Peter Wilson on the Importance of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI)

Peter Wilson

Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Proskauer, DEI and Social Impact Leader, Lawyer, Family Man

What’s your G.O.A.T.?

For me, the greatest and most influential person in my life has been my Dad. I learned all of my important life lessons from him. Every lasting life lesson about how to treat other people, about how to love others, to love yourself, and your family, I got from him. So he's absolutely my greatest of all time.

What makes you feel like a real grown-up?

Having a family and having to make decisions for a five year old. There's nothing like, right now, understanding that I'm raising a little black girl and I want her to be successful. I want the world to be open to all of her gifts and skills and the unique things that she brings to the table. I can't help but fear that the world won't be ready for her. And I'm trying desperately to make sure that it is. 

What do you refuse to give an f about?

I refuse to give an f about the views of individuals that would continue to try to marginalize me, to marginalize people who have helped this country to grow, to be successful. I have no patience for it. Because I recognize, at least at this stage in my life, that there is no reason why we should be in a society where people are not willing and open to allowing everyone to flourish.

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Peter Wilson on the Laws of Inclusion

I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. My Dad was a Baptist preacher and a pastor. And my mom worked in New York City as an administrative assistant and moved up the ladder throughout her career. The two of them both were from Alabama and they met here in New York. A lot of the things that I have seen and experienced come from two very religious people that grew up in the South, at a time when racial tensions were very real and palpable.

My dad would always tell me, "To whom much is given much is required." So no matter what I did in life, it was very important for me to figure out how to be able to give back and to pay it forward. I think I always knew that I wanted to do something to change the world. I just didn't exactly know what it was. I ended up going to law school and I thought that was the path.

When I first started practicing, I was a finance lawyer doing corporate and public finance work. I thought that this was something perhaps that I could spend my career doing. But it became readily apparent to me in the early stages of my career, that there were very few in the profession that really looked like me—at least in the large law firm context. It just started to really weigh on me that I had been given an opportunity to practice law at the highest levels, but that there were not a lot of opportunities for others to come behind me. I spent a lot of my time helping my firm build out a strategic initiative around diversity and inclusion. That level of, I guess, passion around trying to create a different environment for others was really what drove me into diversity and inclusion work. And the thing that's really strange to me now is that I've been doing diversity and inclusion work for longer than I practiced. It has absolutely helped me be effective to have first been a practitioner in the law and be able to navigate the waters of working with partners and senior executives, speaking the language and helping them resolve and create more interesting and innovative solutions around things like this. I needed to travel the path that I went in order to arrive here.

For me, diversity is much more a quantitative way of looking at the demographic makeup of your organization using groupings like race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and veteran status, to name a few, to categorize similarities and differences among people. It can be a very helpful tool—but when you distill it down it really is only an analytical look at the numbers. Inclusion to me is about how you create an environment, a place, a space, where all of these individuals have equitable access to resources and opportunities in their careers. We recognize that the differences people bring to the table help organizations to create better products and outcomes. We also know that inclusive environments create a sense of belonging that motivate and empower people to perform to their highest potential. And so inclusion is much more qualitative in the way that we look at things. And in some regard, you can't talk about one without talking about the other, but clearly you can have a lot of diversity and no inclusion.

When I first entered into the diversity and inclusion space, there was much more discussion around the business case and understanding how diversity and inclusive practices would create better outcomes and products and distinguish organizations in the marketplace. I do think now that companies have evolved, the business case has been articulated enough. The question now is whether or not it is a core value. Are you going to value it enough to put the time, efforts and, particularly, the resources into making this successful? I think that we're now talking more about it as the right thing to do, as a more focused model of how do we change the course of people's opportunities and careers here, and what does that look like? And what do we, as an organization, value more than anything else? And so that, to me has been the best part of watching the evolution of the conversation around diversity and inclusion.

I think I'm probably more hopeful than I have ever been that we will be able to come to a point of true inclusion and a place of equity in our organizations, because we have this next generation of people entering the workforce. We as parents have brought them up and taught them that everyone should be able to have an opportunity to reap the full rewards of their hard work. And they're coming into the workforce expecting that they're going to have colleagues that look differently than they do and experience the world differently, but they will all be able to work together to create the innovative solutions for the future.

Disruptions tend to adversely impact underrepresented groups more than any other. And so COVID-19, the biggest disruption that we have seen (at least in my lifetime), has forced organizations and people to start to think about their practices. The way that we train, the way that we interact and engage with one another. And to be totally honest, diverse professionals right now are very vulnerable—easy to be forgotten about and overlooked, not included in the Zoom meetings because they're just out of sight, out of mind. These are the biggest concerns and quite frankly, the thing that keeps me awake at night when I think about how I continue to make sure that we keep the momentum of the diversity and inclusion practices that we put together. All of the programs and initiatives that we have in place are very reliant on people being able to connect with one another in the office space and being around one another. And when left unchecked, biases and other things come into play. 

We're also dealing with the social and racial reckoning that is happening in this country. We have, historically, seemed to have a proclivity to take a one step forward and go two steps back as it relates to race relations. We absolutely have to double down on the efforts around inclusion to make sure that we're being thoughtful, that our professionals have the opportunity to be successful.

My advice for leaders is that they should be careful to surround themselves with individuals who are different and have different perspectives from them. You don't have to have a head of diversity or a chief diversity officer to be able to do this. But be thoughtful about who you trust with information, and who you are taking advice from. If you can surround yourself with a personal board of directors that can give you good, critical advice about how you're leading, and the things that the organization can do to be more successful, you're far better off than being advised by what seems like your natural circle of colleagues if they all have very similar experiences to you.

Leaders also need to explore more things about difference. There are lots of places where you can get information around the importance of inclusion, equity in organizations, how it impacts organizations, what leaders should do, what inclusive leadership looks like in an organization. If you don't have a person like me in the organization, consider it. Ultimately, when you want to assess where the organization is and how the organization is moving forward, you need someone who's absolutely focused on it every single day. Most likely that person is already there; they just have not been tapped or been given the opportunity to utilize that part of their skillset.