Preventing DEI Missteps and Building Belonging

Shelley Smith has spent more than thirty five years arguing that culture was never about the building, it was always about the people. As the Founder and CEO of Premier Rapport, a consulting firm she has run for just over 13 years, she has helped mid-size businesses, enterprises, and multinational corporations build workplace cultures that stay healthy and still protect the bottom line.

In this episode of CultureClub X, host Nicole Patrick sits down with her to unpack diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, from policy framing all the way to daily implementation. Smith came to this work from the hotel industry, where she realized the brick and the mortar mattered far less than the human beings inside it. That lens shapes every answer she gives. DEI cannot be bolted on, copying another brand's playbook almost always fails, and a culture is only ever as strong as the alignment sitting underneath it.

The core question of the conversation is a practical one. How do leaders keep DEI from becoming an empty stamp, and how do they build a genuine sense of belonging that everyone in the organization actually owns? Smith's answer begins long before any initiative launches, with the plain words a company uses to describe itself.

Why alignment has to come before any DEI initiative

Smith's first move is to slow leaders down. Too many, she says, reach for the stamp: Disney does this, so let us do that. The real work is less glamorous and starts with clarifying the company's purpose, its mission and vision, and the values that assimilate with them. Without unity there, boards cannot even quote their own value statement, and their employees have no idea what the culture is.

Her diagnostic is simple. Hand everyone in the room an index card and ask them to write three to five values that describe the workplace culture. The descriptions almost never match. When she then asks someone to read the culture statement, the room often admits there is none at all.

That gap between people's answers is exactly where DEI efforts quietly come apart. Alignment between mission, vision, values, and a genuine culture statement is the word Smith keeps returning to, because without it every downstream initiative rests on sand.

Culture is not built in a day, it is built every day

Belonging, in Smith's framing, is not something a company can wake up and declare. You cannot announce a diversified, equitable, and inclusive workforce and expect it to be true overnight. Those are three separate pieces of work, and they have to be pulled into the culture effectively and daily.

The point is intention over accident. Much of what shows up in a culture, she notes, happens by accident: it was designed one way, but the design does not match the lived reality. It never will unless leaders do it on purpose. Closing that gap means treating culture as a daily measure rather than an annual campaign, because it shows up every day just like the people do.

Why copying another company's playbook backfires

Leaders love a shortcut, and admired brands make tempting templates. Smith is blunt that duplicating what you saw somewhere else simply does not work. An organization has to understand who it is first, then make its values roll trippingly off everyone's tongue.

Plugging DEI in somewhere because everyone is talking about it produces the opposite of belonging. The honest starting point is to back up, work out who you actually are, and decide how your values circle around DEI if that is genuinely where you intend to focus. There is no framework that copies and pastes cleanly from one company to the next.

How a deliberate change process keeps DEI on track

When the conversation turns to scaling good practice, Smith reaches for change management. She favors Prosci and the ADKAR model, paired with her own ACC system: analyze where you are, curate the path, then move into creation. Skip that structure and leaders end up tugging at whatever idea crossed their desk that morning.

The discipline is knowing where you are now, where you want to go, and the incremental stops in between. Without a plan, she says, everyone climbs into the car and drives in separate directions, insisting they will get there eventually. A deliberate process also builds in how teammates get rewarded and recognized for doing the work the right way, so leaders can report back on real progress rather than guesswork.

Why focusing on one thing makes culture stick

To prevent DEI fallout, Smith tells leaders to own where they are and resist taking on too much. Culture becomes sticky when an organization frames one priority, keeps everyone focused on it, and rewards progress around it consistently. That is when a value turns into a pillar that cannot be moved.

Her metaphor is the new car. Buy one and suddenly you see that model everywhere, because you are focused on it. Point a whole team at a single diversity goal over the next 30, 45, 60, or 90 days and the same focus makes it part of how things are done, and how they are not.

Newcomers quickly learn the guard rails from teammates who tell them plainly that is not how we do things here. That shared accountability is where psychological safety grows, because people feel able to speak up when something does not look right instead of assuming they are the only one who notices.

Who actually owns employee engagement and DEI

Smith knows her next answer will please some listeners and disappoint others. She does not believe HR should be the sole custodian of engagement and culture. HR brings institutional knowledge, expertise, and the data to bubble issues up, but it should not be the only owner, and neither should the CEO.

When ownership sits with every people manager, accountability becomes shared. People stop saying that is just an HR thing and start holding each other to what right looks like. That is the kind of managerial effectiveness that keeps a change effort from springing what Smith calls leaks, especially when a whole organization is trying to shift its DEI perspective at once.

How continuous listening keeps a finger on the pulse

Asked how busy leaders keep listening, Smith refuses to name a single tool. She describes a three-legged stool of trust: managers trusting employees, employees trusting managers, and employees trusting each other. On top of that sit the right surveys, one-on-ones, stay interviews, and recognition for aligned behavior.

A survey run twice a year is a pulse check, but the between-moments matter just as much: the Zoom call where you check in on people first, or noticing something is off and following up in person. Those layers are where a two-way employee feedback loop forms.

Smith is emphatic that leaders must then act on what they hear. A system provides incredible information, but the value only lands when someone leaves their office and turns that data into real conversations. Doing that hand in hand with the human check-ins is what keeps a culture, and its commitment to belonging, honest as the organization grows.