Dr Michelle King is a globally recognised diversity and inclusion speaker, celebrated for her pioneering research and passionate advocacy for equity in organisational culture.
With roles spanning Netflix’s Director of Inclusion, leadership at UN Women’s Gender Innovation initiatives, and her own consultancy Equality Forward, she brings both academic rigour and practical insights to the table.
The author of the bestselling The Fix: How to Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work, followed in 2023 by How Work Works, Michelle has delivered more than 500 keynotes at high-profile platforms such as the Nobel Peace Prize Conference and SXSW.
Her work is underpinned by rigorous empirical study and has earned recognition as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Workplace Equity and inclusion among the Top 100 Women at Davos.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Michelle unpacks how intersectional thinking, authentic leadership, and workplace equity can reshape organisational cultures—offering tangible strategies for creating inclusive environments that truly work for everyone.
Why does intersectional thinking matter so much when it comes to workplace diversity, equity and inclusion?
Intersectional thinking is absolutely critical to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and the primary reason being because when you understand how inequality works you understand why we need to consider all areas of difference.
Very quickly, for everybody, inequality works in a way that organisations really value one way of leading and one way of working over everything else. So we find in most organisations, when you think of what the ideal worker or leader is, it is going to be someone who’s dominant, assertive, aggressive, competitive—even exclusionary.
And it also tends to be somebody who is white, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied and male. So we overly index on that type of worker and really associate that with leadership and competence.
So why does that matter from an intersectional lens? Well, intersectionality was originally created by Kimberlé Crenshaw and it was a way of really accounting for Black women’s lived experience and how that lived experience was different than necessarily any other woman’s.
I think you can take the general ethos of that way of thinking and apply it to all areas of difference, because the more you as an individual differ from that ideal worker—in terms of your behaviours and in terms of your demographic characteristics—the more experience of inequality you’re going to have.
To advance a culture that’s diverse and inclusive, we need to understand difference and different lived experiences.
That starts with getting to know: how does inequality show up for you, how is that different for you, what are the different ways you differ from that ideal standard, and how does that create day-to-day experiences of inequality like harassment, discrimination, microaggressions in your workplace? To solve inequality we have to see it, and that starts with seeing our differences.
How can business leaders make sure their DEI strategies truly represent all minority groups, including LGBTQ+ employees and people of colour?
It is absolutely critical to account for all areas of difference. When you are building a DEI strategy, I think the starting point is understanding how people in your organisation are experiencing the culture.
Inequality is made up in the day-to-day experiences we have of our workplace: the behaviours we engage in, the interactions we have. You understand that we actually all contribute to other people’s experiences of the workplace, which means we all contribute to other people’s experiences of inequality.
So to understand how inequality is showing up in your workplace, and what it is we’re valuing or devaluing, we have to start by asking people and understanding how they’re experiencing the organisation.
A good way to do this, and to make sure you’re being as inclusive as possible in accounting for difference in your DEI strategy, is to ask five key questions:
What does inequality look like in our team—how does it show up in our day-to-day actions and experiences?
- What would a culture that really values our differences look like?
- What am I not doing as a leader to create that environment?
- What do I need to start doing as a leader to create that environment?
- What are two to three things we can do in our team, department or function today to start building that type of culture?
Why does this matter? Because a Catalyst study shows us that 46% of employees’ experiences of inclusion are directly attributable to their line leader. So if we want to change the equation on DEI, we need to start with leaders.
By asking those questions and enrolling everybody in your team, you’re not only going to account for different lived experiences of inequality but also involve everyone in trying to solve the problem.
With customers increasingly expecting brands to reflect their values, how can businesses demonstrate authenticity rather than performative activism?
Here’s the thing: if you are an organisation that is truly value-based, you don’t necessarily need to communicate it.
We often have organisations—we saw this with Black Lives Matter, we saw this with the #MeToo movement—where companies come out with these big corporate statements, CEOs stand up and talk about all the ways they support Black lives, all the ways they support women.
What happens? Very quickly, that’s followed by employees Tweeting or posting on social media how their lived experience as a Black employee, as a woman, isn’t great in that organisation.
So what I always say to organisations is: absolutely, internally get clear on what you value and why. Have that be your North Star in terms of guiding behaviours. Help people understand how your values translate into a set of behaviours, and make sure your policies and processes are set up to hire, reward and promote individuals who align their behaviours to those values.
But when it comes to your initiatives and how you’re taking action, your values will show. Your values will speak for themselves. People will know what your organisation is about by the action that you’re taking.
In the DEI space, one of the challenges is there is so much performative talk and very little action. Employees now know this. As a result, we’re seeing studies come out showing high rates of fatigue, backlash, denial—basically exhaustion with all this DEI talk and no action.
So if you really want to be value-based, if you really want to move past the performative stuff, park talking about DEI and start sharing all the action you’re taking. The actions will speak louder than any of the words you’ve got to say on DEI.
What would you say to organisations that are still hesitant about investing in diversity, equity and inclusion?
I’m a metrics person. I have spent 20 years studying metrics, specifically in the DEI space. One of the things we know about organisations and the current state of DEI is that companies tend to over-index on demographic diversity.
There’s a 2020 McKinsey study showing workplaces are more diverse but less inclusive. What does that tell us? It tells us we are preoccupied with making it look like we value diversity when in fact we’re paying very little attention to the lived experience.
So how do you measure the lived experience? You can measure it. The lived experience is: what are the day-to-day moments of inequality that show up for me? What are the behaviours my leaders are engaging in, the behaviours I’m engaging in, the behaviours my teammates are engaging in, that create inequality?
The best way to summarise that is barriers. In my book I show 19 barriers that show up for women throughout their careers, and I highlight six that show up for men. These are lived experiences of inequality that you could very easily create a survey from—in fact I’ve done this myself for many companies.
So I encourage people to think about how are we measuring the “moments that matter,” the moments where inequality shows up. Because it’s not enough to get diversity into your organisation if you’re not going to value it.
What’s the point? Those people are just going to leave. We have to start valuing the diversity we’re bringing to organisations, and that starts with valuing difference and different lived experiences.
This exclusive interview with Michelle King was conducted by Megan Lupton of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
