Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right

Product Information

I lead a BRG system at a large bank and I spoke about this book so often, that the entire DEI office has decided to read it together. I know you and I have been in the work for a really long time, but particularly sounding like a broken record, I do worry about that.

So I wondered how was it to know so many things about this topic and have been swimming in these waters for so long and yet sort of simplifying it for the beginning learner and writing to that audience. I also saw it as a very strong approach to change leadership in general and will be using it in my PD going forward. But organizations are lagging behind that because in organizations, power distance has been something that we've accepted for a long time. I hate to say people eat it up because they're like, "Yeah, I don't know what any of those words mean.But I think the approach that I've tried to take is to deconstruct DEI, if you will, to turn it less into a unified body of you have to be all in or you're not one of us to regardless of how you feel about the industry, there are practices that achieve certain things. This book will be something I refer back to and use to evaluate other DEI books, initiatives and trainings. Then it delves into the DEI initiatives at organizational level, which were more nuanced and detailed. LILY ZHENG (they/them) is a no-nonsense Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategist, consultant, speaker and author who helps organizations and leaders achieve the DEI outcomes they aspire to.

By the way they happen every couple of months at this point in our world, unless we use that momentum, it'll just keep going like this. There is very little discussion of a lot of buzzwords associated with DEI, and as such the book truly boils down a lot of topics into interpersonal dynamics. The book emphasizes creating a culture that frames feedback as constructive and implementing training to normalize it. We also need: white people, men, cis-gender people, straight people, non-disabled people, neurotypical people, Christian people, and more to make sure that the world we design together doesn’t just put new people in charge of broken systems but truly designs something better for everyone.They showcase how DEI work cannot simply center around inviting a guest speaker once in a while or developing an employee resource group that only has volunteer advisory power. LILY ZHENG: Oftentimes when I speak with leaders who are skeptical, they're actually pretty aware of what type of person does DEI. A common recommendation is for recruiters to note the demographic representation their organization lacks and look for identity-based communities with that representation. And it was important for you to make sure it met the learner wherever the learner is, where they're at. The book advocates for sharing not only successes but also failures and lessons learned, building trust through transparency.

This book is a must have for anyone who wishes to understand, create, and implement DEI initiatives in their workplaces and lives. And that's already more detail than most movements have been able to tackle because they focus on the first thing and then they stop. We're talking about de-biasing an organization and different processes and policies, which by the way is not glamorous work at all, but it doesn't need to be framed in the way that it's been framed.Action-oriented, results-driven, and outcomes-based, Lily Zheng's no-nonsense approach transforms DEI into a tangible and accessible process to galvanize your entire workforce as DEI stakeholders. Throughout that book the idea that it should be foundational is behind all ideas of how to effectively make change, how to maintain those changes, how to reevaluate and how to do all these things while maintianing the trust of your members so as not to come across as performative or dismissive.

And so, I don't know, I think if we want to live in a world that's better, we need to believe that the world can be better. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Zheng takes a systemic approach in understanding an organization’s structure (centralization and formalization of decision making, and complexity of organization), culture (how distanced are those in formal power from the front line workers, how unified and interdependent do people in the organization feel, and how much do they try to avoid uncertainty and failure), and strategy (the choices that people with power make). And then following that, you can then have people say, "Okay, now we want to make this policy succeed. Our job isn’t to educate DEI naysayers, it’s to push them out (IF a firm is truly sincere in its DEI efforts).

I personally loved the structure, the summary of takeaways after each chapter, and the chain of thoughts. Achieving any of these requires a strategy that dismantles historical inequities and meets people’s unique needs. DEI is a complicated concept, and organizations have (or haven't, depending) grappled with the struggle of how to integrate and use DEI in their work, strategies, products, etc. And I've often thought if we could not even use the words DEI in anything and speak about it completely separately from that, that we would get more traction, that we would get a more productive conversation with people. All I care about is that they do their jobs, eliminate inequities, and make things right within the environments they hold responsibility for.