While all employees participate in annual diversity, equity and inclusion compliance training, immersive DE&I training has historically been available only to executives and high potential leaders. To help facilitate the transition from HR-led to employee-owned DE&I, we wanted to expose the next level of leaders to DE&I concepts on a large scale. Buy-in and support from middle-managers and employees is critical to continued success of DE&I. Our ERG leaders are also DE&I change agents and had not yet received training on how to be inclusive leaders.

We hosted a three-day conference to build DE&I leadership, employee awareness and accountability by providing relevant content to cultivate inclusion skills, competencies and behaviors of leaders and the next generation of talent globally. The goal of the conference was to drive DE&I ownership down and into the organization by furthering our DE&I strategic pillars: infrastructure, communications and marketing, diversity representation and talent, conscious inclusion and equity. Because mid-level buy-in is critical to continued success of DE&I, we invited over 300 high-potential leaders and mid-level employees, as well as our ERG leaders.

Sessions were designed to provide human-centered content beginning with the business case for connecting DE&I strategy to everyday business, examples of successful inclusive leadership (“lead by example”) and activities that helped participants build their understanding of why/how leaders prioritize an inclusive workplace. Speakers were a mix of internal executives and external experts, starting with the CEO providing a high-level overview, leaders sharing personal stories about how they demonstrate inclusive leadership and a facilitated workshop diving deep into how inclusion benefits everyone. All attendees also participated in a four-hour training on Deloitte’s Six Signature Traits of Inclusive Leadership and learned about systemic issues impacting DE&I.