Diversity and Inclusion Committee
Founder and Co-Chair | Blackstone Technology and Innovations | January 2020
Key Responsibilities:
Strategy Lead, Goal Setting and Tracking, Leadership Reporting, Recruitment
We Have a Dream
Blackstone Technology and Innovations (BXTI) was the first stop for then-coworker Meiya Chang and myself after college. Reminiscing on the slew of clubs on our campuses dedicated to celebrating an array of individuals, Meiya and I wanted to fill this gap at BXTI. With determination and a dream, we set out to build BXTI’s first Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Committee, a safe space for our colleagues to grow personally and professionally.
First, Meiya and I methodically carved out a structure for coworkers to target their contributions to the D&I Committee, based on pattern and need. An early attempt at this structure is below. We defined actionable focus areas spanning internal and external efforts.
Then, Meiya, myself, and the members of our budding D&I Committee each aligned ourselves to a single track. Let the inclusion begin!
Dreaming to Doing
Projects taken up by the D&I Committee differed in scope from typical projects at BXTI, but Meiya and I saw key similarities across both types:
Project owners need to stay organized.
Leadership visibility and support drives success.
Aggregate impact reporting increases project-owner fulfillment as well as resource allocation.
Addressing each of these requirements in one fell swoop, the D&I Committee leveraged an industry-standard organizational tool that was already quite familiar to professionals at BXTI: Jira.
Each vertical created epics and tasks in Jira to with overall goals. Weekly on a team-wide basis and quarterly with Executive Sponsors, Meiya and I reviewed aggregate statistics across all D&I epics in Jira, mapping back to the vertical-specific KPIs.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Try, try again!
The initial anatomy of the D&I Committee sparked early interest, but traction was relatively slow, and the Committee was ultimately unsuccessful in achieve its broader mission of actively empowering diverse professionals. Though it amplified independent, scattered pursuits towards inclusion, Meiya and I observed these shortcomings:
Employees lacked encouragement from Senior Leadership to allocate working hours to D&I, which was considered peripheral.
The overlap between the 4 tracks (below) was unclear to Committee members, thereby thwarting ownership, stifling collaboration, and limiting cross-functionality.
- Community Presence and Outreach
- Internal Awareness
- Branding and Employee Showcasing
- Recruiting
To resolve these pain points, Meiya and I restructured the D&I Committee to focus on 3 new areas —Community, Colleague, and Talent Engagement— with clear and distinct target audiences.
We also brought on dedicated Executive Sponsors for each of the 3 verticals to directly involve Senior Leadership.
The graphics below explain to prospective members and Executive Sponsors the purpose and strategy behind the new and improved D&I Committee.
Overview of BXTI D&I Committee Structure, as of 2020. This is not representative of Blackstone's current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
BXTI D&I Committee Executive Sponsor Terms and Expectations, as of 2020. This is not representative of Blackstone's current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
Present Day
Today, the BXTI D&I Committee (renamed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee) continues to grow and nurture diverse professionals.
There is a new emphasis on aligning the Committee’s technology-oriented efforts with ongoing firm-wide initiatives. This way, the Committee’s work benefits from the expertise of colleagues across business units like Private Equity, Real Estate, etc.
Meiya and I have both since left BXTI, but the Committee lives on in the able hands of passionate diversity, equity, and inclusion advocates.