Dear Mr. / Mrs. Leader, Come take a walk with me…

Today, I borrowed words from a song by Pink where she questioned former president George W. Bush on Diversity Topics and I am asking you: Leaders, People and Culture CEOs, Chiefs of Human Resources, HR Directors… all you who oversee development of the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) environment where all the individuals and groups with different backgrounds are welcomed and accepted and are equally treated to be champions to go together and win the championship where they bring huge business impact in the end.

Dear Mr./Mrs. Leader,

I´d like to ask you some questions

If we can speak honestly

What do you feel when you see:

• 77% of single parents are not to be able to align their job and parenting, because of lack of part-time offers (source, Business for Society)

What do you feel when you see:

• 51% of single parents encountering prejudices in their work (source, Business for Society), not mentioning people with different ethnical, social background, education, religion, handicapped people etc.

What do you feel when you see:

• 18,9 % pay gap between women and their men colleagues –  this shows that the Czech Republic has the third biggest gender pay gap (GPG) in Europe, (data as of 2019, source by Eurostat)

What do you feel when you see:

• only 5 % of women in boards and supervisory boards of 13 Czech companies listed on stock exchange (source, Business for Society for magazine Ekonom 2021)

What do you feel when you see:

• only 1 woman in the pool of 4 job candidates. What is the likelihood that she will be hired finally? Reply is: Z e r o. (study published by HBR)

What do you feel when you see:

• potential candidate for your job, older than 40 or 50 years, reading your job advert with expressions as „searching into young, dynamic, sparking, crazy, easy peasy team…”

What do you feel when you see:

• potential candidate for your job, who needs flexibility to take care about family members, listens that working remotely is possible now in the pandemic, however after pandemic „all will be back on the same track” no matter to our all-lockdown experiences that we have ever done

What do you feel when you see:

• potential candidate for your job, who is not from your city, listens „are you ready to commute every day, because I need you to be in the office so I can see (control) what you do whole day, because I need to manage your performance”

What do you feel when you see:

• 94% of you current employees are worried about their loss of possibility to work flexibly and remotely after the end of pandemic (research by Manpower Group, published by Idnes.cz in 2021)

What do you feel when you see:

• 43% of your current employees hoping that fixed working time will be cancelled after pandemic and they would rather go to office only 2x or 3x per week and the rest they will operate flexibly from their homes (research by Manpower Group, published by Idnes.cz in 2021)

You can add more by yourself or - Just now - Get off of the dance floor and look at your operation from the balcony. Once you are ready go to the dance floor again and talk with your people / customers / investors etc. how you can bring more business impact on the marketplace with the equally treated engaged champions welcomed for their diverse offers, your employees, and those potential and future ones. This is what you are chasing for! Don´t you?

This is not a question of women's quotas, it is not a question of big slogans about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, creating fanciful but empty visions and exaggerated goals.

This is a complete change of your MINDSET🧠 as a Leader and its everyday living it, feeling it, and evolving it. Drop by drop. Continue, repeat and repeat…. Now is the right time, cause with the rising amount of vaccination the New reality is knocking on the door and you need to be ready.

‍

Dear Mr./Mrs. Leader

So come take a walk with me.
Let´s pretend we´re just two people.

And you´re not better than me…

You would never take a walk with me.