29. Januar 2025

How to set DE&I goals: Moving from top-heavy to smart targets

While the temptation to make positive diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) headlines is undeniable, setting top-heavy DE&I goals (goals focusing on top management, C suite or the board) is not the most promising way to make sustainable progress – not by a long shot. Let us show you how you can set SMART DE&I goals that are unique to your company’s DE&I needs.

To communicate your commitment to gender equity, you might set a bold goal, such as: In three years, women will hold a third of all our top management positions.

This is not a smart way to achieve DE&I progress. It’s also not a SMART goal, that is, a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound, falling short at the very least in the specificity, achievability, and relevance department.

Let’s say your company – a financial services company – set itself the goal mentioned above – one third female top managers in three years. For this company, that’s like reaching for the stars with a ladder. Let’s do the math. The company has 40 top managers (managing directors and similar). Currently, you have 4 women and 36 men in these positions (this fictitious but sadly utterly realistic example of a financial services company). That’s 10% women. You’d need 13 women to get to 33%. In an average year, 3 top managers leave your company due to retirement, to take on a new challenge, or because they were let go. To get even close to your goal, you’d have to replace every single leaver with a woman, not a single female top manager could leave, and you’d still fall short of your goal by one woman (which for sure everybody would happily accept as a job well done).  

Let’s be real:  You won’t be able to make this happen, so your lofty DE&I goal is putting the cart before the horse. If you had done your succession planning to have qualified female talents to rise to top management within the next three years, would there be any need for a top-heavy DE&I goal in the first place? I think not.

Let’s say you want to train your focus on the C-suite instead. After all, Switzerland’s legal gender quotas (in force since 2021) posit that women and men have to make up at least 30% of members of boards of directors, and 20% of executive board members in Swiss listed companies of at least 250 employees. Executive board appointments (and especially board of director appointments) are notoriously political. Executive level politics are not a direct reflection of the inclusion culture and employee diversity but rather resemble a black box. There’s also the perilous glass cliff: A Journal of Management study confirms that women are more likely appointed to executive boards during times of crisis or into precarious leadership positions that are more likely to be vacant (think: Chief Risk Officer). This isn’t fair to the women, and it is also likely to make your gender equity efforts backfire: “Well, we appointed a woman and she couldn’t handle it. Better go back to the tried and trusted.”

None of this is sustainable and keeps up frustration for women and men, which can result in DE&I resistance. Top-heavy DE&I goals tend to focus on the end result without a plan how you can get there. At best, that’s a performative gesture. At worst, it’s bad PR, a huge waste of valuable resources and opportune ammunition for DE&I critics in your organization. (“See? There’s no point to this anyway.”) Top-heavy DE&I goals are neither smart nor SMART business. Here’s a more cumbersome and less splashy but more sustainable approach to DE&I goal setting:

Tip 1: Widen your focus to include all your employees

Our fictitious financial services company might have 40 top managers, but it also has 1201 employees working in non-management functions who are essential for the functioning of everyday business. It has 796 employees in junior management positions who represent the top leadership 5, 10, 15 years from now. Why not put a considerable share of your focus on the positions where the bulk of your employees do their work? In this case, achievability and impact is in numbers, and the math holds up.

Tip 2: Understand your own unique talent dynamics

When it comes to DE&I goals, one size does not fit all. Before setting goals, it’s essential to have a clear and accurate understanding of your organization’s current state regarding diversity and inclusion. There are no short-cuts here (though the CCDI’s consulting services can streamline the process for you). You need to gather and analyze data through methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, audits, or benchmarking. Trace your on-paper and lived processes to make HR decisions (hiring, promotions, remuneration, etc.) and identify where there is room for unconscious biases to affect decision-making. The data should encompass key aspects, including demographics, workplace culture, policies, practices, employee perceptions, and needs. You should also pinpoint gaps, address challenges, and uncover opportunities for improvement. (If you want to delve deeper into people analytics, read more about the topic here.) With our Diversity Works DE&I data platform  and customized analyses of the employee perspective, the CCDI can help you make sense out of your people dynamics.

Tip 3: Set realistic goals by knowing your industry peers

Depending on your industry, what goals are realistic can vary widely. For example, while pharmaceutical companies can draw from a larger talent pool of women, the talent pool looks vastly different from the perspective of a tech or finance company. To set realistic goals, you need to understand the DE&I dynamics of your industry. Using the HSG Diversity Benchmarking on Diversity Works, you can benchmark your DE&I performance against peers from your own industry to understand what DE&I goals you can realistically achieve.

Once you have this basis of deep understanding, you can engineer your DE&I goals from the bottom up:

• What do your (diverse) employees at the bottom rung of the career ladder need to be successful on their way to the top?
• Do all employee groups feel equally heard, supported, and included?
• Are promotions processes transparent and outcomes equitable?
• Are your employees able to reconcile work and other life spheres all along their different life stages without sacrificing opportunities?

DE&I goals should build on knowing the steps necessary to change the face of leadership in your company. This is necessarily a bottom-up process, starting at the base of the talent pipeline. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a vision for top-level diversity – but think of it as the result of all of your DE&I efforts and a culmination of reaching all your diversity goals along the way.

What might such goals look like in practice?

That depends on your organization! But you might see goals that include some of the following elements:

• In lowest management, the employment percentages of men and women between 31 and 40 years old differs by a maximum of 5 percentage points.
• The percentage of fathers taking parental leave is increased to xx%.
• At least 30% of participants in talent or leadership training programmes are over 45 years old.
• 50% of final candidates in succession planning processes are female.

In short:  Avoid top-heavy DE&I goals, tempting as they might be. DE&I goals that focus on the top-most echelons of your company aren’t smart goals, in part because they are outside the control of DE&I efforts. Even if it might seem less impressive, do the hard work of understanding your specific organization and its dynamics, set smart DE&I goals, and build your DE&I success from the bottom up.

🔎 Would you like to delve even deeper into the topic?

In our upcoming 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫 𝐚𝐦 27th Februar, we will use practical examples to show how companies can set and successfully implement SMART DE&I goals.

🎙 Work SMART: A Bottom-Up Approach to Setting Effective DE&I Goals
📅 February 27, 2025 | 12:15 - 1:00 pm
💻 Online | 🎙 In English
📌 Register now: Meeting-Registrierung - Zoom