Four Essential Levers CEOs Can Adopt to Achieve Racial & Gender Equality - Part 3

3.     Foster an ecosystem

CEOs should build a supportive ecology that sustains RGE. This support system depends on each other but shares a common purpose and collaborates to achieve the overarching objective within an organizational design that is flat but highly responsive and interdependent.

Engagement: Removing racial and gender barriers takes a whole village. By chairing an executive council that provides direction and guidance to advance RGE, CEOs set a leadership example at the top. Senior executives should sponsor an employee or business resource group and help enlist a broader base of employees along the ride. Influence sponsorship and mentoring programs to lift people of color and female talent for advancement.

Since most decision-makers are white males today, we must involve, inspire, and motivate them to become allies and advocates of RGE. When they are positioned as agents of change, white males become a driving force of RGE. And we ought to empower mid-level managers to be purpose-driven leaders who foster a sense of belonging by connecting and engaging people of color and female talent.

Microsoft board member Sandi Peterson talked about the qualities of leaders. "I'm a big believer in people who have a lot of humility, learning agility, intellectual curiosity, great listening skills, and who ask good questions and listen more than they talk." These are the qualities we need to engage others.

An integral part of business DNA: RGE should be ingrained into the business objective and talent strategy, not an afterthought to the decision-making process. To achieve the RGE breakthroughs, we must reconnect fragmented systems and stitch disparate goals to create a joint effort to increase efficiency among different functional areas. 

Business leaders and HR partners must revisit and strengthen incumbent policies and practices with objective procedures and processes to prevent unintended bias. Implant equality and fairness through the talent lifecycle from recruiting, hiring, onboarding, development, promotion, succession planning to performance evaluation. Rachel Thomas, co-founder and CEO, LeanIn.Org, stated: “Companies need to rethink the norms around working. In one fell swoop, work life and home life got mashed together in a very disruptive way. Companies need to step back and say, ‘What should those new norms be?’ That may be setting certain times for meetings and certain times that are off-limits, setting norms around when you’re expected to answer email and when you’re not. And then really, explicitly communicating to employees that they can set their own boundaries, too.”

Data-driven decision-making: We need the best decision-making aid: maximum information before acting for change. Data analytics is crucial for achieving racial and gender equality. We can use descriptive data stories to inform the history and lessons learned, predictive data to determine the explicit goals, and prescriptive data to advise options and solutions. Leverage intelligence behind analytics to suggest change and continue progress.

Jane Fraser, the incoming CEO of Citigroup, shared an example in a recent interview: “A few years ago, in a move that was pretty far outside our comfort zone, we publicly disclosed Citi’s raw pay gap for women globally and for minorities in the U.S. The data revealed we have a lot of work to do to get more women and people of color in senior and higher-paying roles. But we think it’s essential to give people the information they need to hold us accountable for progress.” The story illustrates how data can inform the right change and, in the meantime, hold us accountable for progress.

CEOs should contemplate these questions:

·       How can I invite everyone along the course?

·       How can I make diversity, equity, inclusion an integral part of my business and talent strategy?

·       How can I elevate RGE with pathos, ethos, and logos in the long run?