Out Leadership Managing Director Stephanie Sandberg has published an article with the National Center for the Middle Market talking about the LGBT+ business diagnostic tool, OL-iQ, and why it’s valuable for businesses of every size.
“As all successful middle market firms know, great businesses aren’t built on the strength of products and services alone. Operational efficiency, adaptability, marketing, and strong leadership are all necessary for success. Increasingly, companies of all sizes recognize that a diverse and inclusive workforce, and profile, is important as well, and in fact is quickly becoming a competitive imperative in the marketplace.
If that makes you sigh, because you’ve heard all you care to hear about diversity and inclusion – perhaps it feels squishy, overly politically correct, or like a distraction – you’re not alone.
That’s likely because, while the business case for diversity of any sort (from ethnic, to gender, to LGBT+) is well-established, a clear program for leveraging that promise is not. Managers know they should be supportive, and they often are, but they don’t always directly experience the benefit of diversity themselves.
Out Leadership, which is devoted to helping companies benefit from LGBT+ inclusion, decided to address that ambivalence and occasional confusion head-on, by creating a data-driven solution platform. OL-iQ is the first diagnostic tool companies can use to identify and act on discrete drivers of business impact related to LGBT+ inclusion. Why? As a certified B Corp, we help companies find their “return on equality,” and our work is predicated on tying LGBT+ inclusion directly to business improvement. LGBT+ inclusion can help drive business impact, but only as part of a coherent plan that emerges from a deeply informed diagnostic.”
Read the whole article at middlemarketcenter.org