? Ask your employees if there's ever one of those situations, ask them, what will it take to move forward? We spend so much time focusing on what happened and what went wrong and what you did to me and what he said to her, but what does it take to move forward?

5. Change takes time. It takes about three years in a small organization to see change.

The first year, I like to say is about heroes and holidays. Those are those cultural heritage months where you bring in a speaker or trainer just to increase the awareness with people.

The next year you want to focus on acceptance and training and policy. Start looking at and introducing policy changes or even creating employee resource groups that people can come together. And then the next year, you really want to start looking into those deeper things systemically.

At that point, you have conversation that has gone on for three years, and then the next year, you want to start saying, what do we sustain and how do we start bringing in new people to get on the same page as we were when we started this journey?

Now, the more complex your organization is, the longer it's going to take to really see the needle move forward.

Over time, you start seeing sustainable practice. You can start building. You have predictability around it. You have common language around it. You have individuals who have been identified that you can go to for support.

These things take time. DEI is a journey, because it's constantly changing. People are constantly changing. So with that being said, know it's going to always take longer than you expect it to take. Know it's going to always cost more than you expect it to cost. But hang in there, don't give up.