November 16, 2023
Positive Links Speaker Series
Where Does DEI go from Here?
Laura Morgan Roberts
Associate Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia
November 16, 2023
About the talk
Join us in conversation with one of the world’s most renowned voices bringing a positive organizational scholarship lens to topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion at work. Dr. Laura Morgan Roberts will discuss the headwinds slowing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives amid an uncertain economy and efforts to dismantle diversity programs through court rulings and legislation. Laura emphasizes that leaders will benefit from a focus on an overarching goal, that of creating four freedoms that are central to creating conditions necessary for all workers to flourish. Laura will share how to foster these four freedoms at work – the freedom to be, the freedom to become, the freedom to fade, and the freedom to fail – and how doing so can make organizations more welcoming and safer for everyone. Laura will share practical and powerful approaches, including encouraging individual allyship, implementing strengths-based development programs, and enabling flexible work, and how these approaches can more evenly distribute these four freedoms, reducing rates of disengagement and burnout, especially for those in marginalized groups.