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Dr. Akilah Cadet, founder and CEO of Change Cadet, has spent fifteen years building anti-racism and DEI practices for companies across public health, education, and technology. The conversation focused on what it actually takes to translate awareness of power and privilege into operational change that holds up over time.
Power and privilege awareness is the easy half. The hard half is what the company does the day after the workshop. Without operational change, awareness produces guilt, fatigue, and eventually cynicism. With operational change, awareness produces a workplace that more employees experience as fair.
HR leaders should think about power and privilege work as an ongoing audit of how decisions actually get made. The companies that do this well stop relying on individual goodwill and start building systems that produce equitable outcomes whether or not any single person is paying attention.
From awareness to operational change
Awareness without practice fades. HBR research on diverse teams reinforces that diverse teams only outperform homogeneous ones when the conditions support honest contribution from every member. Those conditions depend on power being used carefully, not just on diversity being recruited.
The HR job is to build the operational change. Hiring rubrics that reduce reliance on referrals, promotion processes that audit outcomes by demographic, and feedback channels that work for employees who would not raise their hand in a meeting all transfer power back into systems where it can be examined. AllVoices supports that work through a DEI solution and an anonymous reporting tool that lowers the cost for employees to share what they would not say in front of a manager.
The shift is from a culture of good intentions to a culture of accountable systems. Good intentions are necessary. They are not enough.
Holding leaders accountable
What does accountability look like in practice?
It looks like specific commitments with named owners and reviewed timelines. A leader who commits to improving promotion equity sets a target, tracks the metric quarterly, reports progress publicly, and accepts consequences when commitments are not met. Equity work without consequences is theater.
The consequences do not need to be punitive. They can be coaching, peer review, or adjustments to scope. The point is that the commitment is real enough to produce a response when it is missed.
How do you handle resistance?
Resistance comes in two flavors. Honest disagreement about priorities deserves a real conversation and sometimes leads to better practice. Bad faith resistance, where a leader nods in meetings and undermines the work in private, requires a different response. Document the pattern, make the impact visible, and adjust the leader's role if the pattern persists.
The hardest cases are leaders whose individual performance is strong. The cultural lesson the company sends when it tolerates them undermines every other inclusion investment. Transformational leadership requires consistency between behavior and values.
What actually works
Audit decisions by demographic
The single highest use practice is auditing decisions by demographic. Promotions, calibration outcomes, performance ratings, attrition, and pay all benefit from regular review. According to SHRM guidance on mitigating unconscious bias, structured review processes catch bias that individual managers cannot see in their own decisions.
The audits are also a check on whether the rest of the inclusion work is producing results. A company that runs unconscious bias training but sees no change in promotion outcomes by demographic has a feedback loop telling it the training alone is not enough.
Build hiring rubrics that reduce favoritism
Referral heavy hiring tends to perpetuate the demographics of the existing workforce. A rubric that scores candidates against the same criteria, with structured interviews and calibrated scoring, reduces the friction that underrepresented candidates face. Unconscious bias shows up most clearly in unstructured hiring conversations.
The rubric also makes the process auditable. A company that cannot show how candidates were scored cannot defend the outcomes when they are challenged. Documentation is part of the practice.
Make the channel for concerns trustworthy
The fastest way to surface power related issues is a confidential channel that employees actually trust. Trust is built through consistent response, not through marketing the channel. Retaliation protections matter most when the report involves a senior leader.
According to EEOC research on harassment in the workplace, the strongest predictor of whether employees report issues is whether they believe the company will respond fairly. Trust is the upstream investment.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Power related concerns often arrive as ER cases. AllVoices supports the work through an employee relations function that gives HR a structured workspace and a workplace investigations product that handles sensitive cases with the rigor they require.
Why pattern recognition matters most for senior leader cases
Cases involving senior leaders carry more risk and require more care. ER teams that read patterns across multiple reports about the same leader catch systemic issues that individual cases obscure. The blog on workplace misconduct covers what that practice looks like.
Frequently Asked Questions About Power and Privilege at Work
Where does this work belong organizationally?
Inside HR, with explicit executive sponsorship. A standalone DEI function without executive ownership tends to get the blame for outcomes the company is not actually committed to producing.
How do you measure progress?
Promotion outcomes by demographic, voluntary attrition by demographic, employee responses to belonging items, and the share of leaders who meet their stated commitments. Multiple signals beat any single index.
What about smaller companies?
Smaller companies have less data to audit but more room to act. Start with hiring practices, manager training, and a confidential reporting channel. The practices scale.
How do you keep the work going through leadership change?
Build the practices into the operating cadence so they outlast any single leader. A new CHRO who inherits a quarterly equity audit will continue it. A new CHRO who inherits a values poster will not.
What is the biggest mistake?
Confusing public statements with internal practice. Employees notice immediately when external messaging outpaces internal change.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Dr. Akilah Cadet makes the case that power and privilege work fails when it stays at the awareness layer. The companies that get this right build the systems that produce equitable outcomes whether or not any individual is paying attention.
The mandate for HR leaders is to audit the decisions, train the systems, and hold leaders accountable to specific commitments. Done consistently, the company stops talking about equity and starts producing it.
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