Why the future of belonging isn’t a department, it’s a leadership practice
A couple weeks ago, I opened a keynote with a line that made people pause: “Thank you for excluding me.” It got a few smiles. A few raised eyebrows. And, I think, a moment of honest recognition. Because something is happening right now across organizations, especially in tech, that many of us can feel but aren’t quite naming clearly: The DEI era, as we’ve known it, is fading. But it’s not because inclusion doesn’t matter anymore. Quite the opposite. It’s fading because the way inclusion was so often operationalized, through what I’ll call the DEI container, is no longer holding.
What’s Actually Disappearing (and What Isn’t)
If you look around, the signs are everywhere. DEI roles are being eliminated or redefined. Language is quietly disappearing from websites and mission statements. Leaders are increasingly unsure what they’re allowed to say, and when that happens, the safest move becomes saying nothing at all. From the outside, it can look like a retreat. And to be fair, sometimes it is. But if we look close, that’s not all that’s happening.
What we’re seeing is not a rejection of inclusion. It’s a rejection of a model that separated inclusion from how organizations actually function. Because here’s the tension: the things leaders still care deeply about, like trust, performance, innovation, retention, and working to include demographic groups historically excluded … are all tightly linked to belonging. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the belief that a separate program, department, or training pathway is the way to get there. And to be sure, this was already changing long before the current politically motivated DEI backlash, which is motivated for other reasons.
The Container Problem
For the past couple of decades, DEI became something that was too often built around organizations rather than within them. It had its own language, its own roles, its own trainings, its own metrics. Often housed in HR. Often episodic. Sometimes powerful. Often performative.
Meanwhile, the real drivers of culture kept operating somewhere else.
- In leadership behavior.
- In team dynamics.
- In how decisions actually get made.
- In the quiet norms of everyday interaction.
So this strange separation emerged: inclusion lived in one place, and culture lived in another. And over time, that separation created a kind of unintended consequence: Belonging became outsourced – outsourced to a DEI container. Once that happens, it stops being a leadership responsibility. It becomes something to attend, comply with, or support, rather than something you do every day in how you lead a team.
The Cracks Were Already There
It’s important to say this clearly: the DEI container challenges we’re seeing now didn’t begin with political backlash. Those forces accelerated things (for ideological reasons), but they didn’t create the underlying problem. Even at the height of DEI investment, we saw signals that something wasn’t working as intended. Programs often focused heavily on representation without equal attention to engagement. Trainings were scaled in ways that flattened nuance. Efforts became reactive and tied to moments, statements, or crises rather than embedded in long-term practice. And ironically, some of these efforts straight up backfired and made people feel even more excluded.
And perhaps most telling, some of the outcomes didn’t move in the expected direction. In computing, for example, women’s participation declined even as DEI efforts and investments increased. That’s not a messaging issue. That’s a systems issue.
Where Culture Actually Lives
One of the most important shifts we need to make is deceptively simple: Culture doesn’t live at the company level. It lives at the team level. While CEOs may influence the cultural framework broadly, every team is its own microculture. Different leaders. Different personalities. Different norms and values, both spoken and unspoken.
And that’s where people actually experience their everyday work. Not in the company’s values or missions statements. Not in a training module. But in the meeting they just left. The feedback they just received. The decision they were (or weren’t) part of.
This is why so many top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches struggle. They’re trying to influence something that is inherently local, relational, and dynamic.
Belonging isn’t scalable in the way we tried to scale it. It has to be built where it’s lived.
A Different Frame: Inclusion as Leadership Practice
So, if the container is fading, what replaces it? Not nothing. Something more integrated and, frankly, more demanding. Inclusion becomes a leadership capability. Not a program. Not a department. An operating system.
It shows up in very practical ways. In how meetings are run, who speaks, who gets interrupted, whose ideas get picked up. In how feedback flows, whether it’s developmental or performative.
In how decisions are made, who has power and influence, and whether that power and influence is visible or hidden. It shows up in how conflict is handled. In whether people feel safe taking risks. In whether different ways of thinking are actually used or quietly filtered out. These aren’t “soft” dimensions of work. They are the mechanics of performance and, if harnessed properly, the igniters of innovation.
Designing for Real People (Not Idealized Ones)
Another shift that feels especially important right now is moving away from trying to “fix people” toward designing better systems. One of the ideas we’ve been emphasizing is that when systems work for those at the margins (people who have historically been excluded or underrepresented) they tend to work better for everyone.
That doesn’t require us to categorize people in rigid ways. It asks us to pay attention to who people are, what they bring, and how they actually participate (or don’t). Not everyone contributes by speaking up in a meeting. Not everyone processes information the same way. Not everyone thrives in the same communication structures.
So what happens when we design for that kind of variability? We start to see more flexible meeting formats. More asynchronous contribution. More ways for people to bring their thinking into the work. More ways to for people to creatively show up and contribute in the ways they were hired for in the first place. This isn’t ideological. It’s practical. It’s about activating the talent you already have.
A More Honest Kind of Accountability
If we take this seriously, it also changes how we think about accountability. Inclusion can’t just be something we say we value. It has to show up in how we develop and evaluate leadership. Not through performative metrics, but through signals that actually matter:
- Are people engaged?
- Are they staying?
- Are they growing?
- Are they moving across the organization?
These are reflections of how a culture is working.
So… Why “Thank You for Excluding Me”?
This is something you NEVER hear people say. Nobody wants to excluded. People want to belong. But sometimes disruption reveals what wasn’t working. The unraveling of the DEI container, messy as it is, creates an opening. A chance to stop treating inclusion as something separate and start integrating it into how work actually happens. To move from intention to practice. To stop asking, “What program should we run?” and start asking, “How do our teams actually function?” That’s a harder question. But it’s also a more honest one.
The Work Ahead
If there’s one idea I’d leave you with, it’s this: Belonging isn’t something organizations declare.
It’s something people experience; locally, daily, and relationally.
And that means the future of this work doesn’t sit in a department. It sits with leaders at every level and in every interaction. If the last era was about building the case for inclusion, this next one is about building the capability. And that’s where things start to get real.
Visit The Center for Workforce Innovation and the National Center for Women and IT (NCWIT) for the most recent updates on rising to the challenge for belonging in the workplace.
About the Author: Brad McLain, PhD, is the Director of Corporate Identity and Culture at the Center for Technology Workforce Innovation at CU Boulder; Managing Director of the Center for STEM Learning at CU Boulder; the author ofDesigning Transformative Experiences: A Toolkit for Leaders, Trainers, Teachers, and Other Experience Designers (2023); and Founder of Designing Transformative Experiences, LLC.
