Spotlight Series: How Cecilia Stanton Adams is Mentoring Employers Increase Diversity
This is #IncreaseDiversity, a weekly newsletter series + Increase Diversity Toolbox sharing best practices for employers who want to learn how to….well, increase diversity. To see previous editions, visit JenniferTardy.com. | IG: @IncreaseDiversity
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As part of the Increase Diversity newsletter, we love to spotlight small businesses doing intentional work to help organizations increase diversity. Today, I am thrilled to present to you all Cecilia Stanton Adams, the Chief Executive Officer at The Diversity Institute by Stanton Adams LLC.
Cecilia comes with 20 years of experience in diversity, equity, and inclusion and has been spearheading organizational transformations within educational institutions, corporate organizations, non-profits, and government agencies. As the CEO and Founder of the Diversity Institute, Cecilia is mentoring the next generation of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Changemakers.
Team JTC: How was your company founded and how did you get started in DEI work and increasing diversity?
Cecilia: I have immigrant parents from Honduras, so I was a first-generation American, first-generation college student, and was the first for a lot of things. It required me to make a lot of leaps and build bridges with communities and environments that I wasn’t comfortable with, or I did not feel like I belonged. As I went through those experiences, I knew that at some point, when I was able to, I wanted to be able to give back by being able to build bridges for others. I got the chance to do that in a lot of ways. I started in education because I was a student, and we built a bridge program for incoming freshmen who were coming from poverty or marginalized communities. They were coming to this very privileged, predominantly white environment, and many of them would turn over and leave after a year. So, the program was aimed at giving them that sense of confidence that they belonged here, and they had connections with people that have their back. It really made a difference in increasing retention, and I think that is what really pushed me to continue this work.
Team JTC: Is that what drove you to also start your own company?
Cecilia: Yeah. I found that I loved working inside an organization because I like to look at things from a strategic perspective and I am very future-focused. So, I felt that lent nicely to helping leaders think through, how to integrate DEI into their regular practice to make it a part of how they are going to move forward in a competitive advantage. But I always found that you could only move things sometimes but so far. You can move things as far as the leadership is willing to go, as far as the climate and environment are willing to let you go. So, being able to pair my network and experience with consulting was great because in consulting I could be more innovative. I can identify those clients that are pioneers and want to step into challenging spaces together and come up with innovative solutions. And that’s what keeps me fresh and “in the know” about what’s working and what’s not.
Team JTC: Whom would you say you are serving through your work?
Cecilia: Through my work, I am serving practitioners that are out there doing the work, whether they have a formal or informal role within an organization. Sometimes, it is someone who is a diversity champion, and no one has designated them that, but they are the ones who are going to ask the question and push the envelope all the way through to those who have made it part of their career and are in practice. I believe that there is so much need for the development of folks that are in this field and community; that we want to be able to provide that through our services. So that is our focus.
Team JTC: How are you increasing representation and how does your organization help companies to increase diversity?
Cecilia: When we come into an organization, oftentimes the organization thinks they have diagnosed themselves. Usually, it is focused on one aspect of their business. Oftentimes there are symptoms like they have a turnover problem or a recruitment problem. You must look at the organization as a whole organism, and the way that we like to do that is with the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Benchmarks (GDEIB). It is a free tool that has been out there for a long time. When I first approached it, I was like “this is a lot!”, but there is a lot of good stuff in there and they have a model that speaks to 15 aspects of an organization and how they contribute to the overall outcomes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, if you have got a recruitment issue, which is that you do not have representation, the first thing people will do is they’ll start bringing people in. But, if you look at the GDEIB, it asks you if you have a vision around DEI. It asks if you have definitions and common terminology in the organization. Why is it important? Because if we just start recruiting people into an environment that is uninhabitable for people of different communities, you are just going to turn people over and over. So, I think when people start to recognize that this is really about the business, the leadership, and the culture, that’s when they start making those small incremental changes, that ultimately lead to the outcome of increased diversity. So, we are not aiming at that. What we are doing is making it a by-product of the real work that we are doing.
Team JTC: What products and services are you selling to employers to help them do this work and how can people get in contact with you?
Cecilia: People can get in contact with me by going to Stanton Adams. We offer a variety of services. One is our strategic planning process. That’s when we work with an organization for six months if they want to be really involved in having their staff, their diversity council, and their diversity leaders involved in not only doing the work but learning the work along the way. We also have a three-month process for those organizations that want to get the plan right away and don’t have the capacity to have the employees be a part of that process. So, three months or six months will get you started. We are also getting ready to launch the Art and Science DEI program and we have applications right now that are available on our website.
