Despite decades of effort to improve diversity, most organizations continue to struggle with ensuring fairness in how they identify, develop, and promote talent.

Traditional approaches still rely on narrow leadership prototypes. Opaque processes and behaviors subtly reinforce exclusion. Practices often replicate existing power structures, unintentionally marginalizing individuals from underrepresented groups.

Those working to right hiring wrongs have, often unwittingly, aided and abetted those working in talent management by creating programs focused on distributive justice, which emphasizes representation.

While measuring outcomes is important, a fixation on targets can actually obscure the strongest job candidates. For instance, one law firm my organization worked with was preparing to introduce gender targets for partner appointments. We encouraged its leaders to instead audit the promotion process itself. This led to significant procedural changes. Two years later, the partner in charge of recruitment called to share the results: Six new partners had just been appointed — and all six were women. Targets would never have uncovered the same insights or produced such transformative change.

Rather than discounting the structures that marginalize talent in the first place, organizations need to focus on the cultures, systems, and daily practices that actually drive long-term change. That requires a more rigorous, values-based approach to establishing workplace diversity.

Below, I’ll discuss three actionable strategies that can help leaders integrate more fairness into talent processes: reforming leadership models to avoid bias, fostering justice in everyday leadership, and developing inclusive leadership as a core capability. Each is grounded in research and real-world practice and shows not only what needs to change but also how change can happen.

Moving Toward a Justice-Informed Talent Model

Many organizations have been in the thrall of ideas about human resources that took hold in the late 1990s, thanks to McKinsey research that was discussed in the article “The War for Talent.” That study and its findings encouraged organizations to focus on acquiring a small group of high performers, often based on subjective notions of leadership potential. As a model, it failed to deliver diversity at senior levels — perhaps because it was never truly designed to.

An inclusive and developmental model views talent as distributed across all identities and groups. From this perspective, leadership potential can be nurtured and grown, not simply found.

This process can be learned.