Four Ways To Support DEI Through Succession Planning

There's compelling evidence that to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive organization, it's critical to diversify your organization’s leadership, and the reason is simple. Research shows that a lack of equity at the top rarely reflects who is present across an organization’s ranks. Instead, it reflects a lack of equity in assessing, developing and promoting talent.

While diversifying the C-suite seems to advance DEI mandates, there is a catch. As more organizations wake up to the fact that a diverse C-suite is good for business, they are struggling to recruit qualified leaders from underrepresented groups. This is largely due to the fact that people from these groups have historically been overlooked in succession plans and, as a result, can lack the experience to step into such roles.

When organizations do recruit outstanding and highly qualified women and BIPOC leaders, particularly for president and CEO positions, retention is also a challenge. To break the cycle, organizations need to develop succession plans that reflect their short- and long-term DEI goals. There is a compelling reason to do so: Diverse organizations aren’t just more inclusive but also more profitable.

Four Steps To Build DEI Goals Into Your Succession Planning

1. Evaluate and identify goals.

Honestly assess your current organization based on previous research or new assessments and observations. Then, set ambitious benchmarks for yourself. For instance, if you’re looking to transform a C-suite or board that is mostly or entirely white and male, set clear metrics on what success will look like and also set a timeframe for achieving your goal.

2. Pay attention to employees who weren’t identified as high-potential.

Most organizations officially or unofficially identify high-potential employees. These employees are often given extra attention, put into leadership roles earlier on, given additional training and given more opportunities to gain visibility across the organization.

As you work to weave DEI into your succession planning efforts, take time to consider who has been overlooked and ask yourself why these employees weren’t seen as high-potential. Was it based on performance alone or other factors? Can you identify any patterns about who is identified as high-potential and at what point in their career? Are certain types of employees more or less likely to be identified as high potential? If so, why?

The goal here is to identify who has been overlooked in the past and, if they are still in your ranks (though they may have already moved on to a more supportive workplace), to fix your company's previous oversights.

If you don’t think this applies to your organization, think again. As Zuhairah Washington and Laura Morgan Roberts observed in a 2019 Harvard Business Review study of major U.S. companies (registration required), women of color are particularly likely to "receive less support from their managers" and "are less likely to have bosses who promote their work contributions to others, help them navigate organizational politics, or socialize with them outside of work. Thus, they’re often left out of the informal networks that propel most high-potentials forward in their careers."

3. Support previously overlooked high-potential employees.

Although there is often an assumption that developing high-potential talent is something that must start early in the career cycle, in reality, leaders peak at different times.

If you identify high-potential employees who have been overlooked for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual performance on the job, do what’s right and start to invest in them. This will likely involve a combination of interventions, including rotating them into a new and more expansive role where they can gain increased exposure across the organization, leadership coaching and sponsor mentorship.

4. Revamp your current approach to succession planning.

If you’ve completed steps one through three, you’ll already have identified where your existing approach to succession planning went wrong. Use these insights to eliminate bias from the formal and informal practices used to identify and cultivate high-potential employees.

Building A DEI-Driven Succession Plan Is Everyone’s Work

Succession planning is often viewed as the job of human resources. However, if you want your succession plan to reflect a robust DEI mandate, it needs to be viewed as part of everyone’s work.

This is also important for another reason. Women and BIPOC leaders who seek to implement a succession plan focused on diversity are far more likely than their white male counterparts to be critiqued for pursuing a "personal agenda." When everyone in an organization embraces a DEI-driven approach to succession, the work and the burden are shared, alleviating such critiques.