Bradley Akubuiro is a partner at Bully Pulpit International, where he leads the firm’s corporate reputation and crisis management practices.
Black History Month is back. I’ve spoken with HR teams that feel pressure to act, while others feel pressure to do nothing. But both instincts respond to the same flawed logic: that inclusion is tied to a calendar.
Nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 100 have scrubbed their public-facing DEI messaging since 2024, even as four out of five C-suite leaders privately believe those programs should be retained or expanded.
The gap between what leaders believe and what organizations do is widening, and employees can see it. If they have to wait until February, June, or October to experience your commitment, you’ve already answered the only question they really care about: Do you actually mean it?
The complex challenges HR faces
What “meaning it” looks like depends on where you sit. Are you at a defense contractor navigating False Claims Act exposure? A regulated utility whose workforce investments get reviewed by a public commission? A multinational bridging institutional cultures? A healthcare provider navigating health-equity mandates and DEI backlash? The pressure is universal, even if the playbook isn’t.
Somewhere between those numbers is where you sit: the HR teams tasked with making sense of it all. You got into this work because you genuinely wanted to help others, and you’re often carrying the same weight as the colleagues you’re trying to support. This is a very human challenge — and this month, it’s landing on your desk.
The work goes beyond heritage months
You may not control the CEO’s rhetoric or the board’s politics, but you control whether inclusion shows up in hiring pathways, manager expectations, and who gets developed when budgets tighten.
These are the moments where real credibility is built. Not in what’s said during heritage months, but in the decisions HR makes all year long.
I’ve sat in rooms as the only person who looks like me, while in the news, those who look like me are being targeted. You’re expected to perform at the same level and contribute with the same energy, but part of your brain is elsewhere.
That’s the tax your minority employees are paying right now. It shows up as the idea that doesn’t get raised in the meeting, the risk that doesn’t get flagged, and the high-performer who stops volunteering for the hard assignments. It doesn’t appear in engagement surveys, but rather in the quality of your team’s outputs.
I’m not telling you to take a political stand. I can’t without knowing your specific exposure. But what I am saying is this: conviction and caution are not mutually exclusive. Conviction without caution puts you in traffic, while caution without conviction leads to paralysis, and paralysis is its own kind of answer.
In my work advising organizations through high-scrutiny moments, the pattern holds that companies that maintain credibility are those whose commitments were consistent before the crisis. The ones that scramble to articulate what they stand for in the middle of the storm are usually the ones who drown.
The legal reality is serious. We’re seeing this with Nike. In June 2025, the Supreme Court lowered the bar for reverse discrimination claims. But 64% of leaders still say the greater long-term litigation risk comes from traditional plaintiffs — marginalized employees alleging discrimination.
For federal contractors, the Department of Justice has signaled it will use the False Claims Act to challenge diversity-related representations in contractor certifications, meaning your compliance and inclusion language now have to be reviewed together.
It’s a time that asks: Is your language change the entire strategy or is it a cover for the strategy?
There’s no version of this where everyone walks away happy. But the fundamental question hasn’t changed: How do we make employees feel like this organization values them, and that they are better for their association with it than they would be without it?
That’s your North Star. Deliver against it.
How HR can navigate the DEI crisis
Audit for legal exposure, not optics.
The EEOC’s March 2025 guidance is clear: quotas, disparate treatment, and limiting ERG membership by protected traits are out. But open-access mentoring, broadened talent pipelines, and inclusive culture work are all still lawful.
Evolve the vocabulary without gutting the substance.
“Belonging,” “opportunity,” and “talent development” aren’t admitting defeat. If the language changes but your commitment remains, employees will feel it.
And if the language changes and the programs have to shift, too, own it. Pretending otherwise will lose you credibility with everyone.
Move your highest-value work out of the spotlight.
Drive on internal mentoring, manager development, supplier diversity, and community investment. In regulated industries, supplier diversity is often built into the rate case or procurement framework. This offers institutional cover that most companies don’t have. Use it.
For field-based workforces, crew-level mentoring drives retention and safety outcomes that show up in the metrics your board already tracks. The work that matters most rarely needs a press release.
Prepare your managers for the human moments.
They need to be equipped to say, at minimum: “I know this is a heavy time for some of you, and I want you to know I see it.” That sentence costs nothing and signals everything.
And remember… you’re human, too.
Most of you got into this work because you wanted to help people. Balancing your own emotions with the work in front of you is one of the hardest professional challenges there is.
Give yourself grace. Sure, the person holding the organization together doesn’t get to fall apart, but you do get to be honest about the real costs.
No matter the restrictions on specific policies, there’s no executive order, no legal ruling, and no activist campaign that prevents us from helping employees see that they are valued.
Whether that employee is an engineer with a security clearance, a gas technician in the field, or a designer at a 300-person brand, the question is the same: Does this place see me?
That isn’t a DEI program. It’s leadership.
