Your focus is on fixing the culture. Changing the organizational culture to level the playing field is important. But culture change happens very slowly-and usually not at all until new faces have appeared in your company’s leadership ranks and new perspectives have begun to reshape its strategies. Your first priority should be to improve performance and promotion rates in underrepresented groups. You’ll find that culture change comes more readily from a critical mass of diverse executives than from a series of diversity and inclusion seminars or one high profile minority hire.
You prioritize minority candidates for diversity department roles. This practice is everywhere, and it’s understandable. But minority managers are usually struggling themselves with the issues their companies want them to solve. They may be risk averse—especially given their awareness that, with so few senior minority members around, they and their new strategies are highly visible. A company that wants its diversity executives to advocate for bold new approaches should think about rotating high performing line executives (whether minority or nonminority) into diversity roles. Having already established their reputations internally as revenue producers, they can navigate any setbacks that come from new approaches.
Don’t undermine your own efforts to make your leadership pipeline more diverse. Instead, incorporate the same rigor and results orientations that you apply else-where in your operations. The problem is entirely manageable—if you’re willing to manage it.
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