25 Aug
Business Relationships Start with You | Chief Diversity Officer Insights

The Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) is a C-Suite role that is becoming more common with over 50% of Fortune 500 companies having that role as part of their organization.

The role of Chief Diversity Officer has been defined as being “responsible for creating, managing, and optimizing their work culture to be an equitable and fair environment for all employees”. We also think it includes building and maintaining effective business relationships which helps drive results and satisfaction levels.

The CDO understands and appreciates differences and works to ensure the following dimensions are not excluded from, but rather incorporated into the work culture:
  • Class
  • Ethnicity
  • Gender and gender identity
  • Income
  • Mental and physical abilities and characteristics
  • Race
  • Religion
  • Sexuality
Having an inclusive culture requires six principles:

  1. Diversity and inclusion are to be considered business-critical, not compliance-necessary
  2. There’s a focus both on diversity and inclusion to obtain superior performance
  3. Leaders must demonstrate behaviors such as courage, curiosity, and cultural intelligence
  4. Incorporate demographic diversity and diversity of thought into all talent management practices (ex. talent pipeline, talent acquisition, promotions, and leadership development)
  5. Empower individuals to take action and be authentic, manage unconscious bias effectively, and leverage the support of mentors and sponsors as needed
  6. Create accountability and share measurements about diversity and inclusion-related activities and their impacts
The ultimate goal is to create a work culture of trust, transparency, and accountability with open lines of communication and a sense of fairness. When this type of work environment exists, morale, satisfaction surveys, accountability, productivity, and innovation will all increase.

You may not have a CDO at your place of work, but is there anything you can do to incorporate the 6 principles and strengthen your work culture?

Sincerely,
Mike and Jan

The chief diversity officer (CDO) is an organization’s executive level diversity and inclusion strategist, whose job may include, but is not limited to, addressing discrimination in the workplace, launching initiatives to change the organizational culture, and increasing the range of backgrounds and the representation of various groups in staff, volunteers, and/or management.
Roughly 52% of Fortune 500 companies employ diversity officers.

–Wikipedia