SUMMARY
DEI in Digital Transformation – our guest, Ken Ramaley, Managing Director of the boutique consulting firm Ramaley Group, shares his unique perspective on how embracing Diversity & Inclusion principles has become a game-changer in the competitive landscape of Fortune 1000 consulting.

Ken’s journey of competing against industry behemoths has led him to develop innovative strategies that integrate DEI into the very fabric of business operations. His insights reveal how this approach not only sharpens problem-solving skills but also fuels innovation and elevates client satisfaction to new heights.

In this must-watch interview, Ken delves into the areas of:

• Innovative DEI-focused hiring practices that uncover hidden talent
• Leveraging diverse perspectives to drive digital transformation success
• Overcoming DEI implementation challenges in smaller companies
• Measuring and showcasing the tangible business impact of DEI initiatives

Join us as we explore how Ken’s DEI-centric approach is reshaping companies’ digital transformation and setting new standards for business excellence.

Book your complimentary inclusive growth call.

Connect with Ramaley Group.

—

 

So I have six values. One of the values Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, we couldn’t figure out a good question to ask. You can’t just say, Are you committed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion, because that’s not a very good interview question. Everybody says, yes.

 

This is Chandre Torpet from Inclusive Matters. I’m happy to have with me. Ken Ramaley from Ramaley Group, so let’s hear from you. Tell me about yourself.

Thanks. Chandre. Ramaley Group is a boutique consulting firm focused on helping clients realize the benefits of their digital transformations. A lot of clients will invest heavily in digital transformation, but they aren’t necessarily buying from the right people. They’re buying the right tools, but they aren’t necessarily focusing on their business processes. So what my team does is really help them focus on those business processes and optimizing them so that they can have a successful digital transformation.

My clients are generally fortune, 1000 companies. It’s very important for me that my team present to my clients in as effective a way as possible. This is actually how I discovered inclusive matters. One of my company’s values is Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. As I was growing the team, I was trying to overhaul my interview process to figure out the best ways to engage with prospects so that they could become good members of the team and really reflective of all of the company’s values. My people are my only asset. They’ve got to be great. They’ve got to be the best of the best. I can’t have anything getting in the way of that.

I have six values, but one of the values, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, we couldn’t figure out a good question to ask you can’t just say, Are you committed to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion? Because that’s not a very good interview question. Everybody says Yes, right? Everyone thinks that they are. Everyone certainly is willing to say that they are. But what we really wanted to to do was make sure that that they really understood what that meant in the way our company did and would therefore reflect well for on our company in dealings with clients.

 

Bringing in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion into these conversations is quite important for you did or do these candidates that you brought in, have they self identified as diverse?

You know? So that’s that’s an interesting that’s an interesting question. Having a diverse staff has never really been a problem for for a company at all. We make a point of casting an extremely wide net, and to be honest, until the second interview, we don’t know what they look like, or really any bucketing them, really, in any way, except by what’s on their resume and how they’ve answered our screener questions. And so that’s that’s never really been much of a problem, that being said, these two candidates, they they celebrate different holidays. But that’s, you know, it’s extremely important, though, for my company, at least this value is not about it’s it’s not about making sure that my company looks like a rainbow. 

Okay, you know. It’s really about making sure that my company has all of the different perspectives and experiences that we need to get to the best answers, and I can’t have anything get in the way of that. It’s too important. I’m competing against companies that are literally 100 times my size, right? And so, you know, it’s just extremely important. 

You know, gosh, I can tell you at this point, my company has tremendous age diversity. We’ve got racial diversity, we have religious diversity, we have gender diversity, you know, I mean, by the way, the age diversity really threw me for a loop. I never thought that was going to be a critical thing. I figured, well, more experienced is always better. But man, one of the people that we brought in is, let’s, let’s, let’s say he’s closer to his college days than most of you are, but has had, you know, different solutions to client problems. Bottom line, it’s been a, it’s been a very, very successful hiring process, integrating what we got from Inclusive Matters.

 

Great, great to hear if you could talk more about the challenges that lay ahead had you not found the answer or the way to ask those questions around Diversity & Inclusion, what would have. What would have, what would have continued to be the challenge.

There are two challenges. One challenge is, I think we still can get the right people, but it takes a lot longer, and it’s almost coincidental, right? I feel like our interview process now is extremely deliberate. And it’s not just asking the question, it’s seeing how they respond. In the case study, you know people that respond like this aligned with our values, people that do not respond like this not so aligned with our values, not to say that they’re bad people. There is some company whose values they might be very aligned with just not my company, right? You know, I want my company to reflect a set of values that the company have agreed on, that we think are are important, and I’m getting the candidates that align with that. . 

So one thing is, certainly it would take more time to interview to get people and the second, obviously, is, yeah, you run the risk of simply not getting there, and we wind up with the wrong people, people that do not share this commitment. Well, what happens?  if I’ve got a hard business problem to solve, and we always, all of our problems are hard business problems to solve, right? Unlike most digital transformation companies, we don’t throw the clever technology at it and assume it will fix everything. One of our important mantras is that if you digitally transform a broken process, you’ll just get bad results faster, right? We have to fix the underlying business process, which means we’re rolling up our sleeves and addressing business problems.

Well, to roll up your sleeves and address business problems, it’s better if you’ve seen more of if you’re familiar with different types of business problems. It’s better if you can speak with anyone in the business and connect with them, because at some point we need to get beyond what they tell everyone about their process. We have to get to what they tell us and what they tell us, needs to go deeper so that we can solve the root cause. 

One of you know, one of the worst things that we can ever do is to go in and work with a client and believe that we are getting to something that will solve the problem for them long term, but in in actuality, no, it’s the underlying root cause is still there, and we’ve just covered up a symptom somewhere. So by having the right diverse, inclusive team. We, we we get to those things, we get to the connections with our clients that we need. We get to the right answer that only comes when you have the appropriate diverse group considering it. So, you know, we would have a lot of problems if we weren’t doing this.

 

 

You have the process in place that makes it so that you have more success and built in, fantastic.

You know, I’m glad you said that, right? Because that’s how my company thinks about everything, right? We focus so much on business process, and so that is how we think about everything. And there are people that say, Oh, well, the business process, that’s more art than science. No, no, no, that’s, that’s science. That’s exactly what we do. Many of our people have titles like engineer, right? I mean, that’s absolutely science. 

Well, you know what? Recruiting people can be like a science too. We’ve, you know, and again, that’s one of the things that you know, Chandre Torpet was able help to with is, is saying, you know, what can we do systemically to make sure that your company has this not, you know, to scatter the artful impression among the people so that maybe you get lucky, there’s, no luck required. You do things the way Chandre and I eventually got to, and you get the result. That is the process.

 

THE STATUS QUO

Well, it’s fantastic to hear. There are many processes that have existed a long time, and it’s because they have become efficient. People get results and and companies think, if it’s not broken, let’s not fix it. There are often times processes that are that provide barriers to access for certain groups. How easy is it for you to revisit these processes and to build on them and update them with your team? What’s your take?

You know what I’m going to say about this already? The status quo processes are where you always get into trouble, right? We question everything. We look at the outcome we want to achieve. A process just just converts inputs into outputs, right? That’s all. It converts untied shoes into. Tying shoes, right? Tied shoes. So you have the input, untied shoes, output, tied shoes. What’s the process? We call it shoe tying. It’s the middle, right? That’s the shoe tying process. 

So when we’re looking at our clients business processes, we’re looking at what the input is and what result they’re trying to achieve. And if the process that they presently have makes a lot of sense and seems like it’s reasonable and will achieve those goals, right, then absolutely we don’t want to destroy for the sake of saying that, like us genius consultants, did something new for you, right? That’s not that’s not useful for us. But maybe there are structural limitations that were built into it, structural limitations against lots of things that our client cares about, right? I mean, there can be structural limitations that make the process not work very well for you know, people in Netherlands, right? It was a fine process if you were operating in the United States, but now they’re a multinational company, and they’re partnering with a team in Amsterdam, you know, maybe there’s something about it that makes it not work very well in Amsterdam. Would depend on the process, I suppose, but absolutely everything is taken into account.

So if there’s a hiring process that involves going to the, you know, five most expensive universities in  the country. And we, they asked us to help them with their hiring process. You know, we might say, Well, gosh, I’m sure you’ll get new candidates at the five most expensive universities in the country. What is it that those universities are teaching that you think you must have? Why is it you think that’s, that’s the right place, you know? And maybe we say, Hey, you’re going to get more bang for the buck going to, you know, three of those, and the other two should be randomly selected every year from among this pool, right? Or some other approach. And again, the reason for that would be if we looked at who they were recruiting, and found homogeneity of thought, or something like that, where there’s an opportunity to improve.

Yeah, in fact, you know, I will say that’s one of our biggest differentiators relative to the big three year Big Four, however many there are of them nowadays. You know, because what they tend to do is go into their incredible database of genius that they’ve got and pull out what worked for some other company and say, This is the best practice, we know. And so therefore your company should do it like this way, And at the level of clients we’re dealing with, we don’t think that there are best practices like that, per se. We think the best practice needs to be more tailored than that and really get into what is this company’s values? What is this company’s limiting factor? What are their constraints? What can we do to help them improve their process to the point that when they digitally transform it, they will get good results faster instead of bad results faster. 

 

INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP

How do you demonstrate inclusive leadership in your daily work?

You know, my team sees me being inclusive every day in everything I do, they see in meetings that I’m actively engaging whatever resources are available. And if I feel that there is an inadequately diverse group, I make sure that there is. I make sure everyone who is incorporated is incorporated, so that they are not sitting at the side, that they are really contributing to whatever it is that we’re trying to do. 

 

What drives your focus on Diversity & Inclusion?

I’m going to reframe that question as, why am I focused on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion? You know, simply because getting to the absolutely best possible answer is my company’s lifeblood. Without doing that, we are a riskier version of some big company, and I can’t be that. I’ve got to be better. I want my team members to feel valued for what they bring. I have gotten more referrals in the last six months than at any time previously in my company, I’m getting to the point where my subcontractors, people who had their own company, want to work for my company as employees. Now, right? They all, they all want to be on board as employees, and they’re referring people to be employees or subcontractors. So that’s why I focus on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, because I want to create that kind of environment where everyone feels like they’re going to be valued for what they bring to the table.

 

You will get into a room with diverse opinions and perspectives from people that have been fighting with each other for 18 months, and they will leave two hours later on the same page, everyone believing it was their own idea.

 

What measurable results has your business experience by leveraging diverse sources, just like you talked about here?

Yeah. So you know the biggest, the biggest measurable result is. Has got to be repeat client work. You know, basically 100% of our clients get a second project with us by getting the right sources involved. They know that they can trust for Ramaley group to get them the solutions that will really make a difference, and by the way, that their team will buy into. That’s the other thing. 

You know, one of my one of my clients, I was doing a debrief. What do you like most about working with our company? And he said, you know, Ken, I’ve never seen anyone get into a room and herd cats the way you do. You will get into a room with diverse opinions and perspectives from people that have been fighting with each other for 18 months, and they will leave two hours later on the same page, everyone believing it was their own idea. And I don’t know how you do it, but I wouldn’t want you bring people together. So you know, that’s yeah, that that’s measurable. 

 

How has D&I contributed to innovation within your company? 

Yeah, the innovation side, you know, gosh, really good example, one of our, one of my new hires, that was hired actually under the new diversity and inclusion interview protocol, has been responsible for revising the template for our initial client engagement. This is extremely important, right? I mean, this is the the first view on us that clients have, and it’s already been very successful. Everyone wants a second shot. Why would we change that? And we’re changing it because he came to the table and said, Have you thought about making a few changes? Our general format standards been the same for 10 years, you know, but have you thought about maybe making some changes at the very beginning, when you talk to executives about what’s going on, which executives are you talking to? Is it based strictly on the organization? The organization? Can we be adaptive there? Can we hear something from the CEO that makes us want to talk to someone different and just is helping us, really help us innovate that initial offer, which is very, very important. I mean, it’s the foot in the door.

The reason I call this a DEI contribution, rather than a just a contribution, is this individual was hired under the new protocol, is 20 years younger than almost anyone else involved in the company, so we’ve got some age diversity there, and also is actually diverse in either more traditional categories as well. So he was able to join the company and his first three months, seriously question something that has been cornerstone and not necessarily a challenge, that provided you with opportunities to say, we could update this. We can make it stronger. So, yeah,

 

I have prospective clients that make me sign a diversity and inclusion pledge as part of doing business with them.

 

What external factors have affected this? Your business’s approach to D&I, many companies are reactive to to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, or any kind of disruptive situation because of what’s going on outside of their own doors that affects them?

So, you know, it’s interesting, the external environment is certainly has an impact. I mean, I have prospective clients that make me sign a diversity and inclusion pledge as part of doing business with them. We’ve, had clients say, you know, I like the way you you ran the room. We haven’t seen people doing it that way before, you know, oh, I’ve really enjoyed working with Hassan. I mean, they don’t like come out and say, well, we never would have wanted a guy like that, right? They don’t say that. Obviously, they don’t say that, you know,

 

Interesting. Tell me about the last aha moment you gained through a new, diverse perspective.

Well, so I hate to come back to the example, but I have to, it’s changing. Our initial offer was a big aha moment like, wow. You know, you know, one of my team members just came to me and said, Hey, Ken, we could change the way we do this. It was not a perspective that that I had thought before he really got into, you know, well, it would be better in these ways. And the really important thing, and why he’s the right guy to be on my team, by the way, is he didn’t come to me and say, You must listen to me because I have a diverse perspective. He did not say you should assume it’s better because I have a diverse perspective. He said, You know, I think we should do it this way, and here’s why, and the fact that he got to it was because of his diverse perspective, because you don’t think about the world the same way as me and the other people. People who put this together the first time. And you know what? There may be someone in two years that comes along and thinks about the world another different way, and the process changes again. And that’s okay, too. In fact, I hope there is. That’s why I keep fueling this within the company. The way you get continuous improvement is by having a diverse, inclusive working environment, yeah, that’s how you do it. 

 

 

So which challenges do you encounter as you are proactively promoting, if you will, diversity, equity, inclusion in your team, to your clients, to the external market? Where do you see the biggest challenges, even with new ideas and taking them in? Where do you find yourself thinking, Oh, this is the muscle I still have to keep strengthen?  

Absolutely, so the biggest challenge that I’ve encountered relates to the places where the clients that we have want to engage in, where the clients want to speak with us about diversity, equity and inclusion, to make sure we’re checking whatever boxes they have on their list. This is, this is challenging. And then when I say whatever about they have on their list, well, so for example, you know, there will be clients that will that will say something like, you know, hey, so you know, what does your company do every year to celebrate Black History Month? Well, you know what? My company doesn’t really have that many employees. Celebrating Black History Month is not explicitly part of our routine. If it were a different company, if it was much larger, and, you know, if I, if I had Walmart and I had a quarter million employees, I would probably be doing something accelerated, Black History Month, right? You know, I’m not. I have fewer than a dozen employees, you know? And I think that’s appropriate. But if we say that’s hard to explain to the client, who might be a very, very very large company. So that can be challenging. So their boxes they wanted to check were, are you doing DEI? The way our corporate DEI says you must do DEI. 

 

That’s a very interesting perspective to have that you’ve the challenges that you have is facing the compliance side of DEI structures within corporations regarding, I think what they’re looking for is diversity suppliers. But if you’re not necessarily owned or operated by a minority stake, it does cause some friction here. What would you say is your characteristic that you built on so that you could be more open to inclusive behaviors and leadership.

I earlier discussed an example relating to recruiting practices. And if you said, what do you do to ensure a diverse recruiting practice? I would have said, well, you know, a diverse recruiting practice should be focused on capabilities more than, well, probably almost anything, right? Yeah, let’s, let’s discuss capabilities. And let’s, let’s leave it at that, you know, and, and I think that over time, one of the things that I’ve come to recognize is that the set of things which can be trained and must be hired in for is maybe different than I thought it was. And there may be capabilities that I did not appreciate the value of, that I can substitute for some of the ones that I used to require, like the individual that I mentioned earlier, that you know, came up with the idea for changing the way we do our initial offer, you know, is not necessarily someone I would have hired was missing some of the experience. You know, didn’t have maybe the kind of background that I would have expected.

Over time, I’ve evolved on this to the point that the interview question, the main interview question, it really differentiates people to ask, is this case study example. And I love it because it’s highly practical and doesn’t depend on a specific thing that you would only pick up in this very narrow kind of place. It’s really a more lateral thinking problem. I guess they used to be called but, but you know where, where you’re asked, if these people disagree, what questions would you ask to try to bring them together? I mean that the key thing is generally like that. There’s more to it, but that’s generally the approach, and anyone can be good at that. And the people that are the ones I want.

 

 

Who among your  external peers and networks do you reach out to for perspectives or inspiration – meaning, who do you talk to about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion?

You know? Well, I call you. Thanks. Yeah, you know, yeah, that’s an interesting question. For new perspectives and inspiration, specifically related to this, you know, I don’t think I’ve almost ever accept what I called you for help in my interview process. I don’t think I’ve practically ever reached out for new perspectives or inspiration, specifically around DEI what I would say is I reaching out to people, external peers, networks and so on, for new perspectives and inspiration as an act of DEI right? If I want perspectives that will, you know, echo chamber or something, I can think about what I think and document it. If I want to broaden it slightly, I’ll talk to my own employees, but that still is contextually sort of pretty tight, right?  Then when I, you know, call up a college friend, you know, who’s Korean, well, he’s gonna have a different view on the world. So I’m getting something different there, you know, then I might post to a mastermind group that I’m a part of and say, hey, you know, this thing has just come up. What would you do about it? Right? 

And I don’t think I’m explicitly reaching out for perspectives and inspiration on DEI. I’m reflecting the importance of dei by the fact that I’m reaching out. If I if the answer to hey, what can I do to recruit better is, you know, take more account of DEI. I think if I reach out to a diverse and inclusive enough group, they will say that. I will hear that from them, and that’s good, right? That gets me there. But you know, the places where I’m the few times when I’ve been specifically saying I want a perspective on D&I, I mean, I don’t think I could do any better than Chandre. 

 

Thank you. For more information about Ramaley Group, where can we find you Ken? 

You can find me at ramaleygroup.com. That’s R-A-M-A-L-E-Y-G-R-O-U-P.com, and always happy to help you.

 

Important Links:

Ramaley Group

Like what you heard? Try more Inclusive Executive Series