Creating a Culture of Accountability: Strategies for DEI Success

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Jessica: Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection podcast. I’m Jessica and I’m joined again today by Anne, founder and president of Strategic Diversity Initiatives. Anne has over 25 years experience helping organizations advance their equity, diversity, and inclusion goals. She’s a trainer, she’s a teacher, and she’s delivered hundreds of workshops and classes for thousands of participants in corporate, government, higher education, nonprofit, healthcare, and faith community settings. Today we’ll be talking about building accountability and managing pushback, and Anne will be sharing a practice with us. Hi, Anne, how are you?

Dr. Anne Phibbs: Hi, Jessica. I’m great and I’m so excited to be with you again.

Jessica: We’re excited to have you again. These conversations have been awesome. Let’s start by learning more about building accountability and managing pushback. Accountability can be a challenging word for some people. They hear it and they think of shaming and blaming, and maybe even being disciplined or reprimanded for something. That’s actually what I think of first is this idea of being disciplined and reprimanded. Why do you think accountability is useful for DEI work?

Anne: That’s exactly what happens. People are like, “Oh, I don’t want to be held accountable.” I really do believe we have to take that piece away from it, the negativity, and see that really accountability is about learning and growing and changing our behavior fundamentally.

As someone who’s been in the diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, justice, access, all of the wonderful letters space for many, many, many years, both inside higher education, but also running my own company for the last seven and a half years, what I’ve come to understand is that it’s great to have statements. It’s great to have DEI committees. It’s great to have initiatives, but at the end of the day, if we don’t make sure that people are actively trying to change behavior to minimize, if not do away with microaggressions and harm and bias, we’re not actually changing– We have to change behavior.

We have to change individual personal behavior as well as organizational behavior. That’s about accountability. Let me say one more thing that explains why as part of my own evolution as a DEI practitioner, I’ve really come to see accountability as central to the work. My company does assessments. Somebody will say, “Hey, come in and we want to find out what people think. Do they feel listened to? Do they feel supported? Do they face microaggressions? Do they face bias?”

It is very, very common when we’re looking at the data from those assessments that we find out that people routinely say, “Well, we have a statement, we have this on our website, we have a committee, et cetera, but sometimes the people who cause the harm are not held accountable, particularly if they maybe have been there for a long time, if they are in leadership positions, if maybe they’re a really big moneymaker. Maybe they have great client contacts.” Fill in the blank.

We find reasons to say, “That’s just Kent. Everybody knows to avoid Kent.” We’ve heard those stories. “Just avoid him,” or something like that, instead of saying, “Wait a minute, I don’t care if Kent is a boss. I don’t care if Kent’s been there 20 years. I don’t care how much money he brings in. You’re not going to get employees to stay if bad behavior doesn’t get managed. Now, our idea is if there’s something bad, we think of cop shows and how there’s good and there’s bad.

No, we need a much more nuanced approach, which is that actually all of us are going to make mistakes. All of us are going to need to be held accountable. Even I, as a DEI practitioner, will make mistakes, will cause harm to others. How are people going to hold me accountable, and very importantly, what am I going to do when they do that?

Jessica: Why is it so hard for us to hold people accountable?

Anne: Part of it is we see it as connected to shame and blame, and we have to take that connection away. I was doing a training and this man– We were doing a scenario, and someone had something reframed for him in this scenario. This man raised his hand. He said, “Well, I wouldn’t do it publicly. I’d do it privately because I wouldn’t want him to feel ashamed.” I thought that was interesting.

First off, his most pressing concern is that this person doesn’t feel ashamed rather than thinking there was some harm done to someone else through this microaggression. That’s part of it we need to shift. I’m thinking about the last time I had spinach in my teeth from eating a salad and no one told me. At some point you walk out, you go in the restroom, and you’re like, “No one told me that there’s this big piece of spinach?” “Well, we don’t want you to feel ashamed.”

Yes, but I would rather have had the spinach removed. That’s minor. Really, most of us want to be respectful. Most of us want to feel like we are not harming our colleagues, our co-workers, our clients, our students, et cetera, but we might be doing it without knowing it. This is a big reframe. If I take you aside and say, “Hey, can I share something I just saw you do with a colleague?” That’s not shaming or blaming.

If I stay respectful and relational with you, that’s actually a gift. That is a big reframe because you have no opportunity to learn if I don’t take the time to say– My favorite thing is to model it and say, “Actually, Jessica, can I point out something you do that I used to do until someone pointed it out to me?” I don’t know about you, I’d be much more likely to hear that instead of like, “Sit down. I want to tell you how you’re wrong.” No, that’s not accountability. That’s not helpful.

Jessica: “Let me give you a lecture.”

Anne: Yes, exactly. “I’m so woke. I’m so great.” How about something like, I used to use the word lame and a lot of people still use it. Then I had some friends who are disability justice activists and advocates who told me that saying, “That’s so gay,” we don’t do that anymore. Why do we say, “That’s so lame?” Because lame is still about a disability. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know it until someone points it out.

What we have to do is shift this idea that accountability is about making someone feel bad, telling them they’re a bad person, reprimanding them, shaming them, and blaming them. Does that happen? Yes, but that’s not good accountability. Real accountability is, “Hey, I saw you do something that I don’t think mirrors the values of our organization or interpersonally goes against my value. I’m not saying I’m better than you, but I want to share something that I think might help you.”

What I like to also say is– Jessica, I’d love it if you share it with me, not if I do it, but when I do it, because we’re all going to do it. We’re all going to make mistakes. Jessica, when I do it, please come knock on my door, call me up, hop on a Zoom, and say, “Here’s what you did,” because we never learn if we don’t create that accountability space that is not about feeling badly.

Jessica: As hard as we work at being mindful of all the things we’re trying to learn and do better at sometimes we may be less mindful and we might need a person to help us see it and help us be mindful in that moment.

Anne: Can I just share a quick story? I was working with an amazing woman of color, working with a client, and we did this thing together with a group of people. I thought it went well. We’re having coffee and she says, “Hey, I want to share with you that when you did this one thing when we were working with the group, I felt undermined.” Let me tell you, I was not expecting it. I immediately felt, “Oh, my God.” I went to shame because I’m a white person and a DEI practitioner.

“Oh, my gosh, I’m the worst person in the world.” Brene Brown talks about this, that we often just go to shame. What I love that Brene Brown also says in a podcast that is on the handout that people have access to, in this podcast, she shares, “Look, just because I felt shame doesn’t mean my colleague was trying to shame me.” That’s a really important point. I’m the one who went to shame. She was just holding me accountable. She was respectful.

She didn’t say, “Anne, you’re a horrible person.” She said, “I want to share this.” I got over myself. That’s part of the emotional intelligence from the previous practicast. We need emotional intelligence to go, “Oh, Okay, I feel shame, but I got to move through it.” One of the things Brene Brown says is that we challenge the shame of accountability with action. If I said to my colleague, “Oh, my gosh, I feel so bad. I’m such a bad person,” and then she starts taking care of me, now I’ve recentered it on me.

The answer is, which is what I did, I said, “I’m really sorry. That’s not what I intended. That doesn’t really matter. What matters is how it impacted you. I am sorry it impacted you that way. I want to make amends,” and I said, “I won’t do that again.” Changed my behavior. Then I have to let it go. She doesn’t have to absolve me. She doesn’t have to forgive me. She gets to just say, “I want to share this with you.” Then I get to decide, “Okay, that actually was a gift. It really was a gift. It was a hard gift. It wasn’t a gift I wanted, but now I can be a different person.”

Every single one of us, this is the other piece, no one gets a pass because they have so many identities, they’ve written so many books, they’ve done so many trainings. I don’t get a pass. No one does. We need to be prepared for it.

Jessica: The next few times you see that person, no matter how they approached it, whether they approached it with that grace of the examples that you just described or not, you’re probably going to feel a shadow of that embarrassment the next few times. I just want to share that because clearly that’s happened to me. You’re going to feel that for a little bit, but the more interactions you continue to have– I wouldn’t avoid seeing that person and talking with that person because they held you accountable about something because the more interactions you have, your trust between the two of you will deepen and you have to move through that initial few interactions where you’re still going to feel a little embarrassed.

Anne: I love that, Jessica. A great point because we like to think, it’s so foolish, but we do it, “I’m going to go into this interaction and be perfect.” Then we’re like, “Oh no, I wasn’t perfect.” Instead of going, “Okay, I’m going to do my best and I’m going to manage whatever comes up. The other piece that you mentioned that I do really want to share that’s important is, in my example I just shared, my colleague wasn’t particularly harsh at all, was very respectful. That might not happen.

Somebody might hold you accountable in a way that you don’t like. Then it’s very tempting to critique the way it was delivered. That’s another way that we miss the forest through the trees. We miss the message, which is, “Okay, that might not have been how I wish it was delivered, but that’s not the most important thing is how it was delivered. What’s important is what was the message I need to take.”

Jessica: What can you appreciate from the message and what can you learn from the message and just move forward from there?

Anne: Yes. How can I change my behavior? That’s what accountability is all about, Jessica, is changing our behavior because we are very good– Most people who have marginalized identities, who live with oppression, whether it’s people of color, native people, queer folks, people with disabilities, women, et cetera, most of them are pretty used to people saying things and then not delivering. That’s the history of our racial equity efforts.

It’s the history of our efforts around ending sexism, and ableism, and homophobia, bi-transphobia. What they’re looking for is not the perfect thing on your website. That’s important, but the phrase is not the most important thing. The coming through with actions and when someone doesn’t follow through, they’re not acting out of the values of inclusion and equity, they need to be held accountable.

Jessica: Of course, things are very complex within organizations. Actually, let’s talk about that because I’ve been in some situations where it didn’t matter what stories you shared or what evidence even you shared with leadership. Nothing was happening to the person who was doing the behavior. How can we build accountability into our organizations without turning everyone into an arm of HR or some little tattletale, which I know everyone hates?

Anne: Yes. I’ve met that person who in every meeting brings something up to the point where now they’re not listened to anymore. A couple of things. In the name of my company is the word strategic. I like to think about, “Yes, but what’s a strategic approach?” Let’s just say I’m moving into working on a team or maybe it’s my department and we’ve had some challenges with staff meetings. One thing you can do is say, “I know there are some organizations that have working agreements.”

The best time to do this is before there’s conflict, before there’s a problem, and say, “Can we come up with a set of working agreements?” “Why should we do that?” Your boss says, “Well, just because should something happen– hopefully, it won’t, but should something happen, we can go back to these.” That’s one thing you can do to hold people accountable is to say, “Remember, we talked about not interrupting. I’ve noticed that Anne keeps interrupting. Anne, pay attention to the working agreements.”

That’s one thing is to set some boundaries and parameters before there’s conflict, before there’s challenging behavior. The other thing is to recognize that you won’t be able to affect change in every way. If I have a direct supervisor who continues to cause harm, I’m not going to be the person to say, “Well, just hold them accountable.” You could lose your job. That gets tricky. That’s another thing to think about.

Let’s say you’re part of a DEI committee, one thing you can think about is what might be a strategy within your company or your organization for feedback to be given anonymously. Is that an option? Let’s say someone is facing sexual harassment or they’re facing some particularly egregious behavior, just the same bad behavior, inequitable, hurtful, harmful behavior, do they have to march into HR and everyone knows who they are or can there be–

There’s challenges with anonymous reporting, but at the same time thinking about what are some of the ways that some– Doing a little research. What are some of the ways that organizations are able to create mechanisms for, again, setting up the parameters at the start of a meeting with shared agreements, allowing for anonymous feedback? Things like climate surveys or engagement surveys can be ways that you can get a feel of how things are going. Then if you do something like that, make sure you share it with everyone, share back the results, and then take it to leadership and say, “Look, here are some areas.”

I’ve had leaders, they get the assessment data back that we do, and they say, “Oh, I had no idea there were some of this stuff going on.” A part of it is, yes, they’re in the rarefied air. Nobody’s doing a lot of microaggressions to the senior leaders because the senior leaders have power. Finding a way to get the voice of the people who might be facing things, and that can be a formal assessment, it can be focus groups, it can be employee resource groups, ERGs, training, all sorts of things like that are ways that we can build that in. Part of the problem with doing that is we have this idea that we only do it if we’re a bad organization.

We need to say, “No, no, no, every organization is going to have challenging behavior because it’s what it means to be human, because of implicit bias, because we know everyone has these stereotypes.” You can be a wonderful organization and especially do amazing work in the community or nationally or internationally, you’re still going to have this. To build in some communication, this is important too around holding organizations and people accountable, communicate about it.

Communicate and say, “We’re not doing this–” whether it’s an assessment or whether it’s starting a DEI committee or starting training, “We’re not doing this because everyone’s messing up. We’re doing it because we’re human, and we know we can all do a little bit better or a lot better in some cases.”

Jessica: You and I have talked about pushback. What does that mean in terms of DEI? What are some examples of pushback at both the personal and the organizational level?

Anne: We have seen an increase in it. DEI as a thing has been targeted more recently, and there’s been lies spread about it, that it’s about brainwashing, that it’s about making everyone think the same thing or believe the same thing, which it is not. It’s about saying when we’re in a intentional community, which is basically what a workplace is, a classroom is, an organization is, it’s an intentional community, we’re going to have rules that we all agree to live by.

Now, you may never want to hang out with anyone like Anne Phibbs who happens to be a lesbian in your personal life, and you have a right to do that. I think you’re missing out, but hey, it’s not my business. Once you come into the workplace, you don’t get to say, “I don’t want to work with this type of person,” or “I can’t have a supervisor who is this kind of person.” We need to find ways to have those values. We’re talking about it more. That’s the good part.

What it also means, since we’re talking about it more, is that for some people, it’s like, “I’ve worked here 20 years, I have perfect reviews, everybody loves my work. Now you’re telling me I have to talk about race, and I’m white, or now I have to think about gender pronouns and I don’t even understand that.” I had someone say this to me in a training, “Why isn’t being respectful enough?” I said, “Yes, it actually isn’t. It’s a basis. It’s a good foundation, but it’s not enough, because we need to understand these very specific ways that some people face bias and harm in the workplace.

Jessica: What’s respectful to you is probably different than what feels respectful to other people. I think that’s an important thing to remember.

Anne: Yes, absolutely, Jessica. The golden rule is do unto others as you would do unto yourself, but the platinum rule is, do unto others as they want done to them.

Jessica: You’ve got to spend some time finding out.

Anne: What’s important to them? What matters? Exactly. That’s one kind of pushback. Another kind is to see this as something that is now flipping and targeting the people who had more, say, privilege or unearned access. Suddenly now, and I’ve had people say this to me, I’m not worried about people of color or women of color, or white women, I’m worried about white men. Now, white men aren’t going to be able to get jobs, they’re not going to get promotions because everybody just wants to put diverse people into jobs. It’s not accurate.

It’s a very strong stereotype that there’s a quota system. I never support quotas, I never advocate for quotas, and most organizations don’t. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to have a more diverse workforce because still, the majority of organizations, whether it’s higher ed, whether it’s corporate or nonprofits, still have a lot of white people in senior leadership. roles. We want to diversify that, but we don’t want to hire anyone who’s not qualified, of course.

The perception is that now, everything’s about this diversity, and for example, if I’m white, I’ll never move ahead. That’s a pushback. We have to think about how do we counter that idea and say, “No. No diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are ever about putting anyone on the bottom. It’s not about flipping things. It’s about equity. We still want every person to apply for every job that they would like to get.

It might be though that 25 years ago, when you were a white man and you applied for a leadership position, they wouldn’t ask you about diversity. They wouldn’t ask you about equity and belonging and how you were going to develop that on your team. You just assumed if you were qualified, you’d get the job. I’ll never forget a Black colleague who said, “Anne, a lot of Black people I know, we never assumed we would get the job.” That’s a shift.

Suddenly it’s like, “Wait a minute, I have to think about my gender identity. I have to think about my racial identity when I never had to before.” Another way that we’re seeing pushback is the idea that it’s these specialized things people like Anne do, but hey, it’s not in my job description. How can we reframe that as, “Well, no, you don’t have to have all the experience a DEI consultant does, or maybe you have someone in your organization who that’s in their job description,” but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to care about inclusion and belonging and equity and minimizing microaggressions and minimizing bias in your hiring practices and things like that.

It’s really about how you do your job. That’s the reframe we want for that particular pushback. I want to share one more. These ones I’ve mentioned of pushback are also in the handout. The other pushback, it comes a little bit from the other side. There’s the one side of like, “Why do I have to do this?” The other side is, “Oh, this isn’t going to make any real change. It’s all performative.” That’s hard because sometimes it is. Not just performative, but things are never going to move as quickly as they should.

When you’re talking about changing systems, it is slow work. You might have someone who’s like, “Oh, they have a committee or they have a statement, but nothing’s really going to change.” I often share that what you can do in that situation is say, “Well, look, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I’m not involved in the committee. I’m not going to this training. I’m not doing this just to look good, I’m doing it because I really want to affect change at this company, at this organization for myself.”

“It’s slow and I realized not everyone’s on board, but I’m doing it because I want to be inclusive. I’m doing it because I care about my colleagues who are different from me.” I think in that respect, we can push on that idea that it’s all just for show. We can’t guarantee that someone’s not doing it for show, but you can tell someone, “I’m not.” I think that’s a good way. One of the things I share with the people I work with is expect the pushback so that it doesn’t throw you. Don’t give into it.

Just because someone pushes back doesn’t mean they can’t learn, they can’t be prepared for it, but don’t let it throw you like, “Oh my gosh, I never thought anyone would not like this initiative.” Actually, I think you should be prepared for that, but also pay attention to all the allies, all the people who do want your workplace, your school, your football team, your fill-in-the-blank to be more inclusive.

Jessica: Is there more pushback for DEI now?

Anne: There is actually. People in some ways mark 2020 Memorial Day, the horrible murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that started what some refer to as a racial reckoning. The New York Times said likely the summer of 2020, more protests, a larger movement than we’ve seen in any other time in US history. We’ve lived through that. It was down the street from me where I live in Minneapolis. The whole thing, very real. Although as a white person, still I have tremendous privilege to not impact me in the same way of all the people living in this country who are Black, African-American.

In many ways, what we saw in 2020 was coming out of that racial reckoning, if you will, a lot of movement toward racial justice, anti-racist action, people wanting to start committees or do training. It’s been really interesting to see what’s happened in those four years. Not only the rollback, the, “Suddenly we don’t have the position anymore,” but also actually targeting. There have been some people really targeting companies with DEI initiatives.

Some has been around race. A lot has been around LGBTQ issues. We’ve seen more anti-LGBTQ legislation, both past, but also just brought forward in 2023 and 2024 than in the last 20 years. Even the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest LGBTQIA plus rights organization in the country came out and said, for the first time that I remember, our community is literally under attack, a rise in hate crimes. There has been this pushback. At the same time, there still continues to be tremendous support.

One of the things that gives me a lot of hope is that all the research, whether it’s from Pew or Gallup or a lot of these organizations, show that younger generations, millennials, Gen Z, the folks coming into the workplace now, twice as likely to talk about mental health, much more likely to be LGBTQIA identified or allies, much more likely to care deeply that their organizations have a focus on DEI. That gives me a lot of hope. Anybody caring about this needs to be prepared that there is pushback, but there’s also a tremendous amount of things to feel hopeful and positive about.

Jessica: Let’s get into the practice you brought. What can we do to challenge pushback on our DEI efforts?

Anne: I want to share something that is not mine because good trainers always steal things. We just have to attribute it. This is Catherine Mattis and she works with Civility Partners. Now she does a lot of work particularly around bullying and incivility and I highly recommend looking at her work. I think that her work around this is very much related also to diversity, equity, and inclusion. What I love that she talks about is we have to shift from this idea of a bystander to a reinforcer.

When I train about this, I say, imagine you come home from work and you talk to whoever is there that you talk to after work and they say, “How was your day?” You say, “It was challenging. I was a bystander to some racism.” They would probably say, “Oh, that sounds challenging.” Now let’s change the word. “How was work?” “Oh, I reinforced racism.” Hopefully, they’d be like, “Wait a minute. There’s much more agency, there’s much more responsibility and accountability if you will, in being a reinforcer.

Most of us do not want to be reinforcing bias and ableism and sexism. Here’s the thing that she says, when you don’t say anything, that’s exactly what you’re doing. We want to believe there’s this neutral space where I can be a bystander. “Oh, someone told a racist joke, but I didn’t laugh, or someone was a bully and I didn’t say anything.” She’s pushing us to say, “No, you need to see that you’re actually reinforcing it.”

Now, I don’t think we’re going to be able to speak up in every situation, but we certainly can speak up more than we do. When we shift that, we can start to say, “Was there anything I didn’t do today that I could do?” I say that silence is often seen as agreement. When we don’t say anything, people often mistakenly assume we agree with them. That’s the other thing is, we think people can read our minds, they can’t. We need to be overt and open about how we think about things and what we believe.

Consider how you can pay attention just to the ways you reinforce bias and harmful behavior, not because you want to, but just by not showing up, if that makes sense., and the ways you actively work against bias and harmful behavior. Here’s a practice. You could just ask yourself at the end of the day or on a Friday or whenever, “Did I witness any behavior that was disrespectful, biased, and/or harmful? If so, did I do anything about that behavior? If I did something, how do I feel about what I did? If I didn’t do something, why didn’t I? What kept me from acting? What could I do differently the next time?”

I’ll end with a story of a white woman who said she went into Nordstrom’s up to the makeup counter. Now, I know nobody sees you in a podcast, but I will just share it. You’re never going to find me at a makeup counter. That’s not my jam. I do understand that typically when you’re at a makeup counter, people are helping you out. She said, a white woman comes up to her, cannot be more helpful. “Oh, what do you want to look at.”

She said, “Anne, I’m standing there–” We don’t see race in that story, but it’s in that story because up comes a Black woman and also stands there at the Nordstrom makeup counter. The first thing that the woman behind the counter says to the Black woman is, “Are you going to buy anything?” In this moment, this white woman who was telling me the story has this stark contrast of like, “Wow, look at this racial difference and how we are treated.”

What she said to me is, “I, to this day, regret that I didn’t say anything.” What I said to her was, “Yes, that is unfortunate you didn’t say anything, but it’s really good you noticed it because that’s the first step.” I’m sure there are all sorts of those kinds of interactions that people, particularly white people, are not noticing. The ways that they have access that people of color, and Native people don’t. That’s the first step is to just start to notice and then to start to say, “Okay, I wish I had said something, but now I’m going to think about if that happens again, what would I say?”

You could be really direct and some people are, “Why did you speak with her that way?” or you could just turn to that woman and say, “Yes, I don’t know if I’m going to buy anything, but isn’t it fun just to look?” or just some way to connect with a Black woman. There’s no one right answer, but the wrong answer is to let that go. There’s no opportunity then for the white woman behind the counter to recognize that her behavior was biased and racist and hurtful. That’s really what we want.

Building in a reflection, noticing things is the first step. Then starting to say, “If I didn’t do what I could have done, what would it have looked like? How can I find my voice?” I think in the next Practicast that we’re going to do, we’re going to talk a little bit more about finding our voice to be able to show up as allies.

Jessica: I’m excited about that. Instead of beating yourself up for days, weeks, months, and years, do this reflective practice. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. That is it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’ll be back next week with a discussion on practices for finding your voice as an ally. Until then, keep practicing.

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Kalin Goble: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2023-48770-41333.

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