Putting the Cart Before the Horse Will not Lead to Meaningful Diversity in Government Relations — Especially Under a Biden Administration

From the beginning of time, we learned to crawl before we walked. In more modern times, we learned our ABC’s before we learned sentence structure. Well, today it seems as though we are trying to achieve diversity before we come to terms with why a lack of diversity exists in the first place — our exclusive organizational government relations cultures.

There has never been a more obvious need for the government relations field to diversify their teams than the present, and yet we continue to want to put the cart before the horse. With an incoming administration determined to build a team that “looks like America” and an increasingly diverse Congress, government relations must stop dragging its feet and put first things first by creating a culture and climate where racially diverse candidates want to exist.

The reality is the field is way behind in terms of acknowledging the need for diversity, let alone taking active steps to remedy it. According to a recent joint-survey from Women in Government Relations and Bloomberg Government, less than fifty percent (47%) of respondents believe their organizations are doing enough on diversity and inclusion (D&I). When looking across race and ethnicity, the disparities in perceptions are glaring — forty-six percent of people of color do not believe their organizations are doing enough on diversity and inclusion, while twenty-five percent of those who identified as White do not believe their organizations are doing enough on D&I. That’s a more than twenty-percent gap in perception, which is no surprise given the literature that points to barriers of inclusion being invisible to those already succeeding in an organization.

These gaps in perception are creating dissonance in our field and muddying the messaging. Part of that messaging leads to the misconception that the answer to the diversity challenge is to simply locate and hire candidates of color. Folks, that is a bass-ackwards approach to diversity.

As the sole Black woman on a government relations team working to advance educational equity on behalf of our nation’s students, the struggle to adapt to a homogenous and monolithic culture was profound. My story is not unique.

Retention rates among people of color who do not feel included within organizations are low. One study reveals more than one-third of Black professionals intend to leave their companies within two years due to prejudices and microaggressions that go unchecked.

Instead of focusing on the explicit act of hiring people of color, organizations must first gauge their readiness to have them on staff — assess where you are on The Path. The quick fix — hiring racially diverse candidates — can actually create or exacerbate tensions within your organization and make it impossible for staff of color to thrive and remain on staff.

Many organizations are “exclusive” or “passive clubs” where the internal culture, policies, and practices are exclusionary and unwelcoming to diverse groups. This must be addressed before your diverse recruitment efforts take shape.

According to organizational development and inclusion experts: “For an exclusive club, a recruitment program to increase diversity does not make sense; a first step would be to start creating a work environment in which anyone who is different from the founders (in style, approach, and look) can function and succeed.”

If your organization is serious about moving from an exclusive club to an inclusive organization it must first determine its value proposition. Why is diversity important to you and what steps are you willing to take to move the needle?

With a new Congress and administration focused on diversity, and an increasingly diverse populace, the viability of our organizations and government relations as a whole is contingent upon us making this shift — horse, then cart.