July 02, 2021
July 02, 2021
Contributor: Teresa Zuech
To accelerate leadership diversity, organizations must elevate DEI goals to the same priority as other business goals.
Despite mounting external and internal pressures to prioritize and make demonstrable improvements on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), organizations continue to struggle to make real and rapid headway — especially among leadership.
HR leaders cite a lack of diversity in the pipeline as the top challenge to diversifying the leadership bench. While many organizations have attempted to address this by investing in recruiting Black, BIPOC, Latinx and Asian talent — particularly for entry level positions — Gartner analysis shows progression of underrepresented talent stalls in mid-level and senior level positions.
“Talent progression, or lack thereof, ultimately comes down to the decisions and behaviors of senior leaders,” says Caitlin Duffy, Research Director, Gartner. “Our research found that to drive real change, organizations must adopt consequential accountability, which meaningfully impacts behavior and outcomes for individual leaders.”
According to the Gartner 2021 Leadership Progression and Diversity Survey of 3,500 employees, organizations that embrace consequential accountability will reach gender parity 13 years earlier and racial parity six years earlier in their leadership benches.
To implement consequential accountability, HR must work with business leaders on three key areas:
Many organizations offer unconscious bias training to reduce workplace bias and help leaders think differently about talent and diversity. Yet, Gartner analysis reveals this has no significant impact on the level of bias in an organization’s performance management practices.
To mitigate this, HR leaders must address two key areas. First, organizations must redefine the criteria leaders use to make talent decisions. This means moving away from making decisions based on instincts and politics, and focusing on driving equitable assessment of skills and capabilities.
Second, HR leaders must integrate objective data into talent processes around leaders’ key decision-making moments. These include evaluating candidates for a promotion or analyzing the health of leadership succession pools.
Progressive organizations contextualize their DEI goals, strategies and action plans.
When customizing DEI strategies, HR leaders should partner with business leaders to identify diversity gaps in their talent pools and progression tracks to uncover unique challenges or concerns that may prevent them from taking action on DEI goals. HR should then establish localized DEI teams to support business leaders as they implement DEI solutions.
To drive personal urgency, HR must work with business leaders to develop organization-wide DEI strategies that are mutually understood and elevate DEI outcomes to the same priority as other business goals for individual leaders. Specifically, they should implement the following three tactics:
“When leaders are not held accountable for advancing DEI goals, yet are personally responsible for advancing talent, this creates a disconnect,” says Duffy.
Consequential accountability helps close these gaps in an accelerated and sustainable way by increasing personal urgency and relevance for leaders, resulting in meaningful change in the organization.
Join your peer CHROs and senior HR executives from leading organizations to discuss specific HR challenges and learn top HR trends and priorities.
Recommended resources for Gartner clients*:
Diversifying the Leadership Bench
*Note that some documents may not be available to all Gartner clients.