Implementing a strategic plan is a fundamental function of all businesses, including legal departments. Now ask yourself … does my legal department have a strategy focused on diversity and inclusion (D&I)? There are some who view D&I efforts as items that should be handled after "real business" in an ad hoc approach and others who understand the importance of D&I in the workplace and also the importance of planning. In fact, D&I efforts should be aligned with your department's overall strategy in order to have the greatest impact, ensure you have buy-in and support from leadership, and transparency across the organization.

This three-step process can take your D&I efforts from ad hoc and unstructured to strategic as long as your legal department is willing to align, strategize and take action.

Align

Look around your legal department and ask yourself the following questions to determine if there is an opportunity to align your D&I efforts. Do you have team members that support D&I in the workplace, industry or the community? Does your department support any organizations that focus on D&I monetarily through luncheons, galas, internship programs and similar efforts? Do you have team members that serve on company employee resource groups (ERGs) or other internal programs through your D&I department? Do you have team members that are involved in legal industry organizations that serve historically underrepresented groups in the legal profession? Are there members of your legal team that serve communities that are historically underrepresented through volunteer opportunities? Do you [want to] make sure that the firms you hire are also focused on D&I? Does your leadership understand the importance of diversity and inclusion? Does your department have a member of the D&I team working to help you accomplish these goals?

If you answered "yes" to more than one of the questions above, then there is an opportunity for alignment. If you could not answer all the questions above, then it may make sense to take a departmentwide survey to answer the questions and you may well find opportunities for alignment. If you answered "no" to all of the questions above, reach out to your company's D&I team to see what your team can do to get more engaged in efforts supporting legal department diversity.

• Benefits of alignment

It is said that many hands might light work, right? Think back to the legal department team members that are involved with D&I in the workplace, industry and the community in the questions above … these individuals can serve as your legal department D&I team (you are welcome). This legal D&I team, including a representative from legal operations and the office of D&I, has the opportunity to sit down and review all of the efforts across the department and make decisions on those that are most important to your team.

The team will also have the opportunity to review an organization's purpose/mission and compare it with those of the legal department. Alignment serves as a tool to understand all internal and external partners. Alignment will help determine whether your department should shift focus or shift resources. For example, should the department continue to support D&I efforts that are pushing money out the door or should you invest those funds in department D&I training, speakers, hiring efforts or conferences? Alignment helps the department figure out what to include and where to shift focus with current support. Without proper alignment and review, there is a risk that sudden change will impact D&I efforts and ultimately hurt the team.

Strategize

Sit down and walk through what your department is currently doing to support D&I in the workplace, industry and community and where it would like to increase or expand efforts. Compare your outcome to your department's strategy and to the office of D&I's strategy. Then plan, plan and plan some more. While drafting the plan it is important to consider the industry standard. Are most companies working with external partners to work towards certification? Are they attending certain trainings or strategy sessions? Consider the standard and determine if you are ahead or behind. The team should examine the strengths and weaknesses surrounding D&I and create a plan to address which goals that are attainable and realistic.

Instead of approaching leadership with one-off requests to support D&I efforts here and there, the strategic plan consolidates the efforts into a story that you can tell with a beginning, middle and end outlining what you plan to accomplish during a certain period of time. Department leadership will likely embrace a strategy that is easily digestible and easy to share with peers. A well drafted strategy makes budget requests that much easier to submit when everyone can understand the big picture of the plan.

Communication is key in this effort. After planning, ensure the strategy's visibility across the department. Communication is important for many reasons, including in relation to candidates for employment in the department. Current team members are walking billboards for your company. If a potential candidate asks anyone in the legal department about its plan for D&I, everyone in the department should be able to speak to the mission, goals and action plan (to a reasonable extent). With a well drafted and aligned strategy, actions will be intentional, and every effort will count toward the outcome.

Take Action

Execution is a must after drafting a strategy. An action plan that places expectations and goals (including dates and time frames) next to each item is helpful when integrating expectations into the responsibilities of your job. It is important to take this plan seriously now that efforts are aligned and formalized and senior leadership understands and approves. Drive accountability and get help from your change management team if necessary. This may be a shift in the culture for your department for those individuals that are in need of a support plan to provide change-management sessions.

Finally, measure your success. One way to measure the success of the legal D&I strategy is to distribute a survey to capture views on the department's D&I efforts at the beginning and end to check for results.

Following the aligning, strategizing and action efforts, shift your department's D&I efforts from ad hoc to a formal committee. Doing so will ensure leadership awareness, understanding and sign-off and will allow an opportunity for the entire department to understand the purpose. Eventually, it will lead to attaining more D&I goals and an increased presence of D&I efforts within the legal department.

Brandy Smith is assistant vice president, chief compliance officer and counsel for the group benefits division of Lincoln Financial Group. Smith is a board member of the Philadelphia Diversity Law Group, chartering member of the legal department's diversity action team and head of Lincoln Financial Group's African American business resource network.