On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Lara McLeod, Head of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Axon. Lara came into JEDI work from an unusual route. Her early career was in political journalism and UX writing, then she pivoted into workplace culture roles at Microsoft, Zillow, and now Axon. That writer's eye shows up in how she frames the work: precise language, a bias toward action, and an aversion to performative statements.
Lara argued that the corporate justice movement after 2020 produced a wave of public commitments that mostly outran the operational work needed to back them up. The companies that got real traction were the ones that treated JEDI as an operating model question rather than a marketing question. She also pushed on the term itself, walking through why adding justice to the diversity, equity, and inclusion shorthand reframes the conversation away from representation alone and toward how power and decision-making get distributed inside an organization.
That conversation matters because most HR leaders are now in the second or third year of programs that started with momentum and are now under pressure to show impact. The question is no longer whether to invest in this work. It is how to design it so it survives leadership transitions, budget cycles, and the news cycle.
Why JEDI Strategies Stall in Year Two
The pattern is familiar. A strong opening year produces hires, training programs, statements, and an ERG launch. The second year produces fewer announcements and harder questions about outcomes. By the third year, executives want a single chart that proves the program worked.
According to McKinsey's research on diversity and business performance, companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams are 36 percent more likely to outperform peers on profitability. The financial case is strong and durable. What gets cut is not the case. What gets cut is the program, because the program was never built to sit inside the operating model.
Programs that survive year two share three traits. They have a single executive owner with budget authority, not just a steering committee. They tie to a small number of metrics that the CEO already cares about, like retention by cohort or time-to-promotion gaps. And they have an intake mechanism for problems that surface in the work, not just for celebrating wins.
Justice Versus Diversity: Why the Word Matters
What does adding justice to DEI actually change?
Lara made the case that the addition of justice forces the conversation onto power. Diversity describes who is in the room. Inclusion describes whether they get to speak. Justice describes who decides what the room is doing. Programs that stop at the first two often look healthy on a dashboard but produce slow promotions, narrow committees, and decisions that still come from the same people who made them before the program started.
How do companies operationalize justice without making it abstract?
The most concrete moves are about decision rights. Who is on the hiring committee for senior roles. Who reviews promotion packets. Who sets the agenda for executive offsites. Who writes the org-design recommendation. Companies that audit those rooms and rebuild them deliberately tend to see different outcomes within two cycles.
What Actually Works: A JEDI Operating Model
Design principle one: tie the work to existing business rhythms
Annual planning, quarterly reviews, hiring committees, and compensation cycles already exist. JEDI work that sits beside those rhythms gets cut first. JEDI work that lives inside them gets harder to remove. That means promotion criteria that include manager-development metrics for direct reports, hiring scorecards that include diverse-slate adherence, and compensation reviews that surface gaps before they get explained away.
Design principle two: build a real intake mechanism
Inclusion data does not show up in engagement scores alone. It shows up when employees flag specific incidents and patterns. Companies need a confidential way to report concerns, a clear triage path, and a feedback loop that closes with the reporter. Tools like a DEI hotline and an anonymous reporting tool give employees a safe path to surface what dashboards miss.
Design principle three: publish the score, including the bad numbers
The companies that move the fastest publish their representation, pay, and promotion data internally. They publish the gaps. They publish what they tried. They publish what failed. Catalyst research on ERGs and inclusion shows that visible accountability changes both employee trust and program durability.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Justice work and employee relations work share a backbone. Both depend on the same intake and case-management discipline. Both depend on whether managers are coached to handle hard conversations. Both fall apart when the system that captures concerns does not connect to the system that resolves them. AllVoices supports this connection across diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by routing inclusion concerns into the same case workflow as harassment and discrimination cases.
How does ER tooling reinforce JEDI outcomes?
When inclusion concerns sit in a separate inbox from grievances, patterns get lost. When both flow into the same triage and analytics pipeline, leaders can see whether a manager has a concentration of inclusion concerns from underrepresented reports, or whether a team's exit interviews share a theme. That is how companies move from anecdotal stories to evidence about which managers and teams need support. Strong programs draw heavily on the language of diversity, inclusion, and protected class to make the work legible to legal and compliance partners.
Frequently Asked Questions About JEDI Strategy
What is the difference between DEI and JEDI?
JEDI adds justice to the diversity, equity, and inclusion shorthand. The addition is meant to push organizations beyond representation and into power and decision-making. It also signals an external orientation: how the company shows up in policy, vendor relationships, and community.
How long does it take a JEDI strategy to produce measurable change?
Hiring metrics move first, often within four to six quarters. Promotion gaps and retention by cohort take longer, often three to four years, because the cycle of growth and movement inside a company is slower than the cycle of recruitment. Patience matters, but so does setting milestones that prove progress along the way. Effective approaches to DEI in the workplace include both leading and lagging indicators.
Should the JEDI lead report to the CHRO or the CEO?
It depends on the stage. Reporting to the CEO signals seriousness and gives the role budget authority. Reporting to the CHRO embeds the work in HR operating rhythms. The strongest programs we have seen use a dotted line to both, with the executive owner sitting close to whichever group makes the decisions that move the metrics.
How should companies handle backlash to JEDI work?
Lead with the data, not the slogan. Most internal backlash dissolves when the conversation moves from values rhetoric to concrete questions about how decisions get made and how careers get evaluated. External backlash is harder, but companies with internal data on the business case have been markedly more durable through political cycles.
What is the single biggest mistake JEDI leaders make in year one?
Trying to do too many things at once. The strongest year-one programs pick three measurable bets, resource them properly, and resist adding new work until those three deliver evidence. Breadth without depth is what produces the year-two stall.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Lara's framing pushes JEDI work out of the values conversation and into the operating model. That shift is uncomfortable because it forces specifics. Who sits on which committees. Who decides what gets resourced. Whose career advances and whose stalls. The companies willing to answer those questions in writing tend to produce the outcomes the rest of the industry talks about.
The good news for HR leaders entering this work is that the playbook now exists. There is a body of research, a set of operational patterns, and a generation of practitioners who have made the mistakes worth learning from. The harder news is that the playbook is operational, not aspirational. It demands the kind of patient, unflashy infrastructure work that produces durable change.
That work is what separates the companies that quietly outperform from the ones that cycle through programs every two years.
.avif)
.avif)
