Inclusive Leadership Strategy

SITUATION:

A global hospitality company was increasing their focus on people, inclusion, and culture timed with the integration of a significant acquisition. The executive team believed the success of integration of operations was very much tied to the integration of cultures. The newly hired lead for DEI wanted this work to be positioned more as a reset in leadership culture than a stand-alone DEI strategy.

The situation called for a model to strategically anchor the inclusion work, a reset with the employee resource groups (ERGs), and an intentional focus to both humanize and operationalize the strategy in a way that connected embedded this DEI work into other work.

SOLUTION:

The partnership was built around three core solutions: strategy development, thought leadership, and operational support. The client wanted an experienced and flexible partner to meet them in this build mode, and travel in this leadership development journey to help facilitate planned and unplanned opportunities.

We began with 20+ executive interviews that gained context and helped to define priorities. We built a custom model for their DEI strategy that grounded all on connecting the what, why, and how in a visual that was scalable within the client organization. We presented this model back to this c-suite and created a stakeholder map to continue informing and influencing the executive influence of this work.

We connected this strategic work to other client partners working ESG strategy development and employee experience surveys to fuel integration of work across work streams.This led to an inclusive approach to employee experience survey action planning as well as an Inclusion Town Hall tour focused on showing responsiveness to recent survey results.

We conducted a virtual Allyship training for the TMRG leads as well as conducted a series of virtual workshops to help the ERG co-chairs understand their roles and how to work with their executive sponsors and stay aligned with the core model.

The engagement also led into additional partnership opportunities including executive coaching as well as design thinking and operational support tied to ongoing talent management and leadership development initiatives.

RESULTS:

The model was anchored in the business case that connected culture, inclusion, and growth. That coupled with their active involvement in the ERG reset, quickly humanized the reinvestment in people first and empowered ERG leaders and sponsors to advance the new focus on inclusion and culture. The DEI team received the support they needed to create incremental and sustainable change and was able to lean on a trusted partner for thought leadership and extra hands to get the work done with quality and speed.

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