Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. My name is Keeley Dannenberg. I'm Senior VP of Client Solutions here at Orange Grove Consulting. And today, I'm joined by Nadia Butt, Lead Consultant at Orange Grove Consulting. And we are talking about the things that organizations should do to prepare for strategy work, whether it's diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy work or some type of other strategy. And so, Nadia, what is one of the things that a lot of organizations don't realize they should be doing to prep for strategy work?

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question and one that we get often. So I think the first thing is defining terms. So organizational objectives and goals could be perhaps short or medium-term goals that an organization pursues to accomplish its long-term objectives. So these objectives really help your organization to evaluate its performance, its productivity, its strategy overall. So when you have your organizational objectives in place and you're establishing your diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, you really want to make sure that your diversity, equity, and inclusion goals are aligned to your organizational objectives. That will really help you focus your focus and prioritize much of your efforts when it comes to your diversity, equity, and inclusion problem-solving to the strategy, the overall business strategy that you have in place.

Speaker 1: And what is the advantage for organizations who do this? Because it sounds like to me, in my mind, there must be. This makes a lot of sense, but I'd love to hear from you what you think.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it can save you long-term in terms of spinning your wheels oftentimes when we are trying to problem-solve something or wondering if, for example, that they are the right things to be problem-solving. If you're doing and collecting the current data and you're understanding where you're currently at, what your goals are, and then the gap in between that and you're solving for the gap, once you're understanding truly what you're problem-solving around, then you can align that to your business objectives. And then there's no waste in talent. There's no waste in resources. So that underlying of waste is really important. I want to also just, if it's OK, to provide an example. So if, say, for example, you're in your current state and you've determined that your sourcing and recruiting processes has a gap or has an opportunity to be better. So for example, if there's a gap in terms of recruiting for more diverse teams, and then your business objective may be to grow the next year in terms of talent, then you likely want to focus your DE&I problem-solving efforts around your recruitment practices. And then the alternative of that is if you don't plan on growing talent-wise. So if you're an organization new for the next year or so, you are not growing, you're not planning to recruit, you're not planning to field and grow your talent pool, then you may not want to prioritize your problem-solving around the recruitment practices. So it's really understanding what your goals are and where your efforts should be placed, again, in those medium to short-term goals.

Speaker 1: Great. That's a great example. I also think that this probably helps a lot with leadership being supportive of the DE&I initiatives if they can see that there is a joint purpose to it.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Any stakeholders or any business leaders that have established business objectives, then absolutely there's going to be more buy-in when we're trying to influence the DE&I strategy and embedding it into the organizational strategy, for sure.

Speaker 1: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. So check out our blog on this subject. We have a list of things that you can do to prep for strategy work. And then we have some other micro-conversations on this topic as well at our YouTube channel. Thanks so much.