• Diversity and inclusion is relevant to all of us and the responsibility of all of us - it includes all of us. It is not about apportioning blame. 

• Ask yourselves, is everyone in the room or just your tribe?

• Find ways to include yourself in the worlds of others don’t think it’s all about including them in your world. 

• Come at Diversity and Inclusion with humility and love and have a go - it’s a learning process.

• Start by having honest conversations among yourselves and spread the load. If you’re not in power find accomplices, reach out and ask advice. If you are in power and don’t know how to share it then do some research and reading to understand the experiences of others.

• Once you have some power you become a gatekeeper you can either push the gate further open and let different people in or you only let people in who are just like you.

• People have to see themselves represented before they want to come in, which is where quotas can come in. You have to decide you’re going to change the diversity of your workplace and promote people but provide mentoring and coaching around that promotion and have a dialogue with those people so they know they are being promoted for the right reasons.

• A diverse workforce can bring people into the business with vastly different life experience and vastly different life skills that are valuable: skills are not just about doing the accounts or marketing.

• When you make the effort to include people the impact on employee culture is significant because you’re showing that we care, we are imaginative about that care and that people don’t have to all be the same.

• You need mentoring and support structures around the people you bring in and promote because all cultures have unconscious biases - we can’t not have in the society we’ve been brought up in.

• Convince people by: telling them it’s the right thing to do for business and for ethical reasons; by showing that we have to keep up with societal norms which are changing; and by appealing to the diversity in individuals' lives outside work.

• All our identities are constructed in relationship to other things around us so when things change it can be a shock which is why people are scared of change. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs!

• Collecting data is difficult but if you need to be able to measure the results of the policies you’ve implemented. But be sensitive and don’t just measure ask for advice on how to change things, make it a two-way process.

• You have to keep gong until you have a critical mass and you stop thinking of people as different - if you can’t see it you can’t model it.

• You can’t do it because you ought to do it you have to do it because that’s the world you want to live in.

​

Some useful reading that was mentioned:

​

The Guardian - Everyday Racism and A Search for Identity  

The Telegraph - Timpsons has key to giving ex-convicts second chance 

The Guardian - Second careers and the third age: you're only as old as your new job

​

SPEAKER INFO

​

Jude Kelly is part of SpeakersHub and one of our most sought after speakers on Diversity & Inclusion and Leadership. To view her full biography, find links to her showreel and to book her to speak at your own event please click here.