How To Succeed at Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Work, with guest Sarah Cordivano

The People Impact Podcast

When you’re the first DEI role in an organisation, not only are you starting a job from scratch, so is your employer: often they don’t yet understand what your role is. It’s not a plug and play situation but a new function inside an organisation without a lot of legacy to stand on.

Moreover, expectations of what this work is like are often different than the reality – for both the DEI professional and the organisation.

To share her own learnings, Sarah Cordivano wrote the book ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: How to succeed at an impossible job’. A very honest and practical look at what it’s like to work in DEI – and how to turn that into a success.

In Sarah’s experience, DEI work in an organisation mainly consists of change management, project management, communications and strategic thinking.

But this is also emotionally involved work: it’s very personal to people. It’s a delicate space, sometimes with trauma involved, and it’s directly connected to people and their identity in so many ways. And it’s often connected with deep motivation and personal experiences of the DEI professional themselves.

It’s hard to build something new in this emotionally charged space, to persevere and remain resilient in it. Working on DEI in organisations, and doing that successfully, can take you on an intense journey to figure out what resilience means to you (and coaching can be helpful there). “You have to do a lot of personal work to make sure that you succeed in the job and also that you have the resilience to stick with it for a long time.”

That starts with expectation setting: being clear about what you expect both of others and yourself. It also takes some work to align individual purpose and drives to reality. When you’re in this work, you want fast change and that may not be the speed of the reality of it.

Sarah realised she needs to make sure to have many motivators to do this work, including passion and purpose as well as realism and data. What helps is to have a frame of mind around success, and to use data to measure impact – not just as a reporting mechanism in the organisation, but for yourself as well. For Sarah, this has made it easier to get a sense of accomplishment along the way and to stay motivated.

On all of those levels: “You need to make sure that you get what you need so that you can make the impact you want to have.”

You need a little bit of everything to do this work successfully. And it’s important work. Let’s set you up to do it well, putting all of those pieces together.

More about Sarah Cordivano:

Personal Website: https://www.sarahcordivano.com/

Blog: https://medium.com/sarah-cordivano

Book: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: How to Succeed at an Impossible Job - https://amzn.eu/d/15VmRWa

More about us:

Lisa Dempsey – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisakdempsey/ - https://www.leadershiplabs.eu

Marjolijn Vlug – https://www.linkedin.com/in/marjolijnvlug/ - https://www.marjolijnvlug.nl/?lang=en

Reach us both at [e-mail]