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

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Using their signature decisive and direct voice, Lily Zheng delivers an accountability-centered and immediately actionable road map to building a more equitable and inclusive modern workplace. And then leaders in positions of power try to recalibrate and regain equilibrium with as little action as possible. Not everyone will agree, and what some see as failure (such as activism) others see differently as another step on the journey, etc. By failing to differentiate clearly and instead effectively saying, "my way is better," Lily does a gross injustice to those who have helped pave the road for them. Lily Zheng's insights on the various roles that changemakers take on, combined with their deep analysis of the history of the field, will make DEI Deconstructed a critical desk reference for all of us seeking to build the better world we imagine.

And I think you can look at the companies that took action in 2020 and almost directly tie back that action to the efficacy of the Black employee resource group or the DEI council or whatever Black employees were advocating for at the time. If you don't have an expert, you need to bring in a third party advisor or make sure that their name comes up for consideration before that group's been established. I really care about ensuring that the things that people want to do result in actual change and actual impact in the long haul.

Whether a DEI aficionado or a well-meaning corporate leader hoping to find the right way to bring about “sticky” change, I recommend this. The book provides practical guidance for leaders to navigate the complexities of DEI work, ensuring that every person can thrive in an equitable and inclusive workplace. Activism gives reformers like Lily a chance to talk to people in a softer and more friendly manner about how we all can be better. Lily shows readers that these days are not that far in our rear view mirror and, perhaps, vestiges still haunt our present day thinking.

Jennifer is an award-winning entrepreneur, dynamic speaker, bestselling author, and leadership expert on how organizations must evolve their cultures towards a new, more inclusive workplace reality. I think the chapter I wanted more elaboration on was the one on identity because I think there's more to tease out about the relationship between power and identity that I didn't feel like was addressed fully.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. Lily is a thought-leading voice on LinkedIn and I was hoping they would have more intriguing and creative ideas on how best to push for and reward DEI initiatives.

In medium-trust environments, there are two core tensions, “the tension between legitimacy and power and the tension between stakeholder patience and intervention effectiveness. I hate to say it, years ago there were a few students who were like, "We're actually going to join this committee to push for changing this thing. And you find with these folks, these true beginners, that it's actually a breath of fresh air because they have no patience for your buzzwords.Before starting any EDI work, Zheng lays out how you must determine whether you are a low, medium, or high trust organization. The book emphasizes creating a culture that frames feedback as constructive and implementing training to normalize it.

It's less and less for people to say people of these genders just have to be, or by nature are better or deserve better outcomes or more successful than other genders. So a very simple theory of change for that might be you start from a state of no one thinking that there's any challenge, no one thinking that there's a problem, maybe a few employees being pissed off, but they're not loud enough. And oftentimes when I speak with leaders who are skeptical, they're actually pretty aware of what type of person does DEI, right? Moving forward, Lily could do a better job not simply acknowledging their positionality but understanding how it has informed their views and work.You could say, "Okay, let's try to start a movement with these employees that raises the visibility of the challenge of the inequity with the goal of that movement being to make more people understand how that policy's broken. Then you need to think about, okay, if you want to change the policy in a certain direction, you want to make sure that folks who are experts in whatever, you want to change the policy to make it into that process.