Rolling back DEI efforts could be a bad long-term strategy

One of the lessons you learn growing up is that sometimes you have to play the long game.

It seems some leaders may have forgotten this, at least when it comes to inclusivity in the workplace. When companies roll back inclusivity efforts for short-term gains, they risk sacrificing their long-term strategies, according to Ruchika T. Malhotra, author of Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success.

HR Brew chatted with Malhotra about how workplace competition and exclusivity can be harmful and short sighted.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

There is a lot of opportunity when HR functions and when culture-building parts of the organization focus on creating a culture of collaboration. One where teams and the organization really feel like they have each other’s backs versus rivalry, and sparring, and competitions that are “winner take all”…Whether I talk about radical generosity, or inclusion, solidarity, creating an abundance mindset, those really, again, can be specifically related to HR functions.

Did anything change from when you started writing the book to publishing?

I pitched the book and started writing it at a time where…there was a lot of focus on creating equitable and inclusive organizations. A lot of HR professionals, specifically, would seek out my services in inclusion strategy, where there was a lot of, like, open conversation about, “Okay, here are some of the ways biases are impacting our workplace, or we do see a mismatch in how opportunities are being doled out in our organization”...There was a lot more open, I would say, conversation around how important DEI was in the workplace.

Even though outwardly there’d be a lot of like, “Yes, absolutely, this is super important. We’re really focused on this,” and then I would feel like the other shoe would drop when it would then be sort of book-ended with...“How do we manage this feeling of other people feeling like their rights are going to be impacted by this?”...There was a lot of zero-sum thinking. There was a lot of like, “winner takes all,” that one person’s progress comes really at the expense of the other, and I really wanted to push back against that narrative.

When I started conceptualizing and started writing the book, to where we are now, we see that zero-sum thinking, winner-takes-all-approach, that competition and hierarchy, in a much more profound, much more vocally shared right now. And, as a result, we are seeing rights being pulled back, and we are seeing some progress that we made over the last few years being eroded…Now, it’s undeniable that this is where we’re at, and my focus is we can’t continue down this path if we want to make true progress and change.

What advice do you have for HR pros amid DEI resistance?

So much of the book about uncompete and how we apply it in our lives and into our workplaces is around long-term thinking versus short-term thinking. So the short-term thinking is, “Okay, we should just kind of go with what’s in the cultural zeitgeist and just continue on that path.” But again, the long-term impact of that is probably, and we’re already starting to see women leave the workforce in record numbers. We’re starting to see all sorts of imbalances, especially in terms of racial [and] intersectionally, that more Black women are leaving the workforce or being pushed out in record numbers.

That’s really going to have long-term impacts, and if you’re building an organization that’s going to be innovative, and very growth-focused, and create impact, taking short-term thinking measures versus long-term thinking measures is going to have a long-term negative impact on your organization.