A professional services firm I worked with had quietly become a different company than the one it started as. Twenty-five years earlier its professionals were almost all white, male, and post-graduate trained. By the time I arrived, the staff was largely multiracial, female, and young, college-educated and ambitious. The talent in the building had changed completely. How the firm operated had not.
The board noticed and asked the CEO to do something about it. The CEO handed the assignment to his senior management team: build us a diversity, equity, and inclusion plan. The team was a dozen executives and department heads, most of whom had been with the firm fifteen years or more.
Almost immediately they split into three camps. One group was genuinely excited and wanted to build something ambitious. A second rolled its eyes, certain this was a recycled compliance exercise and another round of political correctness to work through. A third did not object but honestly could not see how any of it would help the firm do better work.
They met weekly for months. The three camps never moved. The conversations got tenser, then wearier, until the team did what exhausted committees do. They recommended a series of DEI training programs for the staff and called it done. Everyone left the room unsatisfied. The CEO reported to the board that the firm had launched a DEI initiative. The training rolled out over six months, and then it was forgotten. No policy changed. No practice changed. What did change was palpable and measurable in the worst way: more frustration among employees, lower productivity, and higher turnover among exactly the young, diverse talent the effort was supposed to engage.
Here is what went wrong, and it is not what you might think. The team did not fail because its members were biased, lazy or disinterested. It failed because it treated inclusion as a program to deliver rather than a practice to build. Training is a form. It is something you can schedule, attend, and check off. The substance, the actual work, was never on the table.
Real inclusion is not an event. It is integration, and it runs in two directions. There is vertical integration: making sure people at every level are engaged and own the work they are asked to perform for the firm. All employees, not just the senior or tenured ones, are genuinely part of how information moves through the organization and where decisions get made. And there is horizontal integration: making sure different people and different work groups are actually woven together, their perspectives are openly shared and engaged where the work happens. A firm whose talent has become diverse but whose decisions, structures, and daily habits still run the way they did twenty-five years ago has not substantively included anyone. It has diversified the roster while leaving the game plan unchanged.
That is what the management team missed. The young, multiracial, female professionals were not asking for a training session. They were the firm’s future capability, and they could see plainly that nothing about how the place actually operated had engaged or energized them. A workshop does not fix that. Integrating their judgment into how work gets assigned, how decisions get made, and how careers get built does.
So if your organization is wrestling with this, here is the question that cuts through it. Set the program aside for a moment and ask: in the last year, has the way we actually make decisions and do the work changed to reflect and tap the capabilities of the people who are now doing it? If the only thing that changed is that people attended a special learning event, you bought the form of inclusion and skipped the substance. The diverse talent you worked so hard to hire is still standing outside the room.
I think about that team sometimes, and about the talented young people who left in the year after the firm’s big initiative. They did not leave because the training was bad. They left because they had been told, in the most expensive and well-documented way possible, that the firm had looked hard at whether they truly belonged in determining how the work got done and decided the answer could wait. People feel that decision long before anyone says it out loud. And they do not wait around forever to be integrated into a place that has decided it can include them later.