The Day I Turned Against DEI Programs

Sometimes, the quickest way to kill something is to give it a name

For a long time, I was a supporter of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Then, one day, I wasn’t anymore.

The world isn’t waiting for me to tell this story. But I shall tell it anyway.

Executives will say I am wrong. But they reached their positions by getting comfortable with deceit, because the truth about truth is that it reduces revenue.

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§1. Good News

In early ‘20, my boss called me into his office. Not for one of my routine performance rebukes, but to give me some actual good news.

I had been invited to compete for Site Leader in Amazon’s ops network.

This made me a happy boy. Having completed two years and led three different departments in one of the network’s toughest warehouses as a senior operations manager, I was ready for a new challenge. Site Leader was a role I’d coveted since joining the network. The larger scale, the greater trust and autonomy, and the responsibility to develop a team were attractions for me.

The fact it was a major stepping stone toward a director-level role didn’t hurt either. Like any leader, I envisioned a future of ever-growing responsibility and a real chance to influence strategic outcomes.

For a few weeks, I was obsessed with preparing for the two-day panel process, which included a math aptitude test, case studies covering aspects of the business, and interviews with five senior network leaders.

As the panel concluded, I was encouraged. I could sense approval from the panelists. Comparing notes with colleagues, it was clear I’d given myself a fighting chance.

A few agonizing weeks later, the country director gave me the bad news over a voice call attended by me and my boss.

Not selected.

Not the outcome I wanted. It bit with bigger fangs after the long delay, which gave me time to persuade myself a good outcome might be coming. But I accepted the setback and pleaded earnestly for feedback.

This is where it got weird.

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§2. Wait, What?

The guy giving me feedback struggled to provide anything useful. Had he not front-loaded the outcome, I would have mistaken his feedback for a successful verdict.

He spoke in glowing terms. Apparently, I had connected well. Demonstrated operational depth and expertise in developing leaders. Earned high marks for communication skills, poise, and evidence of Amazon’s leadership principles.

He told me to keep doing what I was doing and try again.

It all made sense and was lovely. But it didn’t pass within a mile of explaining why I had missed the target.

So I asked what I thought was an obvious question.

“Ok … so you’ve given me a lot to feel good about. I suppose what’s missing for me is why I wasn’t selected. Can you help me understand that so I can give myself the best chance next time?”

A long pause followed. Long enough that I had to ask if he was still there.

Reaching deep into a tiny, unlit corner of the panel feedback, he was able to grasp one morsel deemed marginally worthy of mention.

One of the twenty-plus examples I’d shared in the interview loop touched on a particularly rich learning experience from the latter part of my military career.

Since it happened beyond the four walls of Amazon, it was a story the panel couldn’t really probe or falsify.

This, he said, raised a trust question.

“Wait, what?”

This is all I could muster. So he repeated himself, as if reading word-for-word from the feedback.

If you’re scraping the barrel for a reason to not support someone’s promotion, questioning their integrity without foundation is a particularly weaselly and dishonorable way to go. It lacks manners, which even fish have.

Briefly, I was gobsmacked. But in seconds, confusion gave way to incandescence. My jaw clenched. The back of my neck aflame, instantly vaporizing each newly-formed sweat bead. The urge became getting out of the room before my actions could carve a hasty path to regret.

I managed to escape the building before boiling over. My entire reputation had been built on integrity. Dependability. Trustworthiness. I was the guy known for character. For that to be trivialized as a convenience, questioned so cheaply, made me question everything. It was the first moment I seriously considered leaving Amazon.

I vented about it over a couple of pints at my wife’s expense. She patiently talked me down, as she does, suggesting they ran out of slots before running out of qualified candidates. The use of bullshit as feedback, she advised, was a signal I hadn’t given them anything legit to work with. If they really thought I wasn’t trustworthy, would they be inviting me back?

Her counsel restored my sanity.

In the weeks that followed, she was proven right. Only two people were promoted from a pool of ten. Most of the non-selects were not invited back.

I let my boss know having my integrity questioned without cause wasn’t something I would tolerate ever again. It had offended me, and caused me to question the culture of the business.

I got mad. And then, following Colin Powell’s wise counsel, I got over it. I focused all energy on crushing my role even harder. I’ve always believed and advised others that if you’re good enough at what you do, everything else fades from relevance.

But as I settled back into a routine, the story got weirder again.

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§3. The Dangling Carrot

A few weeks later, my boss invited me to a regular feedback session. In that meeting, he introduced a new critique.

“Nobody knows who you are,” he said.

Apparently, my “profile” in the network wasn’t big enough.

I found this confusing for a few reasons.

1. I wasn’t hiding. My results were known to the network. My performance was documented.

2. It had been the job of my boss to make sure the network knew who I was. I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely confused or just projecting onto me as a weird way of enlisting my help.

3. It wasn’t obvious to me why the network preferred self-promotion over members of the leadership circle getting out into the network and seeking out the talent they were responsible for developing.

Apparently, my low profile with the panelists had caused them to misread my confident demeanor and military presence as overconfidence.

I felt like a rationale had been concocted after the fact to justify the decision after I had taken offense at the initial feedback.

Now, without a doubt, I considered this entire line of reasoning to be pure horseshit, and had good reason to do so.

First of all, the two successful candidates had more or less the same “profile” I had. They joined the network around the same time and had the same tenure, although both had less experience in the senior operations role.

Second, no one expected managers running departments to have network visibility. Leading a huge fulfillment team was a full-time grind if you were doing it right. None of those who’d come before me were expected to schmooze senior leaders to get themselves promoted.

Later, the network developed the disease of giving people projects to raise their visibility. But at that point, it wasn’t yet expected.

I saw this for what it was. An overture. They were conditioning me before asking me to do something for the network at personal sacrifice in order to preserve another panel attempt. Shrewd carrot tactics. Ever thus with Amazon.

Sure enough, the request soon came. Go to London and help turn around a struggling building with a massive headcount and the biggest volume in the network. Amazon would pay for a flat so I could leave my family in Manchester, and I could travel home occasionally.

It wasn’t ideal. But I accepted that I still had something to prove, and the exertion was worth it to me. So I took the secondment and started packing.

And that’s when the story got a bit more weird still.

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§4. Plot Twist

The next day, I gave my boss my decision. He shared the news that he’d been invited to compete for regional director, and expected to be promoted unless something went terribly awry. He’d been standing in for his boss for most of the past year.

This prompted a new question.

If he was getting promoted, who would run our building? The two people promoted at panel had already been given assignments elsewhere.

“That’s interesting. So, instead of going to London, why wouldn’t I stay here and run our building as an Interim Site Leader when you move up?”

It was a fair question. I’d run the building for big chunks of time over the past year. I was known as a safe pair of hands. Being the face of a robotics fulfillment center with 2,500 employees would provide the visibility I evidently needed.

“The network isn’t going to step people up temporarily into Site Leader roles anymore. They’re bringing someone laterally.”

Fair enough. I accepted his explanation and made my way to London.

A few weeks later, having immersed in the new challenge, I got a chime asking me to give him a call. I ducked into a quiet room and dialed.

He wanted me to hear from him that he’d indeed earned the promotion. He also wanted me to hear that the network was making an exception to its new rule forbidding interim Site Leaders. One of my peers from elsewhere in the network was moving to Manchester to run my old building. Someone a lot less experienced. Someone who was still miles away from being ready to lead a building.

But she was a favorite. A protege of someone influential calling in a favor to position her for promotion. I’d seen things like this before in my military days. The fix was in.

The joke was on me. Those times I took on extra responsibility sold to me as a means to grow and develop, I’d really just been warming a seat for someone better connected.

And for the second time in a few weeks, I found myself feeling foolish for behaving honestly and assuming the same in others.

I appreciated him letting me know so I didn’t find out from an email announcement.

But as much as I felt dishonestly treated, it was something beyond my control. So I got my head down and set out to let my performance do the talking.

That’s exactly what happened. We turned the London site around and broke a long list of records in the peak season that followed. I learned a lot, gained precious experience, and notched a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to immerse in one of the world’s great cities. As pandemic restrictions subsided, it was like having the place to ourselves.

Along the way, I competed again for Site Leader, this time successful.

But although the story had a good ending, there would be a sullen footnote.

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§5. Dead Man Walkin’

Years later, after I’d left Amazon, someone I’d known during my time with the company shared an uncomfortable insight.

They told me I never stood a chance of being promoted on my first try at Site Leader.

In early ‘20, the operations network was under pressure from Seattle execs to increase female and minority representation in senior leadership roles. The two candidates promoted from my first panel were both minority and female, as was the person who conveniently back-filled my departure from Manchester to inherit a step-up opportunity.

The joke had been on me from the jump. I was there to provide the appearance of competition, or maybe to fill a slot of one of the ordained candidates shot themselves in the foot. But the outcome was a fait accompli.

Now you’re thinking I am finally about to confirm for you the moment I turned against DEI programs.

But this wasn’t the moment.

While it certainly unsettled me to think I was disadvantaged in a competition because of immutable characteristics over which I had no control, my reaction was actually to empathize with the network’s predicament. Everyone needs heroes they can identify with, I rationalized. I was humble enough to reason that those promoted were at least as qualified as I was, so the application of visible diversity as a tie-breaker wasn’t outrageous.

But I would have preferred my employer be honest with me rather than manipulative. Let’s hold that thought for a moment.

First, let me tell you when I turned against Amazon’s DEI program, and indeed against all such programs.

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§6. Upon Reflection

After leaving Amazon, I spent a lot of time thinking back on the experiences I had there.

I realized there were actually many moments that could have turned me against the company’s DEI initiatives, but didn’t.

I’ll provide some examples because they help illustrate a clear pattern that I should have noticed when I was still working there, even with the perceptual difficulty of being immersed and being kept too busy to think.

The moment I turned against DEI programs wasn’t:

• When I watched an exceptional female operations leader passed over for promotion because her style, though effective, wasn’t readily grasped by the male leaders holding the gate closed.

• The time I watched four high-potential female managers make lateral moves out of the same operational unit within a few weeks of one another, without anyone from corporate noticing, much less querying.

• When I watched a low-tenure female safety specialist get shoved into a manager role for which she wasn’t prepared, then receive so little support she rapidly grew miserable and left her role. The safety team was stretched so thin this happened repeatedly across the network, with top talent constantly churning.

• When I watched an older female manager get marginalized because she was seen as “too bossy” by a bunch of male autocrats. To his credit, one individual sawed through ageism and sexism to champion her promotion, after which she was set up to fail and unfairly scapegoated for operational issues created by network ineptitude.

• The time I saw a female recruitment specialist hired on a permanent contract get informed with a week’s notice that she had actually been hired on a temporary contract, regardless of what the contract actually said (!!!). Oops. After threatening a tribunal complaint, she was given two weeks pay and an apology.

• The time I reinstated a manager who had been terminated for cause without sufficient evidence to demonstrate any misconduct. This single mother with several years tenure was struggling with work/life balance in a new location and role. She had mental health issues requiring patience and support. Her non-linearity made her a target. After reinstating her, I expected to have a candid conversation with senior leaders about what we could learn. Instead, I was slagged off behind my back for giving someone else a problem to deal with.

• The time I saw an amazing HR leader pushed out of the business for refusing to move to London after the pandemic, having been placed into the role on a remote work contract. A single mother who refused to uproot her kids found her career hard-capped and unsubtle threats to comply lobbed in her direction. She now thrives elsewhere.

• The time I saw a different HR leader, the best people partner I’ve come across in three decades of operations, have her career progression killed for daring to be a mother. She’d proven herself ready for promotion before going on maternity leave, proxying above her level for several months. When she returned, she was asked to prove it again. And did. And then again. And did. And then again. The rationale for denying promotion shifted every cycle. By the time she got tired of it and left the business, she’d been working above her paid level for years. Others who didn’t take time out to have children passed her by.

Finally, it wasn’t even the moment of reflection when I realized what a complete hash the network had made of female manager outcomes in its ham-handed attempt to “flood the zone” with female talent.

In the space of a year, it hired three female general managers externally, promoted another three internally, and moved a female director from another part of the network into UK ops.

Three left the business. Three took lateral moves. One hung in.

This isn’t surprising. The culture was hostile to female style tendencies, hostile toward the responsibilities beyond work women tend to have in greater measure than male counterparts, and ultimately showed itself hostile to female outcomes by pushing women into roles without the proper experience or support to thrive enjoyably.

Under the DEI banner, hiring and promotion pushes were made by well-meaning executives. But nothing else changed. The environment became no more inclusive, no more welcome to diverse talent than it had previously been.

This brings us to the problem with a DEI program.

If such a program consists of stunt moves to gain social and perceptual credit, but you make no lasting commitment to make organizational life more conducive to different sorts of people joining and staying, then you don’t have a program at all. You have the pretense of a program.

When you know that and continue to do it anyway, you have a fraud. A scam designed to retain shareholder approval and avoid public discredit while actually accomplishing the square root of nothing.

By providing cover for nothing being done, such a program actually makes it less likely you will ever create a truly inclusive or diverse workforce.

Which brings us to the moment I turned against DEI programs once and for all.

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§6. Amazon’s Hatred of Diversity

On Sept. 16th of this year, Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy sent an email to every Amazon corporate employee worldwide. This is an estimated 350,000 people.

His message was that every one of them would be required to physically attend a corporate office full-time, five days per week, starting in a few months.

Whether they were hired on a remote or hybrid contract, whether their role required them to be in an office or not, whether they were more productive working remotely or not, whether their team was globally distributed or not, whether the director or VP responsible for their results wanted them in an office or not, there would be one blanket rule for everyone.

The decision was autocratic. It was not discussed with senior managers who supervise remote and hybrid teams beforehand to gain their buy-in or hear their challenges. There was no evidence provided to support the decision.

When challenged, Jassy has hidden behind his PR team and referred everyone back to the original email. This leaves many questions hanging, one in particular relevant to diversity and inclusion.

Because Jassy is responsible for a $2T company employing 1.5M people, we must assume he understands the foreseeable impacts of this blanket policy. Even if he didn’t, we know by know he has heard questions and challenges making him aware the adverse impact of his office attendance rule will fall disproportionately upon women, caregivers, and people with disabilities.

A recent study of more than 3 million employment histories confirms what we already know anecdotally: RTO mandates trigger mass voluntary attrition. That same study also shows that the rate of attrition is 2-3x higher among women compared to men.

Previous studies have crystallized how blanket RTO policies like Amazon’s hurt productivity without helping financial performance.

So, in addition to being

• Bad for productivity

• Deeply unpopular with his own workforce

• An unnecessary and untrusting form of micromanagement

• A pernicious betrayal of previous assurances tens of thousands of staff relied upon in organizing their lives,

Jassy’s RTO rule is also a huge barrier to inclusivity. It is directly contrary to the goal of a diverse workforce. It will drive segments of the corporate workforce that strengthen it through diversity of intellect, experience, and perspective out of the company.

Jassy, Amazon’s corporate board, and its senior vice presidents know this.

Which means the impact of the rule is purposeful and deliberate. Amazon wants a less diverse workforce.

It doesn’t want caregivers, whose lives require balance and support. It doesn’t want disabled employees, whose situations require communication and accommodation.

And it doesn’t want women, who bear a larger burden of family support than their male counterparts. It only wants them to the extent they are willing to not bear those extra burdens and to therefore require less balance and support, fewer exceptions and fewer workarounds.

Diversity is a good goal for an organization. Being inclusive helps achieve diversity.

But DEI programs such as Amazon’s have nothing to do with these objectives. They are engines of cognitive dissonance, creating a clash between the belief Amazon is an inclusive company with the fact its actions are hostile to women.

But these programs aren’t just confusing or misguided. They are corporate malware used to implant powerful lies in the brains of stakeholders.

They are a smokescreen. Propaganda. A carefully crafted artifice.

Behind the facade, nothing changes to actually create a better workplace capable of attracting and retaining all sorts of people.

When I look around the corporate and public service landscape, I can’t find a DEI program run by a large, influential employer which differs from Amazon’s. They all have t-shirts, lanyards, logos for email signature blocks, and a day or two a year set aside to commemorate various segments of people.

Beyond that, they are nothing. We know this because the trend arrow tells us workplaces are becoming more miserable. Burnout has never been a bigger problem. Ridiculous hours, a never-ending grind, and a cutthroat mentality are normalized.

Examine the actions of organizations, ignoring their words. The truth becomes crystalline. Amazon hates the idea of diversity. Which is why it needs an ornate and gaudy program providing perpetual chanting to the contrary.

And that’s really the key to understanding what these programs are and aren’t.

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§7. Before it Had a Name

For a couple years, I had the privilege of commanding an Air Force squadron. When I took the reins, it was in good shape. My predecessor was a fine leader. So my task was to find opportunity to make us even better.

One thing I decided early in my tour was to start accepting couples into the unit as couples. This was contrary to conventional wisdom.

When married or openly together pilots or loadmasters would come through the pipeline, commanders of the four squadrons would agree to split them into different units. The feeling was this would keep them from competing with one another, supervising one another in a problematic way, or having their relationship become a chemistry problem for the unit.

I thought that was all horseshit. Saying so earned me more than a few questions from the grand poobahs. But my reasoning was simple.

The so-called risks were only risks if we abdicated our responsibility to manage. These things were just management challenges. Not a scintilla as complex as the problems we asked our crews to solve every day.

There had been massive downsides to the legacy process. Like partners in a relationship being on different deployment schedules, meaning they were condemned to spending half their time separated. Like the complexity of having two different commanders coordinating their deployments and assignments, raising the risk of divergent career paths and even more separation.

So we accepted the management challenges and opened our doors to couples. We even made trades to reunite some that had been previously split. We installed the right safeguards, shared expectations, and communicated openly.

It worked. It was one element of creating a family-friendly unit. Service in that time was already a home-wrecking machine. Our approach showed we were doing everything in our power to keep families together.

By the time I handed over, something else happened that I didn’t expect but was delighted to observe. We were the most visibly diverse of the four flying squadrons in our wing. By being family friendly, we’d created a market for ourselves with female pilots and loadmasters. They sought us out, and we hired them.

And that had a knock-on effect I found even more delightful. We were the most effective of the four squadrons during that time. On every objective measure, we were the best trained, the best drilled, the highest performing, and the most called upon by senior leaders when the chips were down.

Those two things were not coincidental, but intersectional.

When you create a welcome environment with a sense of belonging, when your reputation for taking care of people reaches far and wide, you end up with a more representative slice of America. More backgrounds and walks of life are represented. Different ways of thinking are brought to bear on challenges. You become more effective as a result.

It was a DEI program before there was such a thing. And it had nothing to do with quotas, targets, favoritism, or positive discrimination.

It was just leadership.

We just made the environment as welcome as we could and built a strong spine of leadership up and down the organization. The unit was focused and precise and tireless as a result.

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§8. Conclusion

Diversity and inclusivity are amazing concepts and they have real world impact.

The way to achieve them is to create a welcome environment where people want to be. A humane environment where open-mindedness obviously prevails and everyone has a chance to be at their best and recognized for it.

Creating that environment is not complicated.

Understand humanity. Understand the role of work in creating or crushing the enjoyment of life. Understand in depth and detail what you’re asking people to do, and how you could apply resources and modifications to make the environment its best possible version.

And then take material action.

It might make you unpopular with executives and other species of vulture to create a humane work experience. Because it's not as easy to use as a decal on the cover of your shareholder pitch as bragging about saving money or dumping another 50 billion into the next big bread slicer.

But who gives a shit. If you have power, use it to do what you believe is best for everyone involved.

Let results persuade.

DEI doesn't require a program. And in fact, naming it is likely to kill it.

The minute you make something a program, you get two things. Virtue you haven't earned, and distorted impact arising from perverse incentives.

People start looking for visibly diverse talent so they can trot over to the boss's desk with their tongue hanging out, panting as they wag their tail, and get a pat of approval.

Promotions get screwed up. Hiring gets screwed up.

Those in visibly diverse categories seeking opportunity are fooled into thinking they're joining an inclusive environment.

Those within the company are still subject to old ways of thinking, but with the bonus of skull-numbing cognitive dissonance and the unstable expectations that arise when an organization starts playing make believe.

Some are promoted and sent on tour as DEI trophies only to find they are not supported or valued in the way suggested.

Underneath it all, nothing changes. And indeed, resistance to change is bolstered by the protective sheen of a false narrative.

Amazon ops is an environment that favors young, single, male, malleable employees. Hungry noobs who will grind without hesitation. Who will cave to authority. Because being resistant to a type of authority which dominates every moment and thought of your waking life usually implicates family, responsibility beyond work, and non-work commitments that require boundaries.

This helps explain why Amazon is happy to accept a multi-billion-dollar annual attrition bill. Tenured employees make more money, and they also make more demands. Older employees bring more experience, but they also apply that experience in the employment relationship. Cultivating a youthful workforce fosters pliability, low information, and low bargaining power.

If you’re a person of conviction, with non-negotiables you won’t set aside to exhaust yourself for the company, you’re a poor fit for Amazon’s culture.

Being passionate about family and external pursuits — passionate enough to stop working when those things take priority — makes someone an inconvenient employee.

Today’s corporations prefer toads. Intellectually dormant dolls who say yes when their string is pulled. Ambition-fueled strivers willing to dremel themselves into a fine powder with unreasonable hours and work addiction that make life insufferable for themselves and others.

If said toads happen to be visibly diverse, companies will take that and absorb the social credit and any material impact of doing so. But if they have to choose, they'll take the toads. Underneath it all, their preferences have not changed a whit.

DEI programs create a fiction to the contrary. A fiction which helps sustain rather than alter the status quo.

On the road to Hell paved with good intentions, DEI programs are the incessant billboards constantly burdening the windscreen. They promise you an exciting experience at a cool carnival if you pull off at the next exit.

When you get there, you find a decrepit parking lot pocked with chuckholes and a lone cash-only food truck hocking day-old churros.

At best they are lies told by Charlatans and ferried by the well-meaning. At worst they are excuses for discrimination, arbitrariness, and toxic politics. Somewhere in the middle, they are barriers to organizational growth and individual opportunity.

At all points on the spectrum, they are a waste of time, waste of resources, and a source of division and discord.

It’s taken us a while to come full-circle and realize that even when well-intentioned in the beginning, attempts at social engineering will always end up doing more harm than good. So I bear no grudge toward those who championed and advanced diversity efforts in the way their boss requested.

My scorn is reserved for those who knew what they were doing, created means of mischief, and then made it mandatory, capturing middle managers in their web of shite.

The joke was on us. But now we know. So it has to stop.

DEI programs are dishonest. They are fraudulent.

And that is why I oppose them.

TC is an independent writer, armed forces veteran, and former operations director in both private and public enterprise. He specializes in organizational leadership.