Is diversity ‘hackneyed’?
“Helping my 10-year-old prepare for a vocabulary quiz at school, I learnt the word ‘hackneyed’. It means ‘overused, unoriginal, trite’. I couldn’t help thinking about one of the most recurrent management and HR buzzwords in the last few years—Diversity.” Explains Lelia Konyn, a consultant at People Strategies for Business Performance. We hear about Diversity endlessly—on boards, in management and teams, at conferences, in annual reports, publications and marketing pitches. We also hear about it from consultants who tell us how important diversity is, how to train for and how to manage it.
There are diversity specialists and officers in many companies. Interestingly, some of the least diverse companies have the largest number of diversity officers. Diversity is used so liberally and ubiquitously that it has become a cliché.
What is diversity?
Diversity means ‘variety, heterogeneity, mix’. In the workplace, more than anything, diversity is about equal opportunity in recruitment, pay and promotion. Not just at entry level and mid-management but all the way to the executive positions, and beyond that to board.
Corporate beacons of diversity
Some companies are seen as the gold standard for diversity culture. Goldman Sachs is one. Goldman invests millions of dollars in diversity initiatives, and it holds itself and is held by others in very high regard. Its website states: “Diversity is at the very core of our ability to serve clients well and to maximize return for our shareholders.” And “Diversity supports and strengthens the firm’s culture and reinforces our reputation as the employer of choice in our industry and beyond.”
According to Konyn, gender diversity, however, has not quite permeated Goldman’s senior management—of 10 Executive Officers, 9 are white American males and only 1 is a woman who, in a stark minority, is also African American. Goldman’s 35 strong Management Committee boasts only 5 women, and on Goldman’s board 10 out of the 12 board directors are male.
So, when reading another Goldman statement: “At the crux of our efforts is a focus on cultivating and sustaining a diverse workforce” Konyn wanted to add: “Just not at the top”. Konyn added, “As for equal opportunity—there probably is equal opportunity at Goldman, it is just more equal for men than for women.”
McKinsey
Another vocal proponent of Diversity is McKinsey, who state on their website, “Diversity and inclusion is not a program at McKinsey, it’s not an effort or department. It’s who we are and what we respect. We represent every race, gender identity, and religion you can imagine.” However, after some research Konyn discovered how diverse McKinsey’s very top is. All 8 members of its Advisory Board are male. Beyond that the website is opaque, but she found some insights in Businessweek—out of 10 McKinsey & Company key executives listed, only 1 is a woman. The 6 board directors listed are all men.
In its October 2010 report Moving women to the top: McKinsey’s Global Survey results, McKinsey shares this astute analysis: “Where diversity is a higher priority, executives also report a higher share of women in their senior ranks.” The inevitable conclusion therefore, is that at McKinsey diversity may be “who they are”, but just not at the top.
…& Co.
According to Konyn, there are several other successful companies in aviation and retail, for example, where women are the majority of the workforce, yet who have no women at all as a top executive, or have one woman—head of HR most commonly—in splendid isolation. She added that “Even PepsiCo, a proclaimed leader in diversity whose Chairman and CEO is a woman, has only 25% women executive officers. A resounding success compared to most companies today, but under whelming in absolute terms.”
Outputs
According to McKinsey, more than 90% of Europe’s leading companies have programs in place to increase the number of women in top jobs. Yet, in only 8% of companies do women account for more than a quarter of senior management jobs.
In business it is outputs that are measured and rewarded, not inputs. And as a business professional I learnt early on to focus on results. Gender diversity talk is a nice input, as are diversity programs and diversity officers. But the outputs, the results, are not there. In fact, the ROI is dismal.
Walk the walk
“Start with ‘why?’” said Simon Sinek, a motivational speaker, in his 2010 TED talk about corporations—100% know what they do, some know how they do it, but very few know why they do it.
Konyn believes that in the gender diversity context these simple questions should be asked:
1. Why is your company espousing diversity? Why do you have these initiatives? Clichés like ‘because it’s who we are, to maximize returns for our shareholders’, won’t do for answers. Dig deep. Why is your CEO, Executive or Board espousing it? Is it a real belief, a conviction or a PR platitude? And is your Diversity agenda integrated in your company’s business strategy?
2. How are you going about achieving Diversity? By doing what? Starting an internal Women’s Network is great, but who sponsors it? What are its objectives? How is it measured? If you were to scrap any one of your current initiatives, would it make a difference to outcomes?
3. What is on your Diversity agenda? And does it include clear objectives? A clear objective would be achieving a certain number of women managers at a certain number of levels of the organization by a specific year. Another option would be auditing gender equality processes—hiring, paying, promoting—on a yearly basis.
4. Who owns and drives your Diversity agenda? The CEO? The Board? HR? PR? Who is accountable for its success or failure? This will tell you quite a bit about the chances of success. The CEO is pivotal, as they set the tone. If they walk the diversity talk and they are accountable for results and actions, diversity will increase. It will stick.
Konyn summarised, “Talking about Diversity is good, but it is the results that count. There are far fewer results for diversity than talk on diversity. The same handful of women are always in the news for breaking the glass ceiling. We know them all by name because they are so few.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
