Common Mistakes Overview

Similarly, as for best practices, common mistakes that coaches either have done in their career or have seen in other companies are listed in the table below.

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Name Common Mistake(s)

Trisha “Believing in who diversity and inclusion coaching is for and what the actual background of that coach needs to look like.”

Caroline “Employer resource groups, to me […] they're just asking the people with lived experience of disadvantages or under representation to do the work in the organisation to create inclusion. And that's my biggest problem with employee resource groups, because they're often a first step. And I don't think they should be the first step. I think the first step should be getting your strategy in place that's meaningful, that's linked to targets and data. Unfortunately, they don't always have diversity within that employee resource group, which is really counter-productive. And I think there's definitely value in having those employee resource groups. But there's got to be this umbrella piece of work that ensures that they are intersectional, that everybody has a voice and they're not doing all the heavy lifting.”

“They identified that people of Asian heritage had felt a much decreased level of inclusion, and their response to that was to provide coaching programs for [them], which to me totally missed the mark. What they really needed to be doing is focusing on why that level of inclusion have dropped and what they needed to do with the organization to reverse that trend.”

“Women in leadership programs. There's value in that because that supports the other work that [D&I professionals] are doing to create change. So, I don't hold that against people who run women in leadership programs. But I just think it's so troublesome, because it's continuing to send these message that the reason women aren't in leadership roles is because they don't have the skills to be leaders. And that's simply untrue. And it by running those programs, we're perpetuating that that myth.”

Lisa “Starting without a plan.”

Theresa “Just focusing on the senior executive leader, and when you do not necessarily democratise coaching, because everyone has a part to play in the organisation. And if the organisation doesn't necessarily know how to identify the true change-makers, and really think that it's just the leaders we need to target, then this organisation can find itself with a frozen middle that doesn't want to cooperate.”

Florence “Coaching as a discipline at the moment is very much dominated by individualism. And when you're initially trained, it doesn't give sufficient emphasis on the fact that we are all socialised beings.”

“You just go through the motions and tick the boxes, or you don't really go for deep, meaningful change. If you're really serious about it, it will take a minimum of three

123 years to get anything embedded. And you need to plan for that. It's not gonna happen by accident and just saying the right words, you've got to do different things, and mean them and do them long term.”

“When coaching happens badly, is because there's no clear, objective, clear sense of what the coaching is being done for. It's not understood. People just assume that coaching is good, let's just do it.”

“Behavioural change. If you say, ‘this is the right way to behave, we all want coaching to make you behave like this’, that isn't necessarily a good thing to do. Because people are set up then to think, ‘Well, this is how I've got to behave. There's something wrong with me, I've got to be like that to be right.’”

Kate “When it's this one and done sort of, ‘Oh, we can do unconscious bias training.’ And then everybody goes back to doing the same thing they've known, there aren’t any incentives and consequences.”

Claire “They sometimes want to build a castle in the sky and have very little money for it.”

“Companies are often just picking the parts and saying ‘We’ll do the rest ourselves,’

and then it is really hard to put the mosaic together, when you are only present at 20%

of the things they do.”

“When they start hastily doing something because they are pressured, and they wake up in autumn that they need to have some KPIs by the end of the year.”

Belinda “You have a statement that you want to be diverse and inclusive. And then you have, well, these six months, ‘we're focusing on LGBT’. And then we have three events. And we have a workshop or we have a webinar where we invite a member of the LGBT community to speak about their professional life and then we partner with pride. And that's it. And then next month, we have ‘we're focusing on gender equality’. And then that's it. So, no integration between the objectives or the topics that the company treats and their internal efforts.”

Agnes “Talking about women still is not like about talking about equality, but more like it's a special group that needs to be treated specially. Also talking about women is always talking about family life and career. And we don't ask men about that, why we ask women about that? So, I think this is the most common mistake that all companies do.”

Paula “Still too much about US and THEM perspective. That US are the ones who are in here doing this coaching, and we need it in order to deal with THEM.”

Erica “When you cannot accept that you are part of the problem. And that you think that you're such a good person and when you don't understand you can have unconscious

124 bias. That's why you need to know how to deal with people, because we only get one chance, and this person will remember how the person was treated in that situation.”

“We have a workshop now. Check. We did this, we made this, oh, it's Pride Week, we make an event. Check. It's just, it's not like becoming a part of the everyday work.”

The lack of knowledge. I think there are too many people out there that don't really know what they're doing in DEI, I think that is a challenge because then there are no results.”

“They think that as we speak a language that this is applicable everywhere […] like

‘Yeah, bring this on, go to [a country] and just do the same thing. Because you don't know their history. And if you want to go work there, you have to know this, if you want to solve something. The company is part of the culture of the country.”

Priscilla “People want to be in a bubble. They're comfortable when they're with people like them […] The manager might have evidence that the older woman from India is better qualified, but they'll still hire the younger white guy.”

“Coaches or trainers talking about D&I or anything, they talk about themselves. It's all about them. Their experience, their knowledge, their background therapy history.”

Matthew “What I see very faulty are quotas. Not in the sense of a legal perspective but as too much of a boosted accentuation of minorities. I find it counter-productive in a sense that for people, who are part of the minority and are able to push through themselves, it devolves their success. You will not get rid of the comments ‘You are there just because you are a woman.’ This is why we are resisting with this.”

Mindy “You value the work of D&I as something that's soft […], it trivialises the strategic mission of D&I.”

“One of the other pitfalls would be authenticity […] In the wake of the incidences last summer, you saw a lot of companies come out with corporate statements on Black Lives Matter. And I think people are looking at it like, ‘Okay, you came out with a nice, pretty statement, what is the investment behind it? What is the actual resource commitment to a staff personnel resources, investment as a line item in the budget?’”

Peter “People make equal mark between promoting diversity and avoiding discrimination.

That's the first one people think that they are pro diversity if they are against discrimination. And that's not true.”

“As long as you keep D&I only as a separate topic, then it stays a separate topic, and people are able to move it aside and say that, ‘okay, well, we'll do business and next we

125 will concentrate on the D&I’, but if you integrate it in the way that you do the business, then you have you don't have that opportunity to say that.”

Jessica “I think there needs to be a target. But it's the difference is between measuring inputs and measuring outputs. And I think it's easier to measure outputs, it's easier to measure whether you've now got 35 people recruited who are different than it is to measure the quality of the input and the experience that went into achieving that. So many key performance indicators are connected with outputs. And I think with D&I, you really need to connect it to inputs as well.”

Nora “In regions, D&I role is part of somebody’s role. It's like 10% part of the role, or maybe 50%. And there's only very few organisations have it as a full-time role. And that's understandable. You know, budget is tight, etc. […] One of the mistakes organisations can make is not giving the real ownership and visibility and investing. ‘Are we really living and embedding it if we don't have somebody focusing on it in the markets?’”