5 Things We Learned by Focusing on Our Internal Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

B Lab’s Biggest Takeaways From the B Corp Inclusive Economy Challenge

By Jessica Friesen and Alicia Agnew, Co-Chairs of B Lab’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee, and Jocelyn Corbett, Head of the Inclusive Economy Challenge

In 2016, B Lab launched the Inclusive Economy Challenge (IEC) to encourage Certified B Corporations to improve their business practices around inclusion, equity, and diversity. Nearly two years later, we’ve talked a lot about that Challenge. We’ve celebrated the B Corps who have participated and shared Best Practice Guides on everything from purchasing policies to worker ownership.

There’s one participant story we haven’t shared: our own. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing perspectives from within B Lab on what it was like for us to take the IEC. We’ll dig into the specific goals we set and the progress we’ve made against each one. We’ll also talk about how the IEC prompted us to do much deeper, lasting work on our culture than we ever anticipated.

To kick us off, here are the five most important things we learned as participants in the IEC.

1. Simple questions don’t have simple answers

We designed the Inclusive Economy Challenge to be as straightforward as possible: choose three metrics from the B Impact Assessment’s Inclusive Economy Metric Set to improve on throughout the course of one year.

One goal we selected from the Metric Set in 2016 was to increase representation for women and other underrepresented populations on B Lab’s Board of Directors. At the time we set the goal, our seven-person board was made up of two women and five men. Two of the seven, both men, were people of color.

As soon as we set our goal, we had to start asking ourselves a series of questions. What counts as “underrepresented” for an organization that operates in a global context? How should we think about race and ethnicity beyond the borders of the United States? We set a goal to achieve gender parity on the Board; what about the fact that we had no women of color on our Board in 2016? We hadn’t even done a demographic survey of our governing bodies yet. What seemed like a natural place to start turned out to require a lot of groundwork.

Two years later, we’re still working on diversifying our Board. We have six Board members currently, with a plan to add three more in the next six months. Of our six current members, three are women and three are men. Two — one man and one woman — are people of color. Another, representing B Lab’s Global Partners, is Chilean. We’ve moved forward, but we’re not done yet.

We’ve also answered more of our own questions. We work in a global context and need additional global perspective on our board beyond the member nominated by B Lab’s Global Partners, so at least one of the growth slots will be filled by a person from outside the United States. At the same time, we’re continuing to focus on building the racial and ethnic diversity of our Board within the context of the United States. To meet the strategic and operating demands of a global movement, we are planning to grow the board to 11–13 members in the next 18 months, creating opportunity to focus further on building a more diverse board. We’re also exploring how we might diversify our other governing bodies, including our Standards Advisory Council, our Global Governance Council, and our Executive Team.

This work took longer than we thought it would, in part because we incorporated it into a broader (and longer) strategic planning process. That’s OK. If we had rushed to meet a deadline our first year, we would have missed a chance to ask ourselves important questions about the outcomes we wanted, and our Board diversity goals wouldn’t have been aligned with other lasting strategic changes. Now, our commitment to board growth creates an opportunity to achieve the goal we set nearly two years ago.

Our Board diversity goal was just one of five goals we set in 2016, followed by five more in 2017, each with their own complexities. We’ll be digging into those goals (and this year’s) in detail in our upcoming Inclusive Economy Challenge Progress Report.

2. You can’t know what you’ve never asked about

Unless you’ve given your staff a chance to share their experiences confidentially, you’re probably making incorrect assumptions about your organization’s culture.

In 2017, to help guide our IEC work, B Lab’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee conducted our first-ever all-staff survey on inclusion and culture at B Lab. We found that people of color at B Lab had meaningfully worse experiences, to a statistically significant degree, than their white counterparts; they felt less comfortable bringing their whole selves to work and had fewer role models they could relate to.

B Lab leadership hadn’t anticipated the day-to-day disparity in how B Lab’s culture was experienced by white staff and staff members of color, nor how that was connected to a mostly-white management and executive team. We knew that our lack of racial diversity was a problem in theory. Our all-staff survey made the impact of that problem on our team real.

We’ll be dedicating an entire future post to what we learned from that survey, how valuable it was for driving organizational change, and resources we recommend for other organizations who want to do the same.

3. Transparency is easier in theory than in practice

Transparency is hard, because there’s never only one story to tell. This goes double for work around equity, diversity, and inclusion, where personal experiences vary widely and inform the work itself.

As leaders of the IEC, B Lab wanted to model effective participation — including being open and transparent about the work we were doing.

There was internal alignment around the value of being transparent, but when we sat down to draft communications, we struggled with putting those values into action.

Without a clear strategy for what we would share and when, different members of the team struggled in different ways:

• Staff members who managed the IEC for B Corps wanted B Lab to communicate our work publicly as soon as possible to encourage participation, and they were frustrated by drafts that went through seemingly-endless rounds of reviews by the Communications team without ever being finalized.
• The team working on implementing our own internal IEC goals worried that communicating publicly meant they needed to have already met goals that had only been set a few months before, and they interpreted questions about transparency as pressure to produce more, faster, without an offer of additional support.
• Interested members of the B Corp community noticed B Lab’s silence, and some questioned whether the organization had the credibility and knowledge to lead the IEC.
• Members of our executive team had pushed for the IEC to be created in the first place and were eager for B Lab to lead the way. They were open to and excited about transparency as long as potential risks were taken seriously. That meant letting the staff lead the way, as long as executives would be able to review content and ask questions.
• Communications staff created drafts that were met with tough questions from above, and it wasn’t clear who made what decisions. Should we share our “before” metrics on our goals before we had “after” metrics, opening ourselves up to scrutiny from third parties? Or keep the story vaguer in the interest of getting something out there, even if we weren’t quite walking our own talk? Without a plan for how to decide and move forward, those questions went unanswered, unintentionally shutting down the storytelling process.

We learned that meaningful transparency required more than good intentions.

We needed structure to allow us to have tough conversations about risk and accountability. We also needed to give up on finding one single narrative to share. Transparency requires being comfortable sharing multiple stories, including ones that are in conflict with one another and share perspectives beyond organizational leadership.

We’ll be working to share those perspectives in the coming weeks through this communication series. Our 2017–18 Inclusive Economy Challenge progress report will include our “before” metrics, our missed deadlines, and our hard-fought wins.

4. Leaders can’t wait to be ready

We weren’t ready for the IEC in 2016. Despite launching the program, we weren’t prepared to take on all the goals we had set for ourselves. But we did it anyway. And while we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, our most important lessons came from those mistakes. More accurately, our most important lessons came from the people, on our team and beyond B Lab, who were brave enough to tell us how our mistakes impacted them so we could commit to doing better.

The fact is, most organizations will never truly be “ready” for this work — particularly those that are white-led or male-led.

But if B Lab had waited until we were ready, we would never have begun.

The good news is that we didn’t have to do it alone. We had an entire community of B Corps taking the IEC alongside us. Our fellow participants were transparent about the obstacles they faced; they shared the resources and lessons that helped them succeed; and, most importantly, they trusted B Lab enough to push us to do more for our own challenge.

We also relied on the experts. We made our greatest progress when we had the humility to ask for help. We partnered with B Corps with expertise in equity like Provoc, Sweet Livity LLC, Change Catalyst, and TMI Consulting, Inc., who helped us prioritize our efforts and provided roadmaps for important internal conversations. We didn’t need to wait until we were ready; we needed to move forward with a commitment to learning from a community with the power to keep us on track.

5. All the lessons that come next

We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’re not done. We’ve got a lot more left to learn.

We’re lucky enough to lead a community that is trying to change the world. Changing the world doesn’t require that you already be perfect or hide the hard lessons you learn. To change the world requires a willingness to change ourselves: to sit with scrutiny, to accept hard truths, to let go of power, and to try our best anyway.

We’re looking forward to convening with our B Corp Community in New Orleans in September for our annual gathering to share our stories, trade best practices, and challenge each other further.

If you have lessons you or your organization have learned from engaging in equity and inclusion work, we’d love to hear them. You can join the conversation in the comments below, or reach out at inclusion@bcorporation.net to share privately with our internal Inclusive Economy team.