DE&I transformation, not just a program

David Herrera – Let’s Talk

I'm David Herrera. I'm a Senior Principal at Korn Ferry and I've been with the firm around 3 years by now.

DEI isn’t a program, it’s a transformation.

You should start seeing D&I not as just one initiative. It's really about having D&I in all the business decisions that you make every day, right? It's about how you develop new products. It's how you engage with the community you operate in. It's how you develop leaders. It's how you engage talent. It's how you make sure that you build a culture where everyone belongs, everyone feels safe and everyone understands why diversity is so important and they just embrace it.

So it's not a program. It's not checking a list. It's really a transformation.

And what you should be doing is enabling your leaders, help them go through their own D&I journey. Build that case for change and just become a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization from the roots.

What you need to understand is that each person has their own background and their own journey, their own skills, and they're able to contribute to the organization in different ways, right?

Redefine what talent means to you.

So, it's redefining what talent means to you, but also by understanding that we need to expand the definition of talent. We need to look at different skills. We need to look at different backgrounds, and we need to understand what are they going to bring to our organization.