Overcome Organizational Diversity Fatigue

  Communications Management  

My friends at the Oxford Dictionary define the word “fatigue” as “extreme tiredness resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness.” If you add “diversity” to the beginning of that, it sums up “diversity fatigue” quite well. It’s about the exhaustion that comes from the mental or physical efforts related to diversity and inclusion (D&I) work.

Organizational diversity fatigue affects the majority of an organization. The fatigue stems from a few sources. One of the most common reasons for diversity fatigue is lack of progress. Progress with this work is often very slow, and as such, it’s hard to see when you’ve improved. For example, diversifying a leadership team can take years, because leadership turnover is notoriously low in most organizations. If you constantly look for the change to occur, it can start to feel like you’re never going to make progress.

It can be very hard to cut through the noise of an organization’s thousands of projects and initiatives, not the least of which is D&I. If people don’t see your work, they’ll start to feel like nothing is happening. Worse is when competing priorities become conflicting priorities—for example, when organizations diversifying their workforce suddenly have to go through a downsizing or rightsizing exercise, and they use the “last in, first out” methodology to decide who will stay and who will go. If the majority of …

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