I’m Tony McCaffery. I founded Diversity Scotland in 2018, and I run it, with our international arm, Diversity Company, as chief executive. We’re a small, specialist team, and we help boards and senior leaders change how their organisations actually work, rather than how they describe themselves on a careers page.
I’ve spent more than thirty years working in people and culture. Long before the frameworks or the consultancy, a childhood in Scotland taught me how this works from the receiving end. I’m mixed-race and autistic, I’m disabled, and I’m queer. I spent time in the foster care system as a child, and I knew poverty and rough-sleeping homelessness before I knew much stability. It’s the reason I understand, in a way no textbook gives you, how an organisation decides who belongs and who gets eased out at the edges. I build everything on that.
I started the organisation because so much inclusion work in this country stops at being seen to care. A training day in the diary, a policy refreshed, a flag flown in June, and not much underneath it once the month is over. I wanted the more conscious, structural kind, the kind that changes how an organisation governs itself when nobody’s performing for an audience. That meant working where the real decisions get made, with boards, executives and the senior people who set the weather for everyone below them.
As a chief executive, the thing I watch most closely is whether we live the thing we sell. It would be the easiest hypocrisy to bill clients for inclusion and run an exhausting, conformist shop behind my own door. So I’ve built Diversity Scotland to be the employer we keep telling clients to become. I’m autistic and disabled, and I’ve been deliberate about that. Different ways of thinking, communicating and working are planned for here, not merely permitted. My colleagues aren’t asked to mask or perform a tidier version of themselves to be taken seriously. Adjustments are simply how we operate. People bring all of who they are to the work, because that’s where their sharpest thinking lives, and because asking anything less would make a liar of me.
How I lead is mostly by sitting beside people instead of standing over them. The work is usually invitational. I’ll put a question to a board and let them arrive at the uncomfortable answer themselves, which works far better than telling them they’re wrong. I give people room to learn out loud without shame, because almost nobody changes their mind while being lectured. But I’ll hold a hard line when something is plainly unjust. Kindness without a spine is no use to anyone. And I’m fussy about language, because the words we choose for people are a fair measure of how seriously we take them, and getting them right is the cheapest respect there is.
The method behind it all is the EMBED framework, which my team and I built over years of practice. It takes an organisation through 5 stages, from working out where it actually stands to driving the change on after we’ve gone, so inclusion ends up in the governance, not a forgotten action log. Alongside it sits a 12-stage Inclusive Hiring Framework that goes through the whole recruitment cycle and finds the barriers most processes miss. We use both across the public sector, academia, cultural institutions, the third sector and private business in Scotland, and through Diversity Company further afield, with organisations in tech, sport and renewable energy. When the work holds, it shows up in plain numbers. One health and social care organisation we worked with saw applications from racialised people of colour rise by a third inside eight months, with a fifth more of them hired.
A fair amount of this happens in public. In 2025 I was given the Leadership Award at the Proud Scotland Awards, Scotland’s national celebration of LGBTQI+ contribution, for sustained work supporting the community, which meant a great deal coming from my own people. I appeared in the Scottish Government’s Mind to Mind campaign on mental health. I came up through poetry and theatre, with two published collections behind me, and it’s the reason I can hold a room and bring round people who arrived sceptical. I also give time to work that isn’t billed. I sit on Skills Development Scotland’s Disability Focal Point Group, the Our Past Our Future Steering Group, Scotland’s Historic Environment Forum and various other boards. I’m an Advisory Friend to the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals, and a regular volunteer for community charities.
I take personal responsibility for everything that goes out under my organisation’s name, and I’d sooner lose a contract than cut a corner on the work. I’m not chasing the title of a leader who performs inclusion convincingly. I’d rather be the one the sceptic in the room ends up trusting, because the work stood up and the change was still there a year after we’d gone.
