With over 21 years of experience as a diversity consultant, specialist, and trainer, Dr. Ayanna Cummings has established herself as an expert in her field. Her accomplishments include being honored by Diversity MBA Magazine as one of the Top 100 Under 50 Executives in Corporate America. Additionally, in 2022, she received the prestigious Top DEI Officer Award from the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Driven by her passion, Ayanna approaches her work as more than just a job; it is a calling that inspires her every day. She describes diversity as her “occupassion,” fueling her readiness to tackle any challenges that come her way.
Below are highlights of the interview:
As an Owner & Principal DEI Consultant, what inspired you to pursue this career path, and how did you get started in the field of DE&I?
My DE&I career was borne out of both art and necessity. In fact, my father was a management consultant and urban planner who was very active in our local communities. I also had the fortune of being introduced to the lifelong activism and advocacy career that my mother had as a Chief Judge within the largest Court of General Jurisdiction in the State of GA. So advocacy and activism, as well as the art of intellectual exchange and analysis, are in my blood. I knew that my industrial and organizational psychology educational pursuits were best suited for DE&I because we are experts in the art of cultural transformation.
With your experience in shaping high-performing cultures at companies, what are some key strategies or initiatives that you have implemented to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging within organizations?
We are straying away from the concept of “initiatives” nowadays in the DEI space. Instead, we like to focus on strategic cultural transformations, as my upcoming DEI Virtual Conference is called (https://strategicculturaltransformations.vfairs.com/), to enact meaningful, sustainable changes in organizations at multiple levels, including the individual (i.e., behavioral, attitudinal, decision-making authority, etc.), interactional or group level (i.e., mitigating microaggressions, microinsults, microassaults, sexist or racist remarks or jokes, etc.), and lastly but certainly not least of these, the systemic and structural level through which all organizational systems and structures, practices, procedures, governance, and policies are audited systematically for the removal of systemic and structural barriers to advancement, particularly for historically marginalized groups.
In your experience, what are some of the most effective ways to measure the success of DE&I initiatives, and what metrics do you use to track progress and identify areas for improvement?
I believe wholly that evaluative measures of success must be defined before, during, and after an implementation. This aids the investigator by allowing them to gain a robust glimpse into the approach and to course correct on previously ill-defined outcome measures when new measures are identified during or after the implementation has gotten underway. We also leverage mixed methodologies rather than singular methods such as likert-only scale items. We do this because all too often practitioners focus only on quantitative outcomes, whereas qualitative inquiry and insights glean much more valuable information when we subject our implementations to open-ended items on surveys, for instance, or to focus groups and candid dialogue regarding the how, when, who, where, and how much impact the implementation is having on the target of the implementation in a contextual sense.
How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the field of DE&I, and what steps do you take to continuously improve your knowledge and skills?
I am an avid reader, a lifelong learner, and I remain a teachable person. Because I am humble enough to accept that there are many ways to achieve the same goal, and the fact that I know the contextual constraints and limitations of any implementation render a turnkey approach useless in most environments, I ask questions and remain curious as to what is now, what is new, and what is next for DE&I to continue raising the bar and moving the needle toward the latter two-thirds of that beloved acronym—equity and inclusion (and the added “J” for justice, the latter ¾ if you will, for those of us who understand the implications of the work we do and that without justice, there would be no D, E, or I!).
In your opinion, what role does technology play in the development and implementation of effective DE&I strategies, and how can companies leverage technology to improve their diversity and inclusion efforts?
A good learning management system is replete with new technological updates and integrations, including animation, simulations, virtual reality, immersive experiences such as job shadowing and cultural immersion experiences globally, and a host of other new features that only technology may afford us.
Looking ahead to the future, what do you see as the biggest trends and changes that will impact the field of DE&I, and how are you preparing for these changes?
I believe that there will be an uptick in DE&I practitioners who get into both the political advocacy space and others who become experts in AI and technology, in an effort to buffer the impact such technological utilizations have on historically marginalized groups.
As a thought leader in DE&I program development and implementation, what do you hope to achieve in your role as a CEO of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging Consultancy, and how do you plan to make a positive impact on the companies and employees that you work with?
My primary focus is on creating an atmosphere where everyone in the organization has space to grow to their ultimate potential. This means that devising inclusive opportunities is at the heart of the DE&I work that I do, and that the positive impact that I am able to achieve is contingent upon the achievement of others. In other words, the people’s success is my success, and it is this impact that I bring to the organization in my current role.
How do you envision the future of DE&I in the workplace, and what steps do you believe organizations should take to create more equitable and inclusive work environments?
I envision DE&I as a central focal point in the organization of the future, not a siloed function or department that is an afterthought. Rather, I believe that DE&I will be foremost in mind for every level and every business unit because it is also at the heart of the core of the company, which is its people. And with the sociocultural landscape growing increasingly multicultural and requiring the intercultural competencies of all of its members, I believe this centrality is also a by-product of population growth and a shrinking global ecosystem in which we are engrained.
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