The role of learning and development has changed substantially, as they now lend themselves to culture, return to work, change management, compliance, learning delivery and operations, and instructional design. These teams often operate without being fully resourced to deliver on these multiple time-bound priorities with multiple stakeholders.
In the spirit of upskilling and reskilling efforts, inclusive leadership and understanding cultural competency have risen to the top of the leadership competency list and L&D and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging are becoming more involved in collaborative efforts to accelerate the advancement of inclusive leadership and principles of allyship.
One of my very first jobs out of college was working at Intel in its Intel University (no brick and mortar), where I served as a program manager supporting corporate teams with their learning needs. I absolutely fell in love with L&D, and the thought of helping transform capability and enabling teams to become their best by giving them the skills and competencies needed to perform.
I became obsessed with manager and leadership development and at a young age, worked with senior leaders to help them develop the leadership capabilities of their direct reports. I traveled all over the world for Intel (best job ever, still) and curated leadership development frameworks and discovered the various ways leaders learned across countries, time zones, and functions.
It was then that I realized the importance of leveraging subject matter experts to provide the deep knowledge and understanding of certain topics and provide L&D the creative authority to develop the full learning experience, through design, development, facilitation and evaluation. Both the L&D team and the SME should be involved in the assessment phase to ensure that key insights are not lost in interpretation. When possible, the HR business partner supporting the function should be brought along to understand the solution, including how to communicate learning objectives and benefits of the opportunity. It also helps leadership see the HRBP as an extension of the functional team the learning is being designed for, as they typically know how the leaders think and what gaps the opportunity will address.
Here are some tips I have picked up along the way to help L&D and DEIB teams navigate creating the optimal learner experience while honoring the SME’s on both sides.
● Appreciate the importance of DEIB. As a profession, DEIB is an important function in your organization. Glassdoor has observed an average, global year-over-year growth in DEIB job openings of 37 percent. They predict a sharp acceleration in the coming years. The individuals in your organizations that have been selected to lead this function and serve on the team have specialized skills to diagnose, assess, and in some cases have lived experiences that lend themselves to the creation of content that weaves together values, pathways and journeys to bring to life some employee experiences that need to be illuminated.
● The DEIB SME may not have deep experience in L&D, however, in many organizations, L&D does not have the bandwidth to co-create or support all training, and sometimes compliance, and a few other key topics are prioritized over DEIB learning. This current trend has created opportunities for DEIB professionals to create their own internal training, on demand, which has given them the skill set and confidence to share how content may be stacked with other modules and modalities, and how concepts of bias, race, and other topics may resonate given previous experiences. Again, these should be honored.
● L&D teams are often pulled in many directions, and with DEIB being at the forefront of the focus for many organizations looking to embed DEIB into their values and create communities of practice while holding leaders accountable for behaviors that will attract, engage, and promote an inclusive environment, L&D is poised to be a collaborator and enabler of creating learning opportunities that align with and ladder up to the core and common learning practices and curriculum. This must also be honored. L&D is in a position to visualize how the key learnings within these DEIB courses can be lifted and successfully integrated within other management and leadership courses, not excluding, new hire onboarding, etc. This creates a learner and employee experience that gets at the inclusive culture outcome both teams are striving for.
So, how do we get the best of both teams?
I was recently serving as the executive sponsor of a program that had a KPI of reaching 1,200 people leaders by June of 2023. We had two small, but mighty and very capable and competent teams, DEIB and L&D that were up for the challenge of taking pre-existing modules, already developed, making them less dense to optimize the learner experience, and enhancing them in a way that would bring what had previously been facilitated in a pure virtual environment, to a hybrid approach — both instructor-led (virtual) and asynchronous via the online learning academy.
The teams first needed to align on program goals, the KPIs we wanted to achieve and the experience learners should have. These were not course objectives, but overall program goals. Then we had the teams align on project goals. These goals helped to shape and inform how we would divide the work between teams. Three work streams consisting of members of both DEI and L&D were formed to ensure diverse perspectives were represented: operational excellence, facilitation and learning enablement: Logistics, facilitation, learning and design.
The learning enablement and facilitation workstreams played a pivotal role in shaping who facilitates and can comfortably navigates conversations about race, anti-racism, bias, and microaggressions, current themes in this organization, striving to become an antiracist while navigating turnover, culture shifts, return to work, like many other organizations.
The learning enablement team ensured the efficacy in adult learning principles and that content reflected the company’s employee value proposition, ways of working, and aligned to the DEIB’s vision. This is where being thoughtful and mindful of the SME is critical. L&D had a vision, and DEIB had a vision. Getting these two visions to be closely aligned without creating tension, and honoring design principles and cultural nuances not always considered (depending on the spaces, and demographic groups that have been navigated in the past), can become disengaging for either team.
These teams also worked together on delivery models, ensuring the technical aspects of system capability and functionality were ready and enabled. They ran train the trainer sessions, selected leaders to facilitate, co-facilitate, launch pilot sessions and helped get the content and delivery to the finish line.
The operational excellence team relied on the outputs of the other two teams to formulate cohorts, engage with chosen facilitators, help to distribute leader and participant guides, and serve as the final integrator to ensure all pieces of the puzzle were in the right place for a flawless execution.
It’s important to remember that thereThere will be tension, because this is a diverse team with different perspectives and thoughts. The key is to lead the team through these conversations, and respect that each member and each team has a point of view.
This is an opportunity to leverage the role of the executive sponsor. It creates the opportunity to establish working norms, team boundaries, appreciate various styles of communication and honor previous experiences, where relevant. Might I add, this is a tactic that, when done well, is the first step in getting teams established.
A few questions to ask:
● Has the L&D team ever created DEIB learning in the past, and if so, was it successful?
● Is there trust between these two teams? Trust that the expertise each team member brings will be honored and valued?
● Is the most senior team member dominating due to their level, and perhaps inadvertently silencing other team members?
● Does every team member have a voice?
● How do we build trust to enable every team member to maximize the opportunity for their voice to be heard? After all, we are creating DEIB learning, and this objective for the team should be role modeled, as it is likely a KPI for the course.
The end result is a learner experience that captures the essence of the program and course learning objectives. It is aligned to the values and business goals for the company, maps to the DEIB and L&D goals and has a confident and competent facilitator, who is able to not only be comfortable with the content but can also respond to challenging questions about tough and uncomfortable topics for some.
Any dissention along the journey should not be felt by the learner and should be worked out prior to the launch. Collaborating with senior leaders for buy-in is a part of the upfront brokering and socializing process, as is bringing your HR and talent teams along to help to serve as ambassadors for the program. If you have ERG’s, or networks, they should participate in pilot programs to provide feedback, as should members of any international teams to get that lens.
These types of courses can be heavy, and difficult to navigate for one facilitator. A best practice is to have two facilitators —, an ethnically diverse leader, if possible and a white ally. Both would need to be vulnerable to share their lived experiences, either as someone who has witnessed microaggressions, and stepped in, or someone who struggled to navigate being looked over for a promotion and how they may have solicited help from an ally. The storytelling elements will bring these learning concepts to life.
Once executed, courses about “how to be an effective ally,” “inclusive leadership” and ”navigating microaggressions,” can be embedded within existing leadership courses and to hold leaders accountable. Ultimately, these learning principles can be woven into leadership goals and for progressive companies, these goals can be tied into bonus compensation and long term incentives.
Ultimately, the outcome is to have culturally responsive team members contributing to the inclusive environment you desire to build and sustain. These team members are poised to lean into tough conversations, and navigate race and other DEIB topics without fear or intimidation. It may contribute to the mitigation of complaints, employee relations incidents and even lead to less legal claims, ultimately aiding in brand connection, increased attraction and higher engagement.
It is definitely possible and critical for DEI and L&D to work together to co-create learning solutions that contribute to a winning culture.
