Don't fall for the Zucker punch
Sometimes a moment arrives that reveals the true nature of an organisation, when the carefully crafted statements and policies fall away, and you see what really lies beneath. The current wave of corporate DEI rollbacks in the US feels like one of those moments.
In recent weeks, we've seen Amazon and Meta step back from their commitments. As Apple and Costco chose to stand firm against shareholder pressure Mark Zuckerberg's comments about the need for "masculine energy" in business emerged: a statement that felt like a CEO saying the quiet part out loud. Except that every public figure knows that what they say on the Joe Rogan podcast will be re-broadcast far and wide.
While European businesses may yet chart a different course in DEI rollbacks, I think the current conversation exposes some fundamental truths about corporate culture and the scope for DEI activities to influence it.
The first is the how the presence of the DEI labels can get in the way of actual change. In recent years, we've seen complex challenges bundled under the single banner of DEI. This has led to the term becoming a catch-all for a wide range of issues to overcome: from recruitment to progression, from culture to customer engagement and a sense that it is also handy tool for burnishing a company’s reputation.
This broad church of initiatives is part of its current undoing as the label has become a target and “extreme” examples are held up against an entire agenda of change. At the same time, the difficulty of making progress on such a diverse range of goals also helps fuel perceptions that DEI isn’t delivering.
The second truth is that success - or otherwise - is intrinsically linked to culture and leadership. There is only so much that can be done in isolation. For Meta and Amazon, the retreat from diversity commitments exposes the cultural mindset that really drives decisions: getting ahead through opportunism and political expediency; win at all costs. At McDonald's, past leadership behaviour and a current environment of harassment reveal the true cultural reality. Try fixing that as a head of DEI.
And this takes us to what’s critical here: we can’t afford to get drawn into an ideological debate about DEI itself. That's precisely the distraction that Zuckerberg and others are offering.
The fundamental challenge facing organisations isn't about DEI programmes and the associated culture wars, it's about unlocking your talent.
Here the argument is very simple. When unlocking your talent is done effectively, your organisation's leadership will naturally reflect the diversity of your available talent pool. At the start of 2025 this still is manifestly not the case.
This is not a DEI problem, it's a double failure of basic talent management and leadership’s ability to influence change.
Both within our organisations and externally, we must not only emphasise the importance of addressing and resolving this issue but also highlight the overwhelming evidence that failing to act now only compounds future risks for those who don't.
So as we hurtle into 2025, the real punch to dodge isn't Zuckerberg's masculine energy comment, it's the distraction from what actually matters: building systems and cultures that allow all talent to thrive.
