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Sharing forward-thinking ideas that help firms advance equitable opportunity and support business results is a crucial mission of the Diversity Project North America. It’s also the impetus behind the Diversity Project’s Next Practices Committee.

The Next Practices Committee regularly seeks input from its member firms, as well as from external experts with different perspectives.

To share her own unique insights and strategies, guest speaker Ayeshah Johnson, Workplace Strategist Specializing in Diversity & Inclusion, was recently invited to lead a Next Practices round table with committee members focused on developing, monitoring, and maintaining DEI practices.

During the roundtable, Johnson, who serves as Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the law firm Goulston & Storrs, identified overlaps between DEI in the legal and asset management industries, highlighted areas for improvement, and pointed to opportunities for expansion.

Understand the Importance of Metrics and Standards

“Your industry is developing a common language around DEI that helps pull everyone together — and that’s definitely something happening in the legal industry as well,” Johnson said. “You have to have a common understanding to cement yourselves around the idea of advancing D&I.”

Avoid proceeding with little to no data and relying on anecdotes, Johnson said. Instead, she recommends building a common language by collecting information from surveys, such as Nicsa’s Annual DEI Perception Study, and using results to identify metrics and standards.

One standard her law firm employs is the Mansfield Rule, a program designated for law firms that measures whether the firm is offering traditionally underrepresented groups career-boosting opportunities (such as leadership roles). The beauty of the Mansfield rule, she said, is that new iterations are continually designed to build momentum.

The Mansfield 4.0 Certified Plus 2021 designation from Diversity Lab indicates that a firm met or surpassed the consideration requirements for certification and reached a 30 percent diverse representation threshold. Johnson said that while the Mansfield Role was created for the legal sector, the asset management industry has an opportunity to implement similar standards and certifications that would “set the tone for what people can expect when they're working with your organization.”

Johnson cautioned against becoming overconfident when developing an organizational DEI framework.

“Keeping a critical eye on the results of your processes and results — even on how meetings are managed and facilitated — is really important,” she said. “If you take your eye off of the ball, there’s often a certain dissonance between what people are told will happen and what is actually happening. Keeping a critical eye can help to alleviate some of that dissonance.”

In addition, she said leaders should continually analyze the DEI data they collect and listen carefully to what underrepresented groups share. “Failure to do so will will lead to certain voices being excluded — even though they were asked for their input.”

Combat the Slow Start

Another common stumbling block Johnson has observed with DEI initiatives is a lack of focus and consistency. This leads to a situation where organizations recognize the need for change but make slow progress.

“There’s a tendency to start and restart,” she said. “If you're identifying core areas you want to work on, stick with them, and keep building momentum,” she said.

While structure is vital in developing a DEI framework, asset managers must allow for flexibility and creativity within traditional business structures for their efforts to succeed. Failure to do so can slow or even stall gains in diversity.

“Another thing that I’ve seen that frustrates D&I efforts is choosing structure over D&I,” Johnson said. “D&I will often run up against process and structure when what we need in the space is creativity, innovation, and taking what we know from our surveys, taking the information that we've already gathered, and putting it to good use,” Johnson said.

Squeezing DEI concepts into existing structures — a “Band-Aid approach” — rarely works. Often, firms must deconstruct and reimagine systems. To streamline the process, Johnson suggested setting a firm expectation that DEI initiatives and structural change go hand in hand.

“There will be some movement; there will be reimagining structural needs to make room for what’s important in the D&I space,” she said.

Leaders who are unaware or unengaged with DEI initiatives also create points of failure.

“I’ve seen the effort to infuse D&I into every aspect of the business work well,” Johnson said. “That also means there has to be some expectation that leaders, particularly middle management, engage with D&I in different ways.”

Hone Your Decision-Making Skills

Johnson said that part of creating workplace change is considering how you arrive at decisions — especially when those decisions impact an underrepresented employee’s career development and trajectory. At Goulston & Storrs, Johnson developed a decision-making process she calls The Pause.

“The quickest decision is often the easiest to make,” she said. “The point is to pause the decision-making process before decisions are made so that everyone's on the same page. Decisions can become routine after a while. Thinking broadly about where you want to go before you start on the journey can tether the operation of unconscious bias.”

Johnson said that it’s important to identify different types of bias and allow space for those biases to be interrupted. For example, she said, it’s important to make sure the voices of marginalized people are not drowned out, even when we are making what feels like real strides toward progress. For example, “when we’re thinking about how hiring impacts women, we’re not thinking how hiring impacts Asian women, how it impacts white women, how it impacts LGBTQ women. When we say ‘women,’ who are we really talking about? We have to dig deeper into thinking about the challenges all women face.”

For more information about Nicsa and its Diversity Project North America initiative, please visit nicsa.org. 


Note: Observations contained in this work represent the best thoughts of the individuals comprising committees and/or speaking panels; they do not necessarily reflect the views of Nicsa or any of its member organizations. Nothing herein is intended to be or should be construed as legal advice. You should contact your own counsel in order to obtain legal advice regarding these or any other matters. 

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