“JEDI” Consultations
Affirming Business Consultations for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Introduction
We offer consultations on “JEDI” principles — meaning, principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion — to organizations, corporations and businesses to enhance workplace culture, hiring, and climate.
Our JEDI consultations combine conflict transformation, mediation, morale enhancement, and conceptual redesigning. We are adept at liaising with any division of a workplace, from the executive leadership to all employees.
We are sensitive to an organization’s culture and traditions while recommending highly considered changes that reflect company-wide buy-in.
We accentuate the positive while offering affirmative, hopeful, and caring solutions, strategies, and systems for the improvement of a business’ commitment to JEDI principles.
Affirming and Restorative Engagement
Our JEDI consultations cultivate affirming and restorative spaces.
We do not blame. We do not shame.
We believe that affirming, supportive engagement that encourages deep, critical inquiry and interpersonal reflection is the best place from which to change.
As we guide workplaces to embrace JEDI principles, we emphasize four key notions in a consciously compassionate and contemplative manner:
- We are essentially good people.
- We make mistakes.
- We can change.
- Change takes great work.
We believe that affirming and restorative engagement builds the best mindsets to do the hard work of change for JEDI principles.
At the same time that we are affirming and restorative, we also create spaces where people can strongly embrace a commitment to ending explicit and implicit biases.
Tailored Consultations
Each business or company has different needs and our JEDI consultations adapt to meet those needs.
We ask companies to share outcomes that exemplify their needs and then we carefully tailor the content and the length of the services in a responsive and respectful manner.
Team Building Through Conflict-Transformational Practices
At the core of our JEDI consultations is team-building. We want work colleagues to liaise with each other and depend on each other in more affirming and supportive ways. We guide teams within conflict transformational practices to uplift their togetherness and productivity. Learning how to transform conflicts helps prevent escalations that lead to instances of injustice, inequity, and exclusion. Conflict transformation also helps us use meditating skills to intervene within conflicts.
Well-operationalized company-wide mediation processes go a long way towards de-escalating workplace conflicts before they occur, and we help companies develop these processes.
Intersectional Understanding
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a pioneering law professor, argues that people face oppression at the intersection of two or more identities. She defines identities not as unitary, but as relational, interpersonal processes. In her early work, she discussed an example of a Black woman whose job discrimination lawsuit was dismissed because the court found that she was not harmed as either a Black person or as a woman because Black men and white women were employed at her job. But it was the intersection of her Black womanhood that mattered because, in fact, all of the Black women at the job site had been laid off when seniority was redefined. Our JEDI consultations embrace Crenshaw’s ideas on “intersectionality” to help us understand that anti-biased healing and learning must take into account overlapping jeopardies and identities so that we uplift complex ways of being and knowing.
Advanced Conceptualizations of Race and Racism
We guide companies to acquire advanced, evidence-based understandings of race and racism.
For example, scientifically, “race” is a culturally constructed myth borne of white colonialism and white supremacy.
But, racism is not a myth: it is a grave reality involving abuses and misuses of power towards non-white people.
Advice on Hiring, Recruitment, Retention, Onboarding, Mentoring and Termination
Many companies initiate JEDI consultations to improve their commitment to the hiring recruitment, retention, onboarding, and mentoring of non-white employees, women employees of all cultural heritages, or LGBTQ employees.
Others engage in JEDI consultations that complement legal advice from qualified attorneys (which we are not) about the workplace climate issues that may surround an instance of an employee’s termination — or how to share “lessons learned” and make the workplace healthier in the wake of such events.
Our consultations cover all of these areas with detailed recommendations for amelioration.
Policy Advisement
We provide insightful, industry-backed standards for the best ways to develop, write, and operationalize workplace policies — such as handbooks, non-discrimination policies, and more — that reflect JEDI principles.
Crisis Management
Oftentimes, a lack of commitment to JEDI principles can provoke complaints and grievances from employees who feel justifiably left out or mistreated. We provide intensive advice for crisis management to get ahead of escalations and to intervene with employees in caring, supportive ways. Conflict transformational techniques, de-escalation practices for workplaces, and mediating organizational strategies are our best tools for crisis management.
Advice on Avoiding the Four D’s
Sometimes, when employees complain of bias, companies move into a reactive loop of what JEDI practitioners and figures like Byron Allen call the “four D’s”: Dismissing, Discrediting, Demonizing and Destroying.
Even when they feel like the right thing to do, it is crucial to acknowledge that the four D’s often result in grave hurt for both the company and the employees who have complaints.
The four D’s also extend conflicts, creating protracted and expensive repercussions that can actually be avoided with a different and more mediating, affirmative, and conflict transformational approach.
Our JEDI consultations provide powerful alternatives applying risk management principles to the management of the four D’s as we assist with crafting preventions and interventions that solve multiple problems at once in ways that benefit a range of parties involved in a conflict while directly addressing workplace explicit and implicit biases.
Operationalizing apology, making amends, crafting inducements for change, and creating patterns of inclusion can actually stem the tide of crises before or while they are escalating.
Advice for Executives, Managers, and Board Members
Executives, managers, and board members — or the individuals who lead companies — play an integral role in the operationalization of JEDI principles. We offer consultations especially crafted for executive leadership to work through complex matters of how leaders and managers process relationships and policies around JEDI principles.
Advice on Sexual Harassment
Often there are matters that arise that are beyond the scope of attorneys (which we are not) that pertain to creating a workplace culture that is free of language, interactions, and conduct that explicitly or implicitly involves sexual harassment. We help companies create such workplace cultures.
Cultural Sensitivity Reviews
We help companies review and update all of their business communiqué (promotional literature, websites, and more) so that it is free of implicit and explicit biases.
Mindfulness for JEDI Principles
We have adapted our longstanding commitment to mindfulness so that this practice joins with our other recommendations to create a workplace culture that avoids bias.
Often implicit and explicit biases arise not only from under-examined feelings of exclusion and power, but also from impulsive, unfocused, and dispassionate behaviors.
Mindfulness helps employees address the root mindsets that lead to acts of implicit bias by helping us control impulses, cultivate calm that de-escalates from power-ladden responses, and fosters greater focus on being supportive and compassionate towards others.
Disclaimer
We are evidence-based healers and teachers, and our consultations should not be viewed as legal or medical advice.
Confidentiality
This work requires the utmost of trust, discretion, tact, and confidentiality.
Most companies and groups with whom we work include confidentiality and non-disclosure clauses as part of our agreement to enter into the delivery of services and we carefully abide by these agreements.
Remuneration
Depending on the size of the companies with whom we liaise, we frequently request remuneration that reflects industry standards described in this article and this article too.
We are open to negotiation on rates.
Every engagement is different and we work with companies to tailor services and remuneration.
