How to Unlock Real DEI Progress With Fractional Leadership

Most companies do not have a diversity problem. They have an execution problem. Programs launch with fanfare, training gets scheduled, a task force convenes. Eighteen months later, the metrics look the same as they did before any of it started. Leaders are left wondering even more whether diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Members of the Senior Executive HR Think Tank, a curated group of human resources leaders and advisors, say the fractional chief diversity officer model offers a way out of that cycle. Rather than adding another initiative to an already crowded calendar, a fractional CDO diagnoses why previous efforts stalled and then rebuilds the systems—hiring, promotion, pay, leadership accountability—that determine whether inclusion actually takes hold.

The appeal is practical as much as philosophical. Full-time chief diversity officers often spend their first year setting strategy and the next several executing it at an executive salary. At the same time, a fractional model can redirect that cost toward measurement, training and infrastructure. Think Tank members say that shift, done right, changes not just the budget but the entire trajectory of a company’s DEI work.

The Economics of a Fractional Chief Diversity Officer

Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist and Founder of Innovation Unbiased, a consultancy that builds data-driven cultures of belonging, says the cycle breaks the moment organizations stop paying strategy-level salaries for execution-level work.

“A chief diversity officer is a strategist,” Bylone says. “Yet most companies hire a team of one, so after the first nine months, the strategy is set, and that executive spends the next several years executing programs. You are paying top dollar for a service you are no longer receiving.”

The fractional model, Bylone says, corrects that math. A fractional CDO builds the strategy and the measurement systems, then hands implementation to a program manager—often at roughly half the cost of a full executive salary. Crucially, the savings do not vanish into the budget.

“The savings do not disappear,” he says. “They get reinvested directly into the work itself: training, accessibility improvements, data infrastructure.” The result, he adds, is a structure where “strategy gets executive-level rigor” and “the budget funds outcomes rather than an underutilized title.”

Bylone brings more than a consultant’s perspective to the argument. He has led global belonging strategies at Krispy Kreme and IFF, built multimillion-dollar DEI initiatives from the ground up and hosts the podcast “I Know I Belong When…,” which explores identity and inclusion through personal stories.

“Many organizations don’t suffer from a lack of diversity initiatives—they suffer from initiative fatigue and a lack of leadership ownership.”

– Sharifah Masten, Managing Partner and Principal Advisor at Counterpoint Collective

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Diagnosing the Real Problem Before Prescribing a Fix

That diagnosis is where Sharifah Masten, Managing Partner and Principal Advisor at Counterpoint Collective, a strategic advisory firm she founded to align people, leadership, technology and communications, believes most companies go wrong from the start.

“Many organizations don’t suffer from a lack of diversity initiatives—they suffer from initiative fatigue and a lack of leadership ownership,” Masten says. Fractional chief diversity officers, she contends, are well positioned to interrupt that pattern by reframing the conversation away from stand-alone programs and representation metrics and toward organizational effectiveness, leadership accountability and decision quality.

Rather than launching something new, Masten says a fractional CDO can help leadership teams define what inclusive leadership looks like in practice and embed those expectations into existing talent, performance and succession processes. She points to cross-functional talent reviews as a particularly effective intervention—sessions that surface hidden assumptions, expand visibility into emerging leaders and strengthen confidence in talent decisions enterprise-wide.

“Sustained progress occurs when diversity efforts are no longer treated as periodic efforts or symbolic events,” Masten says, “but as integral to how leaders make decisions, develop talent and create environments in which diverse perspectives consistently lead to better outcomes.”

Masten’s perspective is grounded in more than two decades across military, nonprofit and corporate sectors. A former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer and past chief human resources officer, she now advises executives, founders and boards on workforce strategy, governance and organizational transformation and serves as executive director of the nonprofit Mission 2 Change.

An Outside Perspective That Cannot Be Captured

Amy Douglas, Chief of Culture and Connection at Levata Human Performance, frames the fractional advantage in structural terms: These fractional leaders can break the cycle precisely because they are never fully absorbed into it.

“Most organizations fall into a familiar pattern: A trigger creates urgency, programs launch, attention fades, and the system quietly resets,” Douglas says. “The issue isn’t intent—it’s that the work stays surface-level, training, events, awareness, without changing how decisions actually get made.”

A strong fractional CDO, she says, shifts where the work lives. They bring enough distance to name patterns that internal teams often quietly work around, and they focus quickly on systems, such as hiring, promotion, pay and leadership behavior, rather than side initiatives. They also push for real accountability by tying outcomes to leadership metrics rather than energy or goodwill, and they work from evidence, connecting data to root causes instead of reporting high-level trends.

“The difference is practical,” Douglas says. “Less emphasis on activity, more on redesigning the conditions that produce inequitable outcomes. That’s what actually interrupts the cycle.”

Douglas built her career in organizational design and development, spending 28 years in corporate and consulting leadership before earning a coaching certification from the Coaches Training Institute and becoming a credentialed coach with the International Coach Federation. She is a founding partner of Levata, a firm built on the belief that people-first cultures produce better outcomes.

“Fractional CDOs bring objectivity and expertise internal teams lack. They diagnose root causes rather than treating symptoms. ”

– Dr. Curtis Odom, Managing Partner of Prescient Strategists and Executive Professor of Management and Organizational Development at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business

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Building an Operating Plan That Outlives the Engagement

For Curtis Odom, Managing Partner at Prescient Strategists, the value of a fractional CDO starts with objectivity and shows up in what happens after the diagnosis.

“Fractional CDOs bring objectivity and expertise internal teams lack,” Odom says. “They diagnose root causes rather than treating symptoms. Most diversity initiatives fail because companies launch campaigns instead of embedding diversity into hiring systems, performance management and succession planning.”

Odom says fractional leaders connect diversity to business outcomes, like revenue, innovation and risk, which shifts the conversation from compliance to competitive advantage. He adds that they demand cultural accountability by tying diversity results to leader compensation and advancement, and that they focus relentlessly on retention and advancement pathways rather than recruitment alone.

“Underrepresented talent without career progression creates frustration and departure,” he says. “Most importantly, fractional CDOs deliver difficult feedback to the C-suite without career consequence. That independence catalyzes real change.”

Odom, an executive professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, draws on 25 years of Fortune 100 experience and serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. His firm helps organizations build the human capabilities required for AI investments to generate lasting value.

Turning Systems Into the New Strategy

Jonathan H. Westover, founder and CEO of Human Capital Innovations, agrees that the outsider’s vantage point is the fractional model’s biggest asset but says the part-time nature of the role sharpens that advantage rather than limiting it.

“Fractional chief diversity officers can break ineffective cycles by bringing fresh external perspectives untainted by company politics,” Westover says. “They assess what’s actually failing, which are often performative initiatives disconnected from business operations, and implement evidence-based strategies with clear metrics.”

Their part-time status, he says, paradoxically becomes an advantage: They cannot be captured by internal dynamics and must show results quickly to justify their role. Westover says they tend to focus on systemic changes such as bias-aware hiring processes and inclusive leadership development, tying diversity goals to performance reviews rather than one-off trainings.

“Crucially, they establish accountability structures that survive their tenure, training internal champions and embedding diversity into existing workflows,” Westover says. Working across multiple organizations also means fractional CDOs bring proven practices instead of reinventing solutions, and their objectivity helps them raise hard questions about why past efforts failed—often due to a lack of executive commitment or resources—to secure genuine buy-in rather than checkbox compliance.

Westover is an associate dean at Western Governors University, founder and CEO of Human Capital Innovations, and a member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. He is a best-selling author whose research and commentary regularly appear in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and other national outlets.

Building the Diagnostic Into a Durable Discipline

Britton Bloch, VP of Global Talent Acquisition Strategy and Head of Recruiting at Navy Federal Credit Union, says fractional chief diversity officers succeed because they are not captive to an organization’s inherited assumptions.

“Their value begins with an external diagnostic: separating performative activity from measurable business, talent and culture outcomes,” Bloch says. She recommends that fractional CDOs benchmark the organization against proven practices, surface root causes in hiring, advancement, retention, leadership behavior and supplier or customer equity, and then translate those findings into a disciplined operating plan.

The larger shift, Bloch says, is from episodic initiatives to accountable systems—executive ownership, clear metrics, manager capability-building, employee listening loops and integration with core business rhythms. A fractional CDO also brings cross-industry perspective, she notes, which helps leaders avoid recycled programs and adopt evidence-based interventions suited to a company’s maturity, workforce and strategy.

“Done well, DEI becomes less a campaign and more a durable leadership discipline,” Bloch says.

From Programs to Leadership Responsibility

Nicole Cable, Chief People and Experience Officer at C3 Health, maintains that most ineffective diversity initiatives fail for a simple reason: Organizations treat them as programs instead of leadership responsibilities.

“A fractional chief diversity officer can bring an objective perspective, but their greatest value is helping leaders move beyond performative efforts and into meaningful action,” Cable says. That means creating environments where people feel they belong, have equitable access to opportunities and can contribute fully to the organization’s success.

Cable is direct about where the goal should not be. “The goal should never be to launch more initiatives,” she says. “The goal should be to embed inclusion into how leaders hire, develop, promote and support their teams every day.” When diversity and inclusion become part of the culture rather than a standalone strategy, she says, organizations stop chasing short-term wins and start creating sustainable change.

Cable brings more than two decades of executive leadership across healthcare, hospitality and customer-centric organizations, with deep expertise in patient experience, culture strategy and measurement. She has led large-scale change initiatives and IPO readiness efforts, and she contributes thought leadership to Becker’s Healthcare, the Forbes Human Resources Council and other national outlets.

Tying Diversity Goals to Performance and Pay

Dr. Tish Hodge, PHR, Founder and CEO of The Shine Institute, takes a more mechanical view of what actually moves the needle: incentives.

“Only what gets measured matters,” Hodge says. In her experience, tying diversity initiatives to performance reviews and year-end increases produced a noticeable uptick in more effective execution of the diversity and inclusion plan. “At the end of the day, everyone wants to be a winner and have a positive performance review, to include being compensated for their hard work,” she says.

Hodge believes fractional chief diversity officers will see results when they give each employee a diversity goal for the year that the employee is genuinely passionate about, then measure it through the performance evaluation process and reward those who exceed expectations with a modest financial incentive. “The premise remains the same,” she says. “People always want to know what is in it for them.”

Hodge has spent 20 years in HR, building award-winning cultures through what she calls unconventional, innovative techniques. She holds a PHR certification and a Cornell University certificate in diversity, equity and inclusion, and has been recognized internationally for her work in coaching and organizational transformation.

How Leaders Can Put This Into Practice

• Pay for strategy, not stalled execution. A fractional model lets companies redirect the cost of an underused executive salary into training, accessibility improvements and data infrastructure.
• Diagnose initiative fatigue before adding another program. Many organizations already have enough activity; what they lack is leadership ownership and a clear line between effort and outcome.
• Use outside distance to name what insiders work around. A fractional leader who cannot be captured by internal politics is free to focus on the systems—hiring, promotion, pay—that actually produce results.
• Let objectivity do the hard conversations. An external CDO can tell the C-suite uncomfortable truths about past failures without risking a career, which is often what unlocks genuine buy-in.
• Build a full external diagnostic before writing an operating plan. Benchmarking against proven practices and surfacing root causes prevents companies from recycling programs that already failed elsewhere.
• Move inclusion from a campaign into daily leadership practice. Sustainable change happens when hiring, development and promotion decisions carry inclusion expectations, not when another initiative launches.
• Design accountability structures that outlive the engagement. Training internal champions and embedding new workflows ensures progress does not evaporate when the fractional engagement ends.
• Tie diversity goals to performance reviews and compensation. Giving employees a diversity goal they care about, then measuring and rewarding it, turns intention into consistent behavior.

What Comes Next for Diversity Leadership

The consensus among these Think Tank members is not that diversity work should slow down—it is that it should be run differently. A fractional chief diversity officer is not a smaller version of a full-time executive; it is a different operating model built for diagnosis, system redesign and accountability that outlasts any single engagement. That distinction matters more as companies face tighter budgets and greater scrutiny of what their DEI spending actually produces.

The organizations most likely to break the cycle of relaunching the same initiatives are also the ones willing to treat inclusion as an operating discipline rather than a communications exercise—measured in hiring outcomes, promotion rates and leadership accountability rather than attendance at a training session. For companies still deciding whether that shift is worth making, the fractional model offers a lower-risk way to find out.