Operational leaders will respond to concrete examples of benefits for the business that they can relate to in a practical sense to motivate themselves for the 'why'.

• “If your team isn’t reflective of the community you won’t be able to serve them properly – provide the services that they need. We know diverse teams are more successful, and people go ‘yeah’ and roll their eyes, but it’s true. So we always talk about the the [successful] product we introduced, that was built around what Māori and Pacific communities need… If we didn’t have Māori and Pacific people internally who had that passion, we wouldn’t have put that product out there… Once you do a practical statement like that, it’s like ‘cool, I’m on board!’” People are at different stages of their journey, so you cannot always go “straight to the tactical stuff.”

Clear targets and benchmarking for recruitment which are backed by top-level accountability.

• E.g. Senior leadership team are held accountable for meeting targets for Māori and Pasifika in leadership roles.

• When policies on DEI targets or other concrete requirements are launched “it has to come from the top”, e.g. in one case, the CEO launched and presented a new strategy, and then handed over publicly to the DEI implementation leads to talk through how it would happen. Without that public support “it would have fallen flat.”

In larger organisations, localise targets for relevance to individual teams and parts of the business.

• Targets and priorities should be set using data for current ethnic representation that is broken down by different teams, so the organisation can see where it is doing well, and less well.

Creating ‘safe to fail’ spaces.

• Ensuring that recruitment and HR is a “safe-to-fail enabling space” for HR teams and hiring managers “really helps people feel less anxious... people get anxious about political correctness, they're getting anxious about wokeness, they get anxious about getting it wrong and we have to be able to help people by showing, for example, how often I make mistakes... it’s really important in the space because it's full of mine fields.”

Recruitment teams need concrete guidance on how to broaden recruitment criteria and clearly define the division between hard skills, soft skills, and lived experience.

• “The big challenge is... people are like “I just want to hire the best person”. [our message is] you don’t compromise your process, don’t hire someone just because they hit a target, always include someone’s hard skills, their soft skills, and their lived experience which is the value that you want, their background, their languages... When they say ‘best person’ they always mean ‘hard skills’... If you are really fair and challenge yourself on what is required, and narrow down, you widen the gate, you can train them in the other seven.”

More advice here.

• Short periods of support with diversity consultancies can help with policies but may be limited in what they can achieve for longer-term attitude changes. Internal champions need to be in for the long haul, and ready to repeatedly create opportunities to discuss hard issues in safe environments, “both informal ones, but also ones that are paper bag lunch type models... Yes, we could bring in experts, but that won’t build socialisation... Socialisation has to be through a basis of people feeling like they've been heard... I think they can accept that their views may not be taken on, but it's really important that they're heard and they feel like they're understood. And that's an ongoing process. I don't think it's tricky. It just takes time.”