I know I missed my weekly “new article” cadence, so thanks for your patience with me; I had my knee surgery last Thursday and I’ve been focused on recovery.
Intellectually, I understand that “recovery” is supposed to be largely about “rest.”
But for me, recovery is hard freaking work.
It’s hard for me to rest, and it’s an intentional, often difficult, practice to let others help me.
It’s hard for me to let my partner drive my kids to school, or worse, drive me around.
It’s mentally hard for me to sit on the couch so much (I’m generally much happier at my desk… working!) and it’s also physically hard (keeping one’s leg propped all the time with itchy compression socks on is just no fun).
I’ve even noticed that it’s been a bit hard for me to let my family do some of the house-cleaning chores I normally do, even though I often wish I didn’t have to pick up after the kids so much.
But all in all, I am making progress! I will keep you posted, but so far so good… next milestone, get rid of these damn crutches. 😎
Today I want to talk about DEI… kind of.
Have you noticed more organizations abandoning DEI initiatives lately? We’ve seen it from a couple highly visible companies recently, culminating on Monday with our very own federal government.
What exactly is happening?
In this article, I’m running a slight risk of over-simplifying this issue, but I think the potential clarity gained from this perspective is worth it. Here’s the core idea:
Organizations are backing out of DEI initiatives because our systems make it nearly impossible for leaders to do the right things… even if they want to.
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To illustrate, I’m gonna pull back the curtain a bit on the work that I get to do. Get ready to see the wizard y’all…
Last Wednesday I was in a session with other Impact Eleven speakers talking about how we can best serve all of you, our clients. (I’m guessing most of you reading this probably work inside an organization, lead a team, attend conferences, etc.) The amazing Seth was facilitating, and presented some great thoughts on how clients this year seem to be focused on growth.
Is this you? Is your organization concerned with growth in 2025? If so, you aren’t alone!
Seth put forth some beautiful language to help us understand where to go next — namely, that we must approach the topic of “growth” as human expansion instead of human extraction.
I love this usage of language and fantastic concept juxtaposition, and any of you who consume my work regularly know exactly why this statement resonates with me. (Do I wish I would’ve thought to put those phrases together?? Absolutely.)
But then, in the Zoom chat window, my friend Lisa insightfully wondered: “But is human expansion what CEOs actually care about?”
Fabulous question. CEOs: you’re welcome to chime in!
Here’s my answer… and I think you’ll see exactly what it has to do with DEI.
In my almost 20 years of being in this space doing “human expansion” work, I have had the pleasure to meet many leaders, including CEOs and other C-level leaders. Some of you reading this undoubtedly go in this group.
The leaders I meet almost unequivocally want to do good work, and they also almost universally understand that doing good work involves human expansion (versus extraction). I think the leaders I’ve worked with are a relatively reasonable sample of leaders that are out there in the market, with the caveat that this group is potentially self-identifying in this direction because they hired me. Despite that, I truly believe that the majority of leaders out there would like to do good, helpful, useful, meaningful work, and they want their organizations to reflect this, as well.
And yet… it’s impossible to deny the challenge it is to just DO the work of human expansion.
It’s hard to get budget for it. It’s difficult to get people to devote time to it. It’s often challenging to get respect for doing it when there are so many other more businessy-looking things that have a more instant “just add water”-like impact on businessy-looking results.
I talked about this at length with my long-term work friend Paul last year on his podcast.
To me, here’s the core of it…
Despite the best intentions, and even honest desires, of leaders, they constantly find themselves in a mostly unwinnable tug-of-war between “market systems” and “human expansion.”
These two ideas are fundamentally at odds because of their inherent and opposite time horizons, meaning:
Markets require short-term thinking and short-term results (think: quarterly earning cycles).
Humans require long-term thinking and long-term investments (think: a human’s 30-40 year long career).
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Both of these cannot win, and the harsh reality is that most leaders are required to do the first item if they want to keep their job, which means the second item often falls lower on the priority list.
Again, this is not because the leader WANTS it to be that way.
It’s simply because the system we’re in demands this.
Which reminds me of W. Edwards Deming’s brilliant quote: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
What we’re seeing with DEI efforts is largely the same.
Sure, with DEI there are added elements of politicization and brand-burning, but at the end of the day DEI efforts are fundamentally about human expansion, and no matter what flavor of human expansion you are trying to do inside your organization, it is DIFFICULT.
Like my journey of recovery, doing the right thing takes work… sometimes a surprising amount.
So…
Here’s to those of you who find ways to do human expansion anyway.
We can see that the work you do is not because of the system, but very much in spite of it.
You are heroes to us ALL, and we appreciate you so much.