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Using Gender Diversity as a Template for All Diversity at Moss Adams

When Chris Schmidt made partner at the accounting firm Moss Adams in 1991, he could not help but notice how few women occupied leadership positions. He also noticed that women were leaving at significantly higher rates than men both in his organization and across the accounting and consulting industries.

“I graduated in 1981, and all my classes were full of women,” he recalled. “The people that I was working with on teams [early in my career] were all women. But it was pretty clear that they weren’t making it to partner and that the whole developmental process needed to be accelerated. There were times when north of 55 percent of our new hires were women. If we’re hiring all of these bright, successful college students into the firm, why are our female partner ranks in the low teens? That’s not logical.”

At the time, many companies were focused on compliance when it came to leadership and gender. This emphasis was in part due to groundbreaking gender discrimination lawsuits such as United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc. in 1991, in which the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Johnson Controls policy discriminated against women by not requiring their male counterparts to also provide proof of infertility.¹ The ruling set the statute that companies cannot discriminate against women by limiting their job opportunities because of potential reproductive hazards. More attention was also shifting to women’s experiences in the workplace. For example, the widespread media coverage of Anita Hill’s testimony in the Supreme Court nomination hearings of her former boss Clarence Thomas was a breakthrough in shining a light on harassment in the workplace—shocking to many except maybe the legions of women who recognized their own experiences in Hill’s story.²

So, companies pivoted to protecting themselves from discrimination and harassment lawsuits. Moss Adams and Schmidt, though, decided to forge a different path. The company would be focusing its efforts on both the business case and the moral case for gender diversity.

“We had progressive leaders that were focused on our value system and translating that into early DEI initiatives,” said Schmidt, who retired in April 2022 as the firm’s CEO. “It really was about looking at the gender gap. We were hiring a lot of women, and we really needed to do much better at creating a place where they felt like they would have a long career and that they can do well, and they would be treated with respect within our value system. So, I attribute [our efforts] to both the market conditions and to leadership.”

By the late 1990s, Moss Adams had created a leadership development executive series that was later branded Forum W and still exists today. The early iteration of Forum W “focused on implementing programming, developing activities, and helping women build their networks.”³

This program was groundbreaking at the time, in part because it included men from the very beginning, and Schmidt was a proud early adopter and participant. Schmidt recalled, “We felt like we had to be specific in finding high-caliber women leaders and then cascading it into the firm so that the young female team members could see a clear career path where they could accelerate their career and feel like they belonged and that they were valued. They had sponsors, advocates, and mentors that were really going to help them grow and develop.”

And the program worked well. Since Forum W’s launch more than twenty-five years ago, Moss Adams has seen significant improvement in gender diversity. As of 2020, women represented 53 percent of all employees, 40 percent of national office leadership, and 25 percent of partners—above the national industry averages in each category.⁴ Moss Adams is viewed as an industry leader for gender equity, enough so that even competitors often reach out to Schmidt for advice on how to improve gender equity in their own organizations.

“People call us up saying, ‘Could you walk us through the framework that you used and developed on women’s programs?’” he said. “I’m flabbergasted because this is just how we do things and what the expectation is. And even five years ago, when firms were calling, I’m like, ‘Where have you been? It’s 2016. And you’re finally getting around to coming up with the systems and processes to really help this?’ But I know there are still firms out there that are not really thinking about it [gender inequality] or that really don’t want to deal with it right now. I have some colleagues and friends that are in firms like that, and it’s a head-scratcher to me.”

A head-scratcher because success at Moss Adams isn’t just built on improving numbers. It’s also based on the real evidence it has collected, and this evidence says that gender diversity is good for business. From the early days of its DEI journey, Moss Adams has always leaned on the business case for diversity and tactically shared with leadership the why behind its efforts.

The focus on the need for the business case for DEI often comes up in my client relationships and has been the topic of many academic debates. Some assert that highlighting the business case for DEI can pull the humanity from the effort and turns something that is right into just another business case. Why do we need to be convinced through a business case that everyone should be treated equally and have an opportunity to succeed at work? There are strong merits for this argument, yet history has shown us time and again the limits of moral conviction around DEI in the workplace. These issues of inequity were not newly emerging in 2020, even if the amount of media coverage made it seem that way. So I work with businesses on the business case, but it is framed differently. Connecting DEI to an organization’s mission, values, and outcomes is a way to give the work prevalence and urgency; it’s not just a business case to convince leaders that DEI is important. Further, many managers and leaders who do not understand the business imperative see DEI as just another thing on their to-do list—something that can be thought about after they have met all their other “real” obligations.

Moss Adams head of HR, Jennifer Wyne, described the business imperative of diversity:

I talk to colleagues inside and outside the industry that feel that they don’t have support and I say, “What you can do is talk facts. Understand your business. What is the business case?” To this day, we talk about the business case: Why are we doing this? Why is this important? For us, when you’re hiring 55 percent women, and then you look twelve to fourteen years down the track and we only have 25 percent women in our partnership ranks, your return on investment is not great. So why is that? We try to speak to our leaders in a way in the business language that they understand and then get them hooked and work on the education piece of it. Hope is never lost, but you have to first speak the language of the leaders that may or may not see [the issue], may not understand it, may, frankly, shy away from it, because they feel like they don’t know what to do with it.

Like many organizations in the tactical stage of the DEI journey, Moss Adams had an almost-laser focus on gender in terms of its DEI initiatives for twenty-five years. In 1997 women’s participation in the US labor force reached an all-time high of 70 percent.⁵ In 2000 women’s percentage of the global labor force also peaked for the first time, at 39.5 percent, and still has not surpassed this number today.⁶ Between 1980 and 2010, there was a gender revolution in management: of the 4.5 million manager jobs created, women occupied 1.9 million.⁷ The changing composition of gender in the workforce required organizations to seriously consider how to achieve gender parity and inclusion.

Moss Adams was on the vanguard of gender diversity but, like many companies, failed to pay the same attention to other diversity efforts. Gender tends to be seen as the most obvious initial diversity push since women consistently represent around 50 percent of the global population.⁸ That’s the easy explanation most companies use for focusing there first.

Yet the often-more-honest answer is that as a society, we are often more comfortable talking about issues of gender than issues of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. Between June 2020 and April 2021, I asked more than five hundred MBA students and executives their general comfort level talking about these topics. I consistently found that people at all levels were more comfortable, by a ratio of two to one, talking about gender than they were talking about any of the other topics. When I probed to understand why people were so much more comfortable talking about gender than other topics such as race and LGBTQ+ issues, people cited more exposure to gender dynamics at work and with their parents and siblings as a baseline, whereas they might not have had close relationships with someone of a different race or sexual orientation. There was a general sense that the gender conversation had been going on for a long time, but that race and sexual orientation were relatively newer, explicit discussions in the workplace. Although the respondents’ perceptions are not necessarily historically accurate—issues of race, sexuality, gender identity, disability, and others have been discussed at work for decades—the clear differences in expressed comfort on these topics should not be overlooked.

The racial reckoning in the summer of 2020 propelled the issue of race in the workplace further than it ever had been. Before then, however, when most organizations said they had a focus on DEI, they meant they were paying attention to gender diversity. Meanwhile, many other areas of diversity were left by the wayside. Moss Adams fell into this category and had to have an internal moment of honesty during the summer of 2020. Schmidt described what it was like to realize that although the firm had come so far on gender and had made a little progress in other areas, it had failed to be intentional with those other diversity areas in the same way that it was with gender:

It was quite an awakening for me when all the tragic events took place during the summer around George Floyd. I always felt like I was a good person. I took the unconscious bias test that Harvard provides and found I don’t have a bias toward women. You know, I did those tests and so I thought, “Well, hey, I’m good. I can continue to do what I’m doing and mentor and lead the way I’m leading.” And then I really started to make myself more aware of the bigger issues—racism, discrimination, all the things that were out there. The books that I read really helped me better understand what it’s like to deal with some of the things that our team members felt. But we had never had those discussions previously, we never had listening groups, and we did not truly understand what the issues were.⁹

One key breakthrough for Schmidt, he said, was to let go of one impulse he has as a leader: “As leaders, we try to solve problems, and sometimes it’s not about solving problems. It’s just saying nothing and listening so that you really understand what the issues are.”

Listening helped Schmidt realize that metrics are a starting point, not a goal in themselves.

And when I’m watching the events unfold across the country and here in Seattle, it really made me feel that all the issues around privilege and racism, all those DEI terms, those things are real. I spent time really setting myself around where we needed to go beyond checking the box; I really started looking at those metrics differently. We had been reporting around those metrics to the firm through the Forum W report for many years, and now we have our I&D report [a broader diversity-tracking report]. We had data. We shared it. We’re willing to put that out and hold ourselves accountable, but [the events of 2020] made me and all of us a lot more aware that the way we recruit, the way we develop team members, the way we grow leaders probably had elements of racism buried in policies, procedures, processes. It caused us to just stop and say, you know, we want to be this inclusive organization. And if we’re going to go there, we have to tackle this.

The reality that there was more work to do didn’t make him despondent, only more focused. “I’m an optimistic person,” he said. “I can be pragmatic and realistic, but I remain optimistic. If we’re able to take the tragedy and use it to help improve what we’re responsible for, then we are going be in a much better position as a firm in our communities and in our profession.”

Managing Backlash

Though its efforts on race may not have matched its success with gender equity, Moss Adams was not new to the racial equality conversation. In 2017, after the White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Moss Adams was one of few companies to publicly denounce the riot. While many CEOs had major issues with the events that took place, fear of political backlash kept many from speaking out. A New York Times piece by Andrew Sorkin captured the sentiment of the business community at the time: “Outraged in Private, Many C.E.O.s Fear the Wrath of the President.”¹⁰ Schmidt described speaking out during that time as a natural response for him and the rest of the Moss Adams leadership team to address White supremacy.

Though Moss Adams had a track record of supporting equality for all as a part of the company values, like many companies, it received backlash after its public statement in support of Black Lives Matter in 2020. Many companies did speak up about racial injustice for the first time and were accused of being performative allies, namely, companies that were only being opportunistic by jumping on the racial equity bandwagon.

Schmidt was frustrated by the backlash. The company had turned some attention to racial diversity as far back as 2015, when it brought in a consultant to speak to the partners and the company committed to expanding its success with Forum W to other areas in need of addressing. He described his frustration:

I felt a little bit defensive, my initial reaction, not to the tragic events that were horrific, but to the criticism that we started to take, saying, “You need to do more.” I’m like, “Have you looked and seen what we’re doing? Have you read our reports? Have you seen our strategic plan around our DEI efforts?” A lot of people were criticizing, but they hadn’t taken the time to even really look at the data. We were holding ourselves account able and measuring. We had two years of reports. We’ll have a third year that’s coming out on what we look like, as a firm, from a diversity perspective. Now, when we sit with the board, and we’re doing partner income analysis, we are looking at diversity statistics beyond just gender. We’re starting to bring that information in. And that’s a win.

So, you get defensive, I think, when you’re in a leadership role, because you want to be the best that you can be. You want the firm to be the best that it can be. The issue is not whether it’s Latinx, Asian Americans, or Black team members; it’s really expanding the pipeline. We are lucky to be recruiting and operating in the West, where we have a lot of diversity. That allows us to hire, grow, and develop diverse team members beyond gender. But we need to do better, and this is just making us that much more focused in our efforts. I know we will. We just need to do our part with building the pipeline and really making sure that we have that representation. That’s what we’re looking for in our communities and the businesses that we’re working with.

But the question can still be asked: Why didn’t the organization have a more intentional focus on broader DEI earlier in its twenty-five-year DEI journey? Schmidt acknowledged that the company could have started sooner but that success with gender diversity has set it up to move fast on other DEI programs. He described the events of 2020 as shining a floodlight on the fact that the firm needed to do just that—move faster—on its broader diversity efforts:

When I came up to Seattle [from Southern California], it was mind-blowing to me that it was all White people. And at the time, back in 2003, it was surprising because we were operating in pretty diverse cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. We made the decision to really focus on women, never taking our eye off diversity, knowing that we were going to bring [other diversity efforts] in a lot more aggressively when we started winning the gender battle. And some could be critical of us, and say, “Hey, why don’t you run parallel?” We said, “Let’s be successful, and then we can replicate that over on the broader diversity side.”

Jennifer Wyne, head of HR, sympathizes with this point of view: “I think any organization can set itself up for failure if it tries to boil the ocean.” But when she joined the company in 2013, she also knew that it was time to start running parallel. Her goal was to build broader diversity efforts deliberately into the company’s strategic plan. Forum W was well established, and the business case for gender diversity was well understood. The same had to happen for other aspects of diversity.

“It’s an interesting part of our journey,” Wyne said. “We still have this conversation today about not wanting to take the foot off the pedal on the gender front, because it does cross quite a few sectors of our population, including people of color. So how do you assure our team members that we will not lose traction by expanding the program?”

Wyne was careful to note that this is no excuse for not moving forward. “[As leaders] we are not concerned about that. We know working on these efforts in tandem will only accelerate the successes. We are confident in that. I think that’s where others have come along and seen that now, too.”

Having the Forum W framework as a template helps, she said. “We have been able to leverage the Forum W framework very nicely and draw parallels in a way that our firm was already used to talking about business cases. Why are we talking about this, and how are we talking about that? The conversation now has shifted a bit, too, because intersectionality, it’s much more complex, but it helped us to start with women, with the intent that we knew we would go broader.”

Dealing with Resisters

Though it has been twenty-five years of DEI momentum for Moss Adams, the road has not been traveled without its fair share of challenges and resisters. Chris Schmidt can be described as unyielding when it comes to dealing with people who resist the journey, especially peers in his industry:

I will have a candid conversation with a leader and say, “You are going to become obsolete, very quickly. How could you be a good old boys’ club in the world that we live in?” They may be experiencing success, but their business will not be sustainable. Some of the leaders that I talk to are mindful of that, and they know that they need to change their thinking and listen to different ways to approach this critical business issue.

Yet, some are just happy, [thinking], “We’re making money and I’m not going to disturb it,” and I’m like, “That’s your choice; the world is going to pass you by.”

Again, Schmidt frames this as a business case. This whistling-past-the-graveyard approach will only mean that over time, a company will lose the war for talent. “If I am a team member and I’m making a choice to go to firm X, Y, or Z, I’m going to look at the public demographics around ethnicity and women’s programs,” Schmidt said. “I want to see action on behalf of that. . . . That’s going to influence my decision on which firm I want to work for, and firms that don’t want to wrap their mind around [DEI] are going to lose the better talent. People vote with their feet. If your values and your leadership aren’t walking the talk, they won’t stay.”

Though these conversations must be had, not everyone resists change efforts, and most leaders do support DEI, at least in theory. Yet leaders often struggle when it comes to identifying what it really means to support change and being okay with the potential trade-offs necessary for systemic change.

Diversity does not have to be a zero-sum game, but many people in traditional seats of privilege struggle with this concept even when they support DEI from the moral and business case perspective. Doing the work can still be difficult.

“I have had so many difficult decisions and uncomfortable conversations [about DEI],” Schmidt said. He added that after promoting a woman, he was approached by critics: “I’ve had male partners come back and tell me, ‘Hey, you’ve put yourself in a position where you have to put a woman there.’ And I smile and say, ‘And?’ They just kind of look at me, and what do they say? I am clear that we need to do this.”

But Schmidt continues to champion DEI work, and at some point, it becomes a natural part of doing business. He explained his position:

For example, say you have two men and a woman, and they are equal, and I will basically advocate for the woman, because we need the woman in the role to continue to develop the leadership ranks. Some people will say, “That’s not fair to this group.” But we know that you need to put this individual in this role and support her with tools and coaching and sponsorship and all the mentoring so that she can continue to grow and develop so that other young women leaders can see that the firm isn’t always going to default to men.

I’ve had so many of those conversations inside the boardroom, one-on-one with partners mapping what women’s trajectories look like. Jen and I will be on calls, and I will text her and say, “This person seems really sharp. We need to make sure that we continue to work with her and find roles for her.” At some point, it just becomes natural and second nature if you’re thinking that way and that helps.

Many leaders struggle with being able to take such a strong stance on DEI when confronted by their peers. I pushed Schmidt further, trying to understand what allowed him to get to a point where he could stand up to his peers in such a direct way.

He started with a single word. “Confidence,” he said. “Confidence that the woman who was being considered was ready because of the time, effort, and energy that had been put into her. Being able to tell the men who might be complaining that there’s a lot of other leadership roles in the firm, there’s never a shortage of leadership needs, we never have an oversupply of leaders. So, I guess, just believing in our strategies and our values, and advocating and sponsoring people who you know are going to pay dividends downstream.”

Developing the Pipeline

The confidence that Schmidt described is certainly not all blind faith. One of his leadership strengths, as described by his team, is his ability to assess the skills of individuals. “Not all business leaders necessarily are as adept at assessing skills as Chris,” Wyne said. “Assessing the qualities and capabilities of somebody without necessarily working with them side by side is a talent that not all leaders possess. But it’s super important in the diversity conversation because individuals who have that skill set can identify skills in somebody who is different from them. He can understand how they would succeed with the skills and experience that they bring to the table. Some people might call this ability to assess talent a soft skill, but I think it’s one of the hardest skills to develop.”

Research shows that most people fall prey to similar-to-me (or affinity) cognitive bias, which causes people to disproportionately favor individuals who are like themselves.¹¹ This bias is well documented to have an impact on how hiring and promotion decisions are often made.¹² But talent selection is only the first step in creating a diverse team. As a leader, Schmidt goes beyond the identification stage and intentionally empowers his direct reports to coach and develop diverse talent. He encourages them to speak up when they “see a spark” and to then ask, “How do we cultivate them? How do we engineer this person into this role so that she can develop, or they can develop?”

“We’re getting a lot better at that,” Schmidt said. “We were never bad, but we continue to improve and really put people in and support them. It does take a village for anybody who steps into a complex leader role, and we’re trying to give the right training and coaching and informal mentoring so that people feel like they are supported. It’s not like you’re sending them off on a boat adrift. ‘We want to support you, and I want to watch you grow and develop.’”

Metrics and Accountability

Even when it’s as deeply enmeshed in a culture as it is in Moss Adams, a DEI strategy is just a vision without metrics and accountability to support actual behavioral and performance changes. Moss Adams has been very clear on the power of both in its DEI journey.

Metrics come easy to Moss Adams in some ways, because it’s an accounting firm. “We love to set metrics on everything and get down to the numbers,” Schmidt said. “So, the simple math, when we started Forum W, was, ‘If we’re hiring fifty-plus percent women, is it not logical that we would have 15 percent women partners?’”

That led to many conversations about how a woman’s career evolves differently, with child responsibilities, for example. The digging into the why behind the numbers helps the company improve its DEI strategy. Why are non-White and non-male hires stalling here? What’s going on at year nine or ten, when there’s a stall in advancement? Schmidt described the process at Moss Adams:

So we went into all of those different avenues and came back and started setting metrics and said the right number to target is 35 percent [women in leadership roles]. We had midterm and long-term goals. It’s a moving target, but we set benchmarks, and we try to measure the pipeline. We look at development reports. We feel anybody who aspires to become a stakeholder or become a partner needs to see that path forward that ties into the metrics that the firm has agreed to.

Analytically, in my mind, the business world at some point should reach some type of equilibrium with all the women in the workforce. And all of these firms and professions need to continue to increase the number of women who are involved in those positions.

Wyne said that making the business case for diversity has become easier in recent years and the company digs in and leans on the external research that supports it:

If you go back ten years, there was a lot of information coming out, whether it was McKinsey [& Company], or the Conference Board, or HBR [Harvard Business Review Press], around the business performance of companies improving when there was more diversity amongst teams. Then there was also specific research around gender and when women were at the table and the results of business decisions. There was data on the bottom-line results of the companies [improving in diverse organizations]. Strategically incorporating external research adds credibility. It’s not just us talking to ourselves. Being grounded in [external and internal] research data has continued to be a big part of our journey.

Schmidt sees in diversity a virtuous cycle as well. The number of women-owned businesses, for example, is increasing rapidly. What firm will those businesses pick when they need accounting and consulting? “Wouldn’t it be logical to have women served by a woman partner?” he asked. “That’s another business driver that we continue to see, and it’s awesome to be able to have women partners and team members who can step in and serve that role.”

The crucial backstop in the Moss Adams DEI program is accountability, of course. Measuring helps. Creating public-facing reports helps. But so does challenging your own results, just as you would with any other core part of the business. As Schmidt sees it, if a unit is under-performing on revenue, no one would shy away from asking that group why. The same goes for DEI, Schmidt said:

[I ask leaders,] “Are you developing these people? Are you adequately providing for succession?” When we have leaders who are only making male partners, they get called out. We start deconstructing and asking questions like, “What’s going on in the pipeline? Where are the pressure points? Why is this?” We lean in on it. We start asking the tough questions.

Sometimes you must have the uncomfortable conversation, and you’re looking for bias. You’re looking for that decision-making framework where there might be an issue. We don’t shy away from putting the pressure on leaders if they’re not delivering around our business imperatives.

Becoming Anti-Racist

As a leader who had long championed diversity in the workplace, Schmidt still found the moment of racial reckoning in 2020 difficult, no matter how much progress the company had made on gender equity and whatever initial steps it had taken with racial diversity. “It was very uncomfortable for me, as a sixty-two-year-old White male who needed help and coaching from our team members on how to deal with those uncomfortable conversations, and it was very educational for many of our leaders, and it’s a journey,” he said.

Like many organizations, Moss Adams started responding by listening to employees, learning about their experiences at the firm, then determining the best course of action. “We got to a point where we had many uncomfortable conversations,” Schmidt recalled. “Then we asked our I&D advisory board that’s made up of multiple business resource group leaders to help us with bold action steps that we could weave through the firm. So, we were listening to the team from the bottom and helping to drive the message from the top.”

In this sort of sandwiched top-down and bottom-up approach, Moss Adams took the bold step of going beyond being an inclusive organization and determining it needed to become an anti-racist organization. There is a distinction between inclusivity and anti-racism. An anti-racist organization actively identifies and opposes racism by changing its policies, structures, and behaviors that perpetuate racist ideas and actions. Race and discrimination scholar Ibram X. Kendi notes, “Racial inequity is a problem of bad policy, not bad people.”¹³ Anti-racism begins in knowledge but must be rooted in active steps to eliminate racism.

“We made being an anti-racist firm a goal for our board for the next eighteen months,” Schmidt said. “We are not going to be done in eighteen months, but [in] every board meeting that we have, there will be discussion, dialogue, and feedback around action items that our I&D board has recommended back to us.”

Schmidt was not taking a hands-off approach or leaning on his HR or inclusivity and diversity leadership group to do the heavy lifting, as many CEOs have. “I committed to our executive committee and our board that anti-racism would be one of my three primary goals for the calendar year. I am responsible for driving that goal forward,” he explained.

Part of the goal, Schmidt said, was to get everyone in the same place regarding where the company was on the journey and where it was headed and to make everyone comfortable with having the difficult conversations. “That’s where we feel like we’ll make progress faster at the firm at all levels, with that board accountability, the communication in the action items, and the responsibility that’s coming up from our other team members.”

Companies do not become ant-racist overnight, but Moss Adams has the advantage of a successful track record with Forum W and is applying that template. Schmidt described the value of feedback:

The feedback that we were getting is, once we bring someone in—for example, if we bring a Black team member in—how are we ensuring that that team member is sponsored, has allies, is getting coached, mentored, and developed? We are watching and looking at our metrics and stepping back and really thinking more holistically about sponsorships. Our Black team members would love for us tomorrow to quadruple the number of Black hires we have in the firm. My conversation back to them is, “Please help us work with the various projects that we have to grow the pipeline of qualified individuals, and also help us with learning and listening, so that we do a better job of retaining those team members.” I love being in a room with team members who are providing us feedback. I use that as an opportunity to lay out the leadership issues that we’ve faced, not as an excuse, but to pull them along that conversation so that they understand what we’re dealing with from a firm perspective.

Schmidt again pointed to the importance of listening but, more than that, listening with an open mind: “A lot of it is just listening, not being offended by what people are saying but asking them, imploring them, to please help us come up with better things we can do to retain, develop, grow, and build these leaders that are going to take us into the future.”

It’s easy to sense Schmidt’s excitement about the dialogue. “The conversations have been great,” he said. “A lot of them are with young people. If you’re dealing with [someone early in their career], and they are confident enough to provide you feedback and an email, it’s great. I’ve been so impressed. I’ve responded to every single email that’s come to me from our team members around this. Sometimes I’m up late at night. But I want them to know that they’re being listened to.”

The Future of Moss Adams

I asked both HR vice president Jennifer Wyne and CEO Chris Schmidt the question I ask everyone: What does a workplace utopia look like to them? Understanding how deeply enmeshed diversity can become in a culture through their experience with Forum W and gender diversity efforts, both Wyne and Schmidt focused on that stage of the journey: the stage where DEI is no longer special, where it’s just something you do. At this stage, DEI becomes effortless, part of your organizational DNA.

“Utopia would be that we don’t need to really have to shine the light on [DEI] intentionally at some point, because it just comes naturally, as it has on the gender front,” Wyne said. “That is what I would say our nirvana would be: [DEI] is just part of our DNA where, theoretically, we wouldn’t have to champion these things, we are not even thinking about it, it’s just who we are and what we do.”

Schmidt retired in April 2022, after I had interviewed him, but his hard work on DEI continues. And his idea of a workplace utopia informs the company to this day:

Workplace utopia, to me, is where people truly feel like, “I belong here. I am comfortable,” and we don’t have to go out of our way to be deliberate. There’s an acceptance and a tolerance and an understanding, where it’s just work. And your differences and my differences don’t even matter. . . . When we are not talking about gender, or the White male who feels like he’s being discriminated against or marginalized, or the team member that doesn’t feel like they’re understood or belong. . . . It’s just, “You’re my team member, and we’re gonna go do some amazing things.”

We have a ways to go, but that’s nirvana. Maybe that’s societal nirvana too. But we can only control what’s happening inside the Moss Adams boundaries, and that’s what we are focused on.