You, the 2019 BAME 100 and our supporting Networks - the speech that never was....

Welcome to Somerset House ...

I had been provided with a significant number of ice breakers and jokes about Proroguing parliament, not using bad language at work (Parliament) and the never-ending surprises the negotiation with the EU bring but I’m not using any.

For those who don’t know us

Green Park is a Recruitment and Talent management Consultancy business broadly looking at leadership and change through our own niche which is the value through the impact zone between Recruitment, Diversity and Brand perceptions.

In fact since we focussed our activities and the behaviours that support our creed of helping people think differently about talent our business has grown from around ￡30m to over ￡88m since 2016 – in markets where our message , innovations and relentless focus on bringing diversity data & the voice of the candidate into boardrooms is still often unwelcome.

But there are people who think of the future like us and recognise they will benefit from fresh thinking uncomplicated by years of cosy existing relationships serving a group think based what companies used to be and how labour markets used to value brands.

This is the fourth time we have published our BAME 100 list. I want to thank our assessors – they do this task for their own firms and organisations, day in day out; they are all distinguished people, and their judgement is impeccable. They did not include every individual we proposed, in fact some of my friends and clients have been left of this year’s final 100 – the choices made were tough, and that's as it should be.

Green Park’s list of board ready leaders has always been without sponsorship for the very reason that our independence is key to our integrity, which is key to why Diverse leaders trust us more than our competitors.

So the list this year isn’t just credible – it’s elite, and any company, public body or third sector organisation that isn’t bidding or competing for the talents of these people is short changing its employees, customers and clients. Of course they may need a little help to do so when they realise they are seen differently by others than they see themselves.

Of course, there’s a reason we originally put this list out there in the first place and why we map the top 10,000 roles in the FTSE , top 5000 in public sector , to 200 in charities and top 700 in retail by diversity and it’s not just proactive market mapping so we can compete with the best global search and interim management firms.

Obviously, it was not the smartest commercial decision to give away our IP. It cost us a bit – but we got so fed up of hearing both clients and rivals claiming that they’d really like to do better but couldn’t find the talent we thought we’d simply put some of it out there in plain sight to take away that excuse. And our shareholders know that behind this group we have another 500 names of BAME board ready talent – and so do some our competitors.

The truth is that there’s no excuse for failure on diversity these days – if you aren’t making you leadership more diverse it’s because you really aren’t trying, don’t know how or lack the intelligence and routes to market required to influence properly.

 Many are still relying on strategies that mean nothing to the people you are trying to influence and reek of tokenism. Reverse mentoring anyone ?

There’s a reason why we placed a diverse leader on a board every 14 days in 2018 , there a reason why our executive placement rates in the Public and Third sectors run at over 40% female and 28% ethnic minority and there a reason why we are more likely to place a Woman CIO or CDO than any one else of our scale or larger in the UK.

Part of its our attitude , part of it’s our credibility that comes with 10 years of campaigning for equality in organisations but the biggest reason is the data we collect and how we leverage the relationships between recruitment, diversity and brand for the candidate.

Our focus on that helps us take a more nuanced, personal and targeted approach to executive recruitment and talent management. Not better nor worse just focussed where we think the markets are going not where they have been.

This is just one element in Green Park’s diversity and inclusion strategy. From the day we created this firm, we decided that we would be different from our competitors in many ways. Of course, we wanted to make money; we wanted to be partners and we wanted to help even the playing field for the next generation through the actions of todays leaders. Most of all we wanted to help improve the clients that partnered with us and accelerate the careers of the people who chose to put their trust in us as a firm.

We also wanted to be different because our life experiences meant we already stood for something different from our competitors. One manifestation of our difference is how we chose our strategic clients because they share our values, or we were sure they would benefit most from our values and capabilities, not because of spend.

 There’s no point just finding talent for organisations who are never going to try and recognise the equal value of all the people we put in front of them or who will not face the need to change.

As I said recently ‘If you refuse fix your leaky pipeline – we won’t risk our integrity by continually filling it for you’. And that honesty underlies the second part of our difference – that we don’t just say we do diversity – we make it a condition of our service. It’s why our practices outperformed the industry averages on the hiring of women and BAME candidates – firms in our sector typically manage 27% women and 8% people of colour in their hiring’s; last year, amongst our successful candidates 44% were female and 27% were people of colour ( whilst growing by ￡30m in the calendar year) . We have systematically built trust around our mission and that trust our greatest business asset.

How did we do it? At the heart of it is a simple Green Park ting: we just don’t take the excuses from the client or candidate we challenge. There may come a point when, as a firm we just need to go along with the client to survive – but at that point I think that both I and my fellow shareholders will pack up and go home.

For example, one of my colleagues was recently told by a client that they wouldn't consider a black woman candidate because they (QUOTE) already had one of those. This woman – whose name you would all recognise is exceptional in her field and is a household name from her profile. The fact was they didn’t have one of her, because there isn’t another one of her anywhere in this country – and we told the client so. Happily, they got the point – and she got the gig.

The fact is, in the battle to create a more diverse and inclusive leadership class in this country we don’t need more facts, more research or more argument. We need more people to let us help them and we need more of the leaders in this network to be empowered and rewarded for doing more that makes a difference.

We should celebrate results and glorious failures not the self-proclaimed ‘allies’ too often motivated by their own PR and organisations aspirational brand promises, strategic marketing spend on branding posing as D&I action.

We’re all awash with data that shows that more diverse organisations do better. And when it comes to (White, Red brick educated) gender it seems that people are getting the message and doing something about it. We know that from the data published by the government. But we also know now that when it comes to ethnicity, at the very best, we are flatlining.

This year, we analysed the career paths of the 180 people who we have named in our BAME 100 lists previously. At one level they’ve done well – there have been 90 promotions amongst this group, and 28 individuals have won additional new board roles. That's brilliant, and I’m happy that about the dominate firm in getting them those seats is Green Park. But what our analysis shows is that this rate of appointments barely makes up for those who have retired, left their industries or moved abroad.

In short, we are running to stand still in numbers but proclaiming that Race in the Workforce is fixed, institutional racism does not exist, and everything is Cool & the Gang.

Allowing institutions to ask, ‘What’s next on the list?’

It equally clear that progress requires us to do better as a Recruitment industry; we can’t do this by ourselves. There are dozens of outfits larger than us, and hundred of clients who seem not have noticed that we are entering a world where absence of credible diversity in leadership is turning off both the talent and the customers.

So that’s why we have published previous lists, and why we have been happy that people have used it, not just to find your next senior appointment, but to provoke a discussion in your organisation about how to do better their own shared interests as well as being an organisation that can be trusted to be one of the good guys

Of course, we would say that the best way to do better is to work with an outstanding talent partner. That, by the way, would be Green Park.

In CONCLUSION I leave you with my gratitude and a single request - 'are you willing to help us , help you ?