Advancing Diverse Talent
By: Barry J Barresi Od Phd
Tags: Talent Acquisition, Organizational Culture, Impact Innovation, Diversity

Advancing Diverse Talent

Source: fizkes via iStock (standard)

Innovative associations have a talented staff that harnesses the power of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills. These associations also have top management that values employee contributions, rewards high performance, and visibly supports the diversity of talent and thinking.

Advancing diverse talent requires the activation of three descriptors: adopting a strategic vision, recruiting diverse talent, and leading inclusively. These descriptors provide essential guidance for advancing organizational capacity to develop new ventures that serve the mission while generating new revenue. This guidance is part of the Association Ventures Innovation Maturity Model.

Adopt a strategic vision

Make the organizational commitment to move beyond a compliance-oriented, programmatic approach to diversity and perform a culture reset across the organization. Deloitte Research identifies four levels of diversity and inclusion maturity. (see below)

Source: Deloitte Research

In this model, significant change across the whole organization will not occur until the strategic vision transitions across four levels: compliance, programmatic, leader-led, and integrated actions. The goal is a diversity and inclusion culture fully integrated into workforce behavior and a business process of innovative customer experience.

Recruit diverse talent

Leverage social media, collaborate with educational institutions, expand advertising efforts, and seek talent from non-traditional sources such as veterans and retirees. Base your recruitment policies and practices on concrete diversity goals. Set ambitious plans to build and support a high-performance staff from all segments of society. Support the effectiveness of recruitment and inclusion strategies across all organizational functions.

Diagnose risks, find opportunities for improvement, track progress, and measure organizational performance in recruiting diverse talent. Determine if barriers are impeding the employment, opportunity, or inclusion of diverse talent. Conduct internal surveys to measure current levels of diversity and inclusion. Survey Monkey offers free survey templates to diagnose culture.

Assess your organization’s practices by considering these questions at each stage of the talent life cycle.

SHRM points to these examples of policies or practices that need to be eliminated or adjusted.

Employee referral programs: Identify and correct “like me” referrals, where staff refers candidates of the same race, gender, religion, and national origin.

Unconscious biases: Watch for an organizational unit with staffing patterns that underrepresents segments compared to the local labor market. Review the practices of any particular manager if warranted.

Political preferences: Be sure to eliminate political signs or any on-site messages that may discourage individuals with different viewpoints from applying. Take appropriate disciplinary action when staff is intolerant of differences.

Invest time and resources to search for talent outside of your usual networks, and find channels into target communities. Bridgespan recommends three tactical steps to achieve a successful search.

Ensure that the way you communicate about a position — both internally and externally — emphasizes your commitment to diversity.

Make your candidate pool as broad as possible from the beginning by doing sufficient research to break into new target networks.

Expand the search beyond personal circles of senior staff. Access local newspapers circulating in specific neighborhoods, associations, and conferences focused on a particular group or specific issue common to minority staff.

Lead inclusively

Rewire behaviors. Combine diversity training with data analytics to pinpoint leaks in your talent lifecycle, introduce behavioral nudges, and track the impact of change. Juliet Bourke and Bernadette Dillon recommend four steps to system rewiring:

1. Use data to pinpoint leaks in the talent lifecycle. To do this, organizations can look at their employees’ profiles from recruitment to retirement, coupled with data on inclusion experiences.

2. Identify and remodel vulnerable moments along the talent lifecycle. These are points within specific talent processes where decision-makers are more susceptible to bias.

3. Introduce positive behavioral nudges that make agility the starting point for all jobs.

4. Track the impact of changes made. Compare your data with nonprofit diversity survey data. Use resources such as NonprofitHR’s diversity practices data.

Create fellowship, internship, and volunteer programs. Provide meaningful experiences for participants and diversify your organization in ways that boost innovation and creativity. Expand your diversity reach to career fairs at historically black colleges and universities. Develop paid mentorships for minority high school students to encourage them to consider career options in your discipline or industry sector.

Develop inclusive leaders. Promote the full participation and sense of belonging of every employee, customer, and strategic partner. Train and support managers and staff to value diversity and inclusion. Access leadership development resources from ASAE and SHRM.

Target your development programs to achieve the Deloitte Six Signature Traits of an inclusive leader: Cognizance — Curiosity — Cultural Intelligence — Collaboration — Commitment — Courage.

Organizational Diagnosis-Guided Capacity Building

Advancing diverse talent is one of eight capacity domains identified by the Association Ventures Innovation Maturity Model. It includes three descriptors: adopting a strategic vision, recruiting diverse talent, and leading inclusively.

If diverse talent scores low in our Intelligence Tool, make it a strategic priority to activate these three performance descriptors. This essential guidance for advancing your organization’s capacity for impact innovation is just the beginning of your journey. At each step, embrace organizational diagnosis to illuminate your next priority.