Ep. 173 - From corporate to consultant - D&I with Andrea Dermody

It’s an all-Irish line up on the podcast this week, where I’m joined by my good friend and client, Andrea Dermody.

Andrea is an all-round diversity and inclusion guru who’s built a thriving consultancy business off the back of a highly successful career in financial services. She works with organisations and individuals to reshape their organisational cultures to make them more inclusive. The result is that regardless of a person’s gender, background, socio economic experience, race or religion, they have the same opportunities of anyone else in that organisation.

Andrea’s passion for Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is so infectious and it was an absolute pleasure catching up with her for this episode. So often a company’s D&I policy (if one even exists) is a mere box-ticking exercise where the focus is solely on compliance. Andrea and I chat about why this is ALL wrong, and how when companies move from the compliance space into the cultural space, it becomes a much better company to work at.

Andrea breaks the D&I challenge down into:

1. The work the organisation needs to do around its systems, processes, policies and its culture. (This one is all about human connections – underestimate it at your peril!)

2. The work that under-represented people can do for themselves - even for those introverts who might be scared to go it alone

I also loved hearing from Andrea about her work as part of the 30% Club – the group who’s objective is to get a representative 30% of women on boards. On top of that, she’s also part of the Dublin City University programme – a leadership and development programme designed exclusively for women. The programme covers building a personal brand, how you communicate and how you build credibility and confidence within your organisation.

And finally (yes, there’s more!) we talk about how Andrea is using my help with LinkedIn for business to expand her network and reach new clients. I’m pleased to say she’s loving the results already.