DEI Training Is A Joke -- But Can Be Fixed

It's handled horribly these days, but an attitude shift can help.

I think most of us realize that there are several inherent problems with conventional diversity training inside companies. Some that immediately pop:

• If handled internally, these trainings are normally done by HR. Anything by HR is almost universally-ignored by other divisions.

• If done externally, it’s often a POC leading the training, and the model being used often opens with focusing on privilege and ways in which certain people get ahead more easily. While this is completely true and valid and corporate America especially is f’n littered with guys born on second base, the thing is that most of those guys don’t believe in privilege. They believe they got there via hard work and cunning acumen around deals. They aren’t going to change their life narrative and identity structure because someone they view as “another Kamala” is speaking to them in a room.

• Most executives don’t care, and often visibly don’t care, and that attitude trickles down to everyone else.

• The whole thing can unfortunately feel performative.

Those are some of your core problems with how we’ve been doing it. Today, the New York Times did an article about all this stuff, and I was ready to be cringed-out when I read it. Sometimes NYT does these topics right, but sometimes they’re way off-base and say stuff like “So, young people enjoy Brooklyn these days, eh?” Here’s the article:

The focus of the article is around the term “belonging,” which is now being added to DEI, so it’s now DEI-B, or DEB. (Isn’t Deb also the HR Trainer? Oh God.) I guess there is now some semantic debate about why we use the word “belonging,” as shown here: