Sarah Liu is the founder and MD of The Dream Collective, a global diversity and inclusion consultancy. She launched the business while in her early 20s, as “a bit of a side hustle, passion project” with the aim of seeing more women succeed and lead across corporate Australia.
Within a couple of years, the business had grown into one of Australia's leading consultancies in the field and now, several years on, The Dream Collective is ranked in the top 10 Global DNI consultancies in Asia Pacific.
TS: Tell us about your original call to adventure to launching The Dream Collective.
SL: For me, it was very much about solving a problem for myself. I come from a background in marketing and branding and throughout my corporate career – as someone who's very ambitious – I found there were a lot of systemic barriers to mid-career female talent to succeed in the workplace.
So I decided to solve that problem. I looked around to see if there were any organisations that helped individuals or organisations to advance women into leadership positions, but I didn't feel any companies really resonated with me and what I believed was needed. It evolved into a side hustle, and now a global business. Sometimes, you have got to focus on the problem that needs solving and the rest will fall into place.
TS: What is the key message that you are passionate about that you are advocating and championing through your work?
SL: Challenging the status quo. The progress that's being made in this world has occurred because people refused to accept the status quo. I feel we need to approach it as something like an ethos across our organisation and challenge with a sense of urgency.
If you want to see corporate Australia, or your business, achieve results you've never seen before, you have got to do things that you’ve never done before. Accelerate and create urgency in how you hire and how you promote diverse talent within your organisation.
Accelerate how you create and embed and mandate an inclusive behaviour and inclusive culture in your organisation. Because diversity is actually the prerequisite for innovation. Unless we can do that – and do it right, in terms of building a diverse and inclusive team in our organisation – innovation, and ultimately commercial success, will be very limited.
TS: Within The Dream Collective office at the moment, what are some of the hot topics that are really getting attention?
SL: We are really excited about the roll out of male ally programs. Instead of the traditional approach of just looking at female talent, female leadership acceleration programs – which I think do have their roles and are important – what is equally, if not more, important is equipping male allies: helping them understand and think beyond their blind spots, and understand privilege equity, so that they are no longer apathetic, but they become advocates of the whole diversity and inclusion discussion and action plan.
We are also excited about potentially rolling out a reverse mentoring program for men, because so much of what we need to be doing is, once again, building awareness and educating and bringing men on the journey with us. That reverse mentoring program – having women mentoring men around what diversity means, about the challenges facing women, the invisible structural barriers facing women in the workplace – I believe is going to be a really important turning point for us.
TS: What are some of the next key steps for you that really enable businesses to create a diverse and inclusive culture that reflects their vision?
SL: Companies need to acknowledge that diversity inclusion is no longer a separate thing that you do. Diversity and inclusion has become a cost of entry for any business to operate. This is what your employees expect. This is what your stakeholders and shareholders expect. This is what your customer base expects of you.
The next step is to acknowledge this is not an HR initiative that you run every International Women's Day or something. This should be entrenched into everything that you do. What that means practically is, when you look at hiring – how do you hire diverse talent through building an inclusive hiring practice? When you look at training – are your staff equipped and trained around diversity, inclusion and equity? This is not an ad hoc, nice-to-have initiative, but it becomes part of the company culture through training.
Then you look at how as a business you are promoting inclusive leaders. Are you promoting leaders who might be good at their job, but actually do not exhibit any of those inclusive behaviours or who may not even be aware of the value of diversity? Or are you promoting people who are invested in building a diverse team, and really understand the value, the innovation, the commercial value they bring to the business? Hiring, promoting and training are three immediate, easy next steps for business leaders to consider.
Interested in learning more? Listen to our entire conversation with Rob Hillard at the TradeSquare podcast, TSQ here.
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