While organizations are changing and people of color and women are taking a seat at the table, the executive board of many organizations remains overwhelmingly white and male.
In order to address this, we have to address the leadership pipeline and the mechanisms through which we assess people. While that can sound like an end game, the truth is, it's a never ending cycle of evaluating and reevaluating culture to not only establish inclusive policies, but to maintain them over time while improving the philosophies that drive processes in employee development, training and promotion and ultimately, have an external impact for our customers and community.
In this session, we'll explore how to create leadership pipelines and ways corporations can foster diversity and create that sense of inclusion all the way to the top of the organization.
Key takeaways (with examples):
- Learn how to assess the diversity of your leadership pipeline with data and real time analysis. Ex: Goal: To reduce inconsistencies and biases in our practices - We have identified focus areas to reduce bias during mid-year and year-end reviews and are building out consistent equity-measurement systems for hiring, promotion and retention, similar to our existing pay-equity reporting.
- Support the development of diverse leaders through inclusive policies and cultural change. Ex: Goal: To increase representation of women leaders and minority leaders to 50 and 40 percent, respectively, by 2025. We will soon be implementing new processes to build diverse candidate pools and form diverse interview panels for external hires.
- Remove bias from assessments. Ex. Goal: To achieve statistically equal engagement scores on companywide surveys. We launched a Deliberate Advocacy training module, which approximately 15,000 employees have completed, including more than 7,000 in the first 30 days.
Increase external impact: Ex: In March 2021, we announced plans to open a new customer care center in Chatham and bring 1,000 jobs to this underserved community on Chicago's South Side. The center's leadership team will be comprised entirely of people of color. All of our practices-from procurement to recruiting and community engagement-have been done through a DE&I lens, which will not only have an impact in Chatham, but also influence how we operate overall. Ex. The Discover College Commitment program will be expanded to offer bachelor's degree programs through Paul Quinn College, a Historically Black College and University in Dallas.
