You can't mandate inclusion in a partnership

In my last role at Baker McKenzie, I created and launched inclusion plans for more than 30 offices across EMEA. They were a way of turning the firm's global inclusion and diversity strategy into something each office would actually run, and EMEA was the first region in the firm to have them. By the end, every office in the region had one and the US was adopting the idea in its own format.

Getting people to act on the plans was the hard part, and a partnership adds its own layer to that. In a corporate business, a board decision at least gives you a mandate to work with, even if you still have to win people over. In a partnership, the equity partners own the business, and any one of them can look at a global initiative and say, "Why should I do that?" You can't instruct them. You have to bring them with you, one office at a time, and most of the work on the ground is done by people who don't report to you.

Start with why anyone should care

The firm's global inclusion, diversity and equity committee set the direction, but a strategy only matters if the people running each office care about it, so the first thing I had to sell was the why. Why should a partner care about promoting more women, or about who gets hired in the first place?

My answer always came back to clients. Clients paying top fees expect the best thinking, and if everyone on a team thinks and works the same way, you're unlikely to find the solutions they're paying for. Bringing people with different perspectives together, somewhere they actually feel able to contribute, helps you do better work for the client. Retention mattered too, because when talented people don't feel included, it's easy for them to take their skills to another firm.

A lot of my conversations were about steering people away from treating it as a numbers exercise. An office would sometimes hear "hire more diverse candidates" as something the firm wanted, without asking what it meant for how they recruited or onboarded people, and if those stay the same, so do the results. Meeting a client tender requirement is window dressing too, if nothing underneath it moves.

One office shows how hard that can be. It was doing very well commercially, it was male-dominated and deal-driven, and the partnership was almost entirely men. Earlier attempts to get inclusion going hadn't got much traction, because the partners were making money and couldn't see why they needed it. But there were no women coming through the pipeline, and that was the conversation I had to have, with the local HR lead and over a number of conversations with the managing partner. Once he was on board, he took the message back to the other partners himself, that the plan would help modernise the culture of the office, and he became one of the main sponsors of the women coming through. It couldn't all sit with him, so we also worked with the local partner who chaired the office's inclusion committee, and pushed for others to take more of a lead. Not every office came round like that, and at least one never really bought in, even with a plan in place.

Working through other people

A lot of what needed to change sat outside our team's control: how work was allocated, how reviews were run, where bias crept into decisions. Our role was closer to a conductor's, getting recruitment, talent and leadership to each play their part and making the case for why it mattered. For me, that meant working with the talent leads and the managing partner in each office on what inclusion could do for them and how they'd engage with it.

Making it theirs

Each office's plan was built from a planning guide we provided, and worked through by the local talent leader with the managing partner and the local inclusion and diversity committee. Alongside it, each office had a gender action plan, and we blended the two together. Gender was the only characteristic we could measure globally, because of local legislation, and the one fixed requirement was that every woman in a local partner role had a named sponsor and actions to help her progress to equity partner. Everything else was the office's call. Having it written down, with the managing partner involved from the start, made it difficult to agree in principle and then do nothing.

Beyond that, every office started from a different place, and the plans left room to focus on any underrepresented group. Some offices were taking their first steps and started with inclusive culture and inclusive leadership. Others put their energy into social mobility, mostly through graduate hiring, looking at which universities and backgrounds they recruited from. We used pulse scores and listening circle notes to understand how people were feeling, gave each office ideas to start from, and checked in every six to 12 months so they could update their plans as they went. Nobody was asked to catch up with a neighbour who'd started somewhere else.

The numbers only take you so far, though. In one office that was doing well on gender balance, a single practice group scored well below everyone around it, and the comments told us why: a fraternity-style culture, a lot of inside jokes, and women who didn't feel comfortable. We worked with the office leadership on it, and the message to the partners in the group came from their regional practice group leader. Things had to change, because of retention problems, negative comments from associates, and a group heavily skewed towards men from certain universities when the firm needed to better reflect wider society. The partners were told that as leaders, they set the culture, and we also made sure more junior associates understood what good behaviour in the office looks like.

Reading the room

Before anyone wrote an action, I sat down with local HR and local leadership in each office. Local HR know which of the global ideas will be welcomed, which will be met with a polite pause, and which need renaming before anyone will touch them, and the data couldn't tell me that from a distance.

LGBTQ+ inclusion was where that mattered most. The firm was openly supportive of its LGBTQ+ colleagues, and I created and ran the firm's EMEA LGBTQ+ and allies network, with Pride events in a lot of locations. But what worked well in one office could cause real problems in another, and in parts of the Middle East the legal, cultural and political position meant we had to think carefully about how we communicated anything LGBTQ+ related, and we didn't always get that right.

We once put an invitation to an LGBTQ+ webinar straight into diaries across the region, including the Middle East offices. That was our mistake and we owned it. When local HR flagged it, we stopped sending LGBTQ+ events region-wide into those offices, but some colleagues there were very likely part of the community and didn't feel able to say so, and being more careful about communication couldn't mean stepping back on support. We made sure people had routes to talk to someone, including colleagues in other offices, if they wanted to.

What slowed it down

The rollout took a lot longer than we'd planned. Some offices pushed back, the plans were competing with everything else local talent teams were juggling, and the planning guide was sometimes too much to take in for people with full workloads. So I worked with a colleague from talent management to simplify it, with a feedback step at the end so we could see how it was landing locally.

What came of it

The plans gave us something to keep going back to with each office. Engagement started as a trickle and grew, and by the time I left, inclusion committees or working groups covered more than half of our offices across the region, from the UK to the Gulf. Some were already running before the plans, but the plans gave all of them something to anchor to, and several offices moved well beyond the minimum quickly. I helped structure the committees, gave them the resources they needed, and worked with them on what to focus on and how it tied back to their plans. One office that was split into silos by practice group started a quarterly get-together for everyone, with an update from leadership and time for people to mix across teams. And some of the women in local partner roles, with a named sponsor and a plan behind them, went on to make equity partner.

To build on the good work the plans were showing on gender, I also coordinated the setup of the firm's EMEA women's network, with a steering committee of around 13 partners and business services colleagues led by senior partners, to take what was working in individual offices, make it bigger, and give women a direct line into leadership. The women's network and the LGBTQ+ network, which also had partners on its committee, were both still getting started when I left, and we were organising a day-and-a-half conference for LGBTQ+ colleagues from across the region.

What I'd do differently

If I ran the inclusion plans again, I'd go to the management committee first. We started on the talent side, which made sense because talent teams usually drive this work locally, but in a partnership, real sponsorship from senior leadership at the start would have made every office conversation easier. It would also have backed up something our team always wanted to get across, that inclusion belongs to everyone in the firm, well beyond the talent function. I'd also spend more time understanding what each office needed before handing anything over, and I'd simplify the documents even further.

If you're doing this work in a partnership, or anywhere you can't simply tell people what to do, I'd be interested to hear how you get people to care in the first place.