Four White CEOs Talk Candidly About Diversity

Over the last few months I have had the honor to interview CEOs for a series for Fast Company on purpose-driven leadership. It has been a pleasant surprise to find that one of the topics that is on the top of so many of their minds is diversity. Equally inspiring has been their desire to speak authentically about their journey.

“What can a bunch of white people in Vermont do?” - Ben & Jerry's CEO, Jostein Solheim

Jostein Solheim, CEO of Ben & Jerry’s shared his early challenges with me about even being involved in discussions about race as a white man. “What can a bunch of white people in Vermont do?” he recalls thinking when they were considering getting involved in work addressing racial justice in America.

The turning point for him was meeting with Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights leader and hero who has recently been in the news for his public feud with President Trump. Solheim recalls Lewis being very clear about the issue and saying that “African Americans can't solve this ourselves.” He challenged Solheim and his team to actively be part of the solution.

Solheim recalls Congressman John Lewis being very clear about the issue and saying that “African Americans can't solve this ourselves.”

While Solheim is white, he is also an immigrant to the United States, and that experience clearly helped him gain insights and empathy that he brings to his work. At 13, he moved to California when his father went on a sabbatical. He was placed in an American Literature course, but after two days his teacher was shocked to learn he didn’t speak fluent English. The teacher was confused and said "‘but you’re white.’" And he replied, "Yeah, I am, but I don’t speak English." They had enrolled him in American Literature because he was white instead of the ESL class he needed.

He was then placed in the proper ESL class with a group of Mexicans. "I just saw from their perspective how differently they were treated." He was also moved by their kindness. "Their kindness toward me was extraordinary." But as soon as the class was over he noticed, "They disappeared. They had this way of hiding out. To not draw attention to themselves. To not be pulled into conflict or bullying. It was a segregated world without looking like it from the outside."

Until then, he had not been able to internalize the role of race in society; it was his "first lesson in segregation." He was an outsider treated as an insider because he was white. Yet he was able to see how different it was for fellow immigrants with a different color skin.

Honest Conversation about Bias

Reflecting back on his early career, SAP CEO Bill McDermott realized that he had a bias to working with people like himself and didn’t always see the magic in everyone. But he came to quickly understand that great salespeople don’t need to be passionate and wear their heart on their sleeves. He recalls realizing that some of the best performers were the "quietest, most intellectually savvy, and least passionate you'll ever meet." He came to realize that you can’t "look just at the surface of an individual but give yourself a chance to really get to the heart of who the person is."

SAP CEO Bill McDermott realized that he had a bias to working with people like himself and didn’t always see the magic in everyone.

McDermott sees bias as one of the greatest challenges to organizations and teams and has focused significant SAP resources to develop "a software application through machine learning that essentially eliminates bias in the workforce." He knows that people want to do the right thing but it is hard to own your bias. The computer, he believes, is able to act rationally without that bias.

People want to do the right thing but it is hard to own your bias.

He took it one step further and has proactively created goals to employ people who are typically overlooked. SAP recently announced a goal to staff 1% of their workforce with people who have autism, as the company has found "there are immensely talented autistic people who do particularly well in some aspects of our business." He wants them as part of his family.

Diversity Overseas

"I'm a senior person here, and I'm the biggest idiot", Erin Ganju, CEO and co-founder of Room to Read, reflected on how she felt about her experience working in manufacturing for Unilever in Vietnam, back in the 1990s. She loved the work, but it was so clear that the local Vietnamese team was "so much better at getting things done."

That lesson stayed with Ganju, when she returned to the U.S. to co-found Room to Read, a nonprofit with a budget close to $50 million per year which establishes libraries, improves literacy instruction, and promotes gender equality in education, and has scaled its impact throughout Asia and Africa with a team of 1,300 employees across 10 countries serving 10 million children per year.

She shared that, "we've really held to having our country directors be local nationals, and 88% of our staff worldwide are all local nationals—from country management teams through the programming and field staff."

This is not the norm for most multinational companies or nonprofits. Whether out of assumptions about unqualified local talent or a need for control, the conventional model is to "hire expatriates, who take on all the senior roles, so you find that your country director, your key leader, is American or British, working in Africa or Asia."

Ganju’s alternative approach offers a distinct advantage. "A library shouldn't look the same in Tanzania and Sri Lanka. You want it to be very contextualized, and there are certain key components, but a lot of it comes with the ingenuity and the creativity and the innovation of our staff. The key is to make our libraries work within each country’s education system."

From Race to Gender

“Tecate, our brand, stands for masculinity,” Dolf van den Brink, CEO of Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma/Heineken Mexico shared with me. So it was a shock to him when the marketing team returned with the recommendation to align the brand with a campaign about gender violence. “Gender violence is a very difficult topic, it's a massive issue in the Latin world. In Mexico, two out of three women gets confronted by gender violence, and a shocking 60% of the population thinks it's okay.”

Van den Brink was clear “there's a major, major issue there,” but “this is walking into a minefield" given the brand. “I was uncomfortable.” His Millennial team stood their ground - "No, this is what we need to do."

They had uncovered a critical insight. “The whole issue of gender violence has been addressed from the victim's perspective, from a female perspective. We, as Tecate, stand for men. And we can speak from a man to a man.”

The resulting ad was revolutionary and gained wide acclaim. They proclaimed in the ad that men who abuse women are not part of the Tecate tribe. “We don't want you as a consumer.”

“We have hundreds of millions of consumers, we have marketing budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. We can make a difference, we can literally support and help changing negative male-female stereotypes in ways that an NGO would be not possible to do.”

Van den Brink has come to appreciate that when he lets go of fear and stereotypes he sees that “the vast majority of people are very good, decent, hard working, well wishing people. In that sense, I'm really an optimist about people. Actually, a big part of humanity is blocked in these functional companies, organizations, bureaucracies that are really blocking, dampening their potential. That actually, you know, when you remove those blockages, when you really appeal to people's passions and you unleash their energies, amazing things can be done.”

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Aaron Hurst is an Ashoka Fellow, award-winning entrepreneur and globally recognized leader in fields of purpose at work and social innovation. He is the CEO of Imperative and founder of the Taproot Foundation which he led for a dozen years. Aaron is the author of the Purpose Economy and has written for or been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg TV and Fast Company.