- May 15, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management

I think I’m going to upset a lot of people with this one, so let’s see what happens.
One way to empower your people to become leaders when they’re not managers is to eliminate the concept of DEI.
Before I get a lot of hate mail, hear me out on this.
I don’t mean that we should eliminate the idea of equality. Rather, equality should just be at the foundation of your leadership thinking. It shouldn’t be a program, it should be in the heart of everything you do — your planning, your strategies, your hiring.
I think having a DEI environment means that people will often wonder if they were a DEI hire. Are they only there to check a box? Or were they hired because they were the best possible candidate for the job?
I can only imagine the embarrassment someone would feel if they realize they were only hired because they were needed to fill a quota.
The best way to eliminate DEI is to eliminate the need for DEI. If you treat everyone with respect and give them all an equal chance at a job and advancement, then you don’t need to check boxes to tell yourself you’re doing a good job.
But — and this is where I’m going to upset a lot of other people — you have to make a commitment to being an equal-opportunity employer in the first place. That means eliminating the old boys’ club and the good ol’ boy way of thinking. It means you don’t hire your friends or your family. No more nepotism, no more race-based hiring, no more backroom tactics of only hiring people who look like you.
1. Hire quality employees
Automate the process, create mechanisms so that no one has to lift the heavy items (this prevents injuries anyway), hire women to drive forklifts., and so on.
Otherwise, if you have a job that only certain people can do, then you’ll always perpetuate the system that only certain people will get that job.
2. Fire people with bigoted beliefs.
One reason DEI has been necessary is that there are too many bigots and sexists in leadership and management positions. They’re the ones who have created an atmosphere that made DEI necessary.
If someone has a problem with a particular group of people, then they need to go. You can’t have that kind of thinking stopping the progress of your associates because that stops the process of the entire company.
More importantly, that kind of thinking can cost your company major lawsuits. People are tired of being treated poorly by bigoted managers and a system that’s stacked against them, so they’re filing major lawsuits. That not only damages your company’s reputation, but it can cost you millions of dollars as well.
I already made a practice to fire unsafe people (non-negotiable #1) and to fire people who were toxic to the organization, so I didn’t hesitate to fire anyone who was racist or sexist.
3. Include your leaders in the interview process.
When I say leaders, I mean on-the-floor leaders — the people who show leadership skills and thinking, not just managers.
When I started doing this, it was very interesting in the beginning, because the associates didn’t know if it was real or not. But they very quickly learned that their opinions mattered. If they took a “what the hell?” attitude during the hiring process, they had to live with the results on the floor.
The other benefit was that the people who we started treating like leaders started acting like leaders. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way — we believed they were leaders, so they believed they were leaders, and they acted like it.
They started making better decisions about hiring and acting with more authority and responsibility.
4. Give non-leaders a voice
I made it a practice to meet once a week for an hour with 10 or 12 random people and give them coffee and donuts. We would talk about different things at work, what they liked, and what they thought we could do better. (More on that in a minute.) When we first started, I would have to provide the topic, but it very quickly got to the point that the majority were participating.
For example, we had some huge tanks that we washed and prepared for treating 10-foot lengths of steel. Except some jackass threw a bunch of safety gloves into one of the tanks, and blocked the drain. We didn’t know why it wasn’t draining, and we had to call someone to come in and unclog it.
That was really painful to fix, because you couldn’t see underwater because of the discoloration of the liquid, and you couldn’t easily get to it because the tank was 12 feet deep.
I put this question to one of my groups, and they actually showed a great sense of frustration. The eventual conclusion they came up with was to not allow anyone but the operator into the area. The reason they were so frustrated was that our quality dropped because we couldn’t clean the product properly. It also caused significant downtime, and no one gets paid for downtime, so it hit everyone’s pocketbook.
But they came up with the idea of only allowing the operator into the area because we had created an environment where people could speak their minds without retribution.
5. If a good idea comes up, act on it immediately.
Whenever anyone has a good idea, make sure you act on it in 24 – 48 hours so the individual can see that you’ve considered it. That way, they can see and feel that their energy hasn’t been wasted.
In the same way that treating people like leaders made them believe they were leaders, treating people like they had good ideas made people come up with more good ideas.
Doing this helps the leaders rise to the top because now they’re thinking of new ways to help the company improve. After all, it takes a special kind of arrogance to believe that only managers can have good ideas on how to best run the company.
Giving leaders an opportunity to speak up and act like leaders is a great opportunity for innate leaders to step out and be loud and proud. And if you give everyone an equal chance because that’s your management philosophy, you make sure that each person in the company gets that chance. You’re not just giving it to people because it checks a box and fills a quota.
I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Photo credit: GovernmentZA (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)