On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with April Powers, Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. April brings 15 years of experience across diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work at Nestlé USA, Amgen, her own consulting practice First Impression Rx, and Fortune 50 government and nonprofit clients.
April argued that the most common mistake in DEI work is starting too fast. Companies feel pressure to publish a strategy, hire a leader, and stand up an ERG within 90 days, then spend the next two years patching the foundation that the rush skipped. She pushed back on the assumption that speed equals seriousness. The companies producing real outcomes are usually the ones that took an extra quarter to listen, audit, and align before the first announcement.
That conversation matters because most companies are now in their third or fourth iteration of DEI work, and the lessons from the rushed first attempts are clearer than they have ever been.
Why DEI Strategies Built in a Rush Underdeliver
The pattern repeats. A public moment forces a fast response. The leadership team picks a goal, hires a leader, and sets a public timeline. Within a year, the leader is overwhelmed, the goal is undermeasured, and the timeline is missed. The next year is spent rebuilding internally what the first year promised externally.
The data on what good DEI work actually delivers stays consistent. McKinsey research finds that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams are 36 percent more likely to outperform peers on profitability. Catalyst research on ERGs shows that members of ERGs report higher engagement, faster career progression, and stronger retention. The case for the work is settled. What is not settled is the design discipline.
Companies that produce durable outcomes share three habits. They listen before they design. They tie the strategy to the operating model. And they protect the strategy from the news cycle by anchoring it in metrics the executive team already cares about.
The Discipline of Pausing Before Designing
What does a real listening phase look like?
It looks like 60 to 90 days of structured input. Listening sessions across cohorts. A culture audit that includes representation, retention, and pay equity baselines. A review of past initiatives and what worked or did not. The discipline is to resist publishing anything until the listening is complete and the strategy is responsive to what was actually heard.
How do you defend a slower start to skeptical executives?
By framing the listening phase as risk reduction. The cost of a strategy that misses the actual employee experience is much higher than the cost of a 90-day delay. Executives respond to that math when it is presented in the language of program risk rather than caution.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Building a Durable DEI Strategy
Design principle one: anchor the strategy in baseline data
Run a representation, pay equity, and retention audit before designing the strategy. Use the gaps to set the priorities. Without baseline data, the strategy is whatever sounds good in the leadership offsite. With baseline data, the strategy points at the largest gaps and the executive team can see the case for the resourcing.
Design principle two: build intake mechanisms that surface what dashboards miss
Most inclusion concerns never reach HR through formal channels. A confidential intake channel like a DEI hotline or an anonymous reporting tool turns those signals into trackable cases. The data that flows through these channels is the strongest input the strategy can have.
Design principle three: tie the strategy to existing business rhythms
DEI work that sits beside hiring, promotion, and compensation cycles gets cut first. DEI work that lives inside those cycles becomes part of the operating model. That means promotion criteria with cohort views, hiring scorecards with diverse-slate metrics, and compensation reviews with pay equity overlays.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Strong diversity, equity, and inclusion programs depend on the ER infrastructure that catches the inclusion concerns survey scales miss. The complaint about a manager whose feedback patterns track demographics. The pattern of underrepresented employees leaving in clusters. The cluster of concerns about project allocation. All of those surface through ER channels first.
How does ER tooling reinforce DEI strategy?
By giving HR teams a structured view of where the strategy is working and where it is failing. Patterns in the case data inform diversity hiring decisions, surface gaps in talent management assumptions, and protect employees in any protected class from patterns that individual conversations might miss.
Frequently Asked Questions About Building a DEI Strategy
How long should a listening phase take?
60 to 90 days for most companies. Long enough to gather meaningful input across cohorts. Short enough to keep momentum and meet executive patience. Companies that try to skip this phase usually rebuild the strategy within a year.
Who should own the DEI strategy?
A senior leader with budget authority and a direct line to the CEO or CHRO. The strategy fails when ownership lives below the threshold where decisions get made about hiring, promotion, and compensation. It succeeds when the owner sits in the rooms where those decisions happen.
What metrics actually matter for DEI strategy?
Representation by level, retention by cohort, pay equity, time-to-promotion gaps, and inclusion items on the engagement survey. Five metrics that move together over time tell the real story. For more on building the plan when conditions are tough, see our piece on creating a DEI plan during hard times.
How do you protect the strategy from political pressure?
By tying it to business outcomes the CEO already cares about. Strategies framed in identity language are politically vulnerable. Strategies framed in retention, promotion, and productivity language are much harder to dismantle because they read as performance management.
What is the single biggest mistake new DEI leaders make?
Trying to do too many things in year one. The strongest year-one programs pick three measurable bets, resource them, 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
April's central discipline is simple and rare: take the time to design a strategy that survives. The pressure to act fast is real. The cost of acting fast without listening is bigger.
The companies that lead in this work over the next decade will not be the ones that announced first. They will be the ones that listened first, designed for durability, and tied the work to the operating model. Those companies look quieter than the ones running splashy campaigns. They also produce the outcomes that the splashy companies are still trying to claim.
That patience is the discipline most worth borrowing.
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