Insight Diversity strategy and governance
The diversity committee must not become the owner of diversity
The day the whole subject belongs to the committee, part of the organization can start believing it no longer belongs to them.
- Coordinate
- Arbitrate
- Account for
- Without absorbing
AN AMBIVALENT MOVE
Creating a committee can strengthen governance or replace it.
Creating a committee is almost always a good sign. It indicates that an organization has stopped handling the subject as it comes, that it is giving it time, a place and people. In most cases, it is the first real act of governance.
But the same move sometimes produces the opposite effect. From the moment a place exists to handle the question, the rest of the organization can legitimately consider that it is being handled. This is not disengagement: it is a rational reading of the structure.
The committee has to organize responsibility. It must not confiscate it.
HOW THE DRIFT SETS IN
Through innocuous sentences, never through a decision.
“That's a committee file.” “We'll take it to the committee.” “Let's wait and see what the committee says.” Each of those sentences is reasonable on its own. Together, repeated for a year, they shift the subject's centre of gravity.
The drift is recognizable by one precise symptom: the committee starts executing. It no longer confines itself to arbitrating and following up; it drafts, it trains, it chases, it produces. Its members work hard and the initiative moves forward, but it moves forward alongside the organization rather than through it.
The test is simple. If the committee stopped meeting for six months, what would carry on? If the answer is “nothing”, the subject has not been governed: it has been delegated.
WHAT THE COMMITTEE SHOULD DO
Receive, decide, redistribute.
A useful committee receives what it does not produce: a dashboard, a progress report, files requiring a trade-off because they exceed the level where they arose. It reviews, analyzes, prioritizes and decides.
What it produces is decisions, each with an owner, a deadline and a review date. In other words, it sends the work back to the functions whose job it is: HR for processes, managers for practices, leadership for the trade-offs that commit resources.
Its value is therefore not measured by what it accomplishes itself, but by what it sets in motion elsewhere.
THE RIGHT SCOPE
A committee closed in on itself is no longer a place of coordination.
Two adjustments are often enough to correct course. First, check that every decision coming out of it carries an owner who does not sit on the committee: that is the guarantee that responsibility circulates. Second, make sure members are there because of their role, not in a personal capacity: a committee made up of convinced volunteers is fragile the day those people move on.
Of the committee's latest decisions, how many were carried by someone other than its members?
A healthy committee produces little and sets a great deal in motion. It is a place things pass through, not a destination.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full system, the steering loop and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Diversity strategy and governanceCONTINUE
Other insights on governance.
- Insight An indicator is only worth something if it can trigger a decision A number tracked every month but never discussed is not yet an instrument of governance.
- Insight A policy without governance is a documented intention A policy can be perfectly drafted and remain almost invisible in daily decisions.
- Insight An action plan is not a governance system A list of actions can be complete the day it is delivered and already fragile the following month.
- Insight What has no owner often ends up belonging to no one “Everyone is responsible” can become an elegant way of not knowing precisely who has to act.