From the bottom of our hearts here at Gender Leadership Group, we wish you a happy holiday and a prosperous new year! This will be our last blog of this year and we will be resuming in the new year. Cheers!
Where To Engage Men In The Workplace - Pt. 2 of Problem, Opportunities And Solutions For Gender Equality In Corp. Culture
In last week's blog, Dale Thomas Vaughn, Co Founder of Gender Leadership Group described gender equality problems and opportunities as related to corporate culture. This week he covers the solutions and then begins a panel discussion entitled The Inclusion Roadmap: Where to Start Engaging Men in the Workplace. He welcomes Dr. Ronald Copeland from Kaiser Permanente, MD Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer of National Diversity Inclusions, Strategy and Policy, and Lesley Slaton Brown from HP Inc., Chief Diversity Officer. The series then continues with Nadia Chargulaf, Telstra Vice President of Human Resources for U.S. Operations and Mike Dillon from PwC, who’s the Chief Diversity Officer.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Let’s get into the solutions. Let’s say you all in this room believe me that gender equality would be good, is that true? Can I get a round of applause for gender equality would be good? That just felt good to hear. So, let’s get into solutions.
HOW DO YOU BRING IN LEADERSHIP? HOW DO YOU MAKE A DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS?
When I go into companies, we start with the cases around impact, but then we start to talk about communication, we start to talk about, "How do you bring in leadership? How do you make a diversity and inclusion program that actually works?" Well, the good news is, there’s some research around this. This is from Harvard Business Review, if you haven't read this, this is literally called Diversity Programs That Get Results. And I'm going to show you diversity programs that don't get results, and some of you are going to blush.
If you haven't seen this, I’m just going to quickly go through it. (points at presentation) You’ll see that the numbers in blue show that there is an increase in representative people within a company, and you’ll see that oranges are lower. Now this shows you all the things that do actually work. You might notice that some of the things you do are on here. There’s one of them that I want you to pay attention to, which is voluntary training. I'm going to show you this slide here in just a second that says Mandatory Diversity Training and I want you to see the difference in the numbers. So, mandatory is bad, voluntary is good.
I FEEL LIKE I'M FINALLY PART OF SOMETHING
Whenever we do training, we ask for voluntary training. That does two things: one is it lets potential allies volunteer to come forward as allies, which is what we want, right? Not quite as rescuers, but as, “I want to be part of this, I want to actually be engaged and be a part of a team”. I have seen literally – this is amazing – I have seen men walk into training I do with 20 to 30 people, and some of them are senior leaders. There are men walking in with their head down feeling like they’re about to get their knuckles wrapped. And I’ve seen those same men after that voluntary training after a few hours walk out, saying, “I am so glad I came to this, I feel like I'm finally part of something at my company.” “I feel like I'm finally part of something” was a quote from a white man who said that to me. He said, “Just the idea that I can be a part of something as a white man, is maybe something I never thought of before. I thought my company was what I was a part of, but now I'm part of something within my company.” That’s huge!
So I besiege you to get this study and get deeper into it. But what I wanted you to see is also that there are some pieces in here about mentoring. We've heard some talk about the difference between mentoring and sponsoring, which is true. One of the things about mentoring is that white men accidentally get a lot of mentoring, and so if you don't have formalized mentorship processes, what happens is, white men get all the mentoring in order to get all the sponsorship. So, installing some kind of formalized mentorship process tends to work very well.
WHAT IS YOUR ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY?
What I want to do really quickly is cover - What is your role and responsibility? This is what I was asking myself when I was in these companies at a lower level and we have created what I think is a very compelling road map, this is something that you’ll see in sheet form on your tables in the next break. On the back of it is also has the top eight ways to engage men in forging a partnership in your workplace. I just want you to have a road map of places you can go, starting from the post-conference show and share. And if you want to have a deeper conversation about all the stuff that we do at Gender Leadership Group, we have a table downstairs where you can come and talk to us afterwards.
I want to get to the next slide package. I'm going to bring up a few people who have actually done the work, who have actually built in systemic solutions into their company and have built an inclusion roadmap.
I want to bring up Lesley Slaton Brown from HP Inc., Chief Diversity Officer; Nadia Chargulaf, Telstra Vice President of Human Resources for U.S. Operations; I want to bring up Dr. Ronald Copeland from Kaiser Permanente, MD Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer of National Diversity Inclusions, Strategy and Policy;Mike Dillon from PwC, who’s the Chief Diversity Officer.
I just want to mention to you that when I got here at about 7 o’clock this morning, Dr. Copeland was already here taking copious notes, greeting everybody, and I think handing out coffee and donuts.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Thank you all for being here. I know that everyone is looking forward to hearing all the stuff you’ve got to share.
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT THE STRATEGY OF INCLUSION - HOW DO YOU BRING THAT TO FRUITION? HOW DO YOU START THE PROCESS OF VISUALIZING THE STRATEGY?
I want to start with strategy, I want to start with the 30,000 foot view. A lot of you are seeing your companies and your initiatives from that level, and some people in this room would like to know what does it look like from that level. I’d like to hear from you all, and we'll start here. At the top level, when you think about the strategy of inclusion - How do you bring that to fruition? How do you start the process of visualizing the strategy? Talk to us about the 30,000 foot level that needs to be in place before we get down into tactics.
Dr. Ronald Copeland:
Well, thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this panel today.
I THINK STRATEGY STARTS WITH A CORE MISSION
When I think about the Kaiser Permanente journey in the diversity inclusion and equity space, and you talk about strategy at 30,000 feet, I think strategy starts with a core mission. In our case, our mission in health care is to provide the highest quality and affordable health care services to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. So when we think about any business discipline, any strategic approach, we ask the question, :How does this inform, enable, and empower our ability to carry out our mission?" So diversity inclusion and equity get that same assessment, and where we find connections, we build an overarching framework in the areas that have the highest priority for us, and we define what particular accomplishments we want to achieve now and downstream that, again, align with our business strategy.
THE DIVERSITY INCLUSION EQUITY STRATEGY IS NOT A SEPARATE ACTIVITY, IS NOT A SEPARATE FUNCTION
My point is that, at least for us, the diversity inclusion equity strategy is not a separate activity, is not a separate function, it is fully aligned with our mission and our recurring versions of our business strategy. We put diversity inclusion and equity to work to serve the mission in our business strategy. That alignment is critical, because the way we drive results around that is through leadership at all levels: board levels, C-Suite, and right on down through all ranks of the organization in the way we talk about performance management goals and in a measure of what we achieve.
Performance measurement is critical, so, if measurement and goal-setting and trend analysis is okay and valuable for financial management for marketing and growth, then it is relevant for diversity and inclusion, if you truly treat it as a strategic asset, which, in our case, we do.
And then the third component beyond leadership and measurement, is alignment; alignment of culture, of policy, and infrastructure. Because, when you get to tactics, that’s where the muscle is at.
Dale Thomas Vaughn:
Thank you.
Lesley Slaton Brown:
So Dr. Copeland set me up really well for this, thank you. So at HP we started, when we split in November of 2015 from one company, the Hewlett Packard Company, as two very distinct companies. When we did that, we set off in one direction with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and then in the other direction with HP Inc, which is the company that I now represent. We said we want to create the most diverse board of directors in the tech industry.
TO BE CONTINUED...
Better Man Conference 2017 Recap Report
We are proud to share this recap report from the Better Man Conference 2017 as just last month, 200+ leaders and many great diverse speakers and panelists, both men and women came together to be a part of the movement to engage men as inclusionary leaders at the Better Man Conference 2017. This year we grew in both quantity and quality. That’s due to your involvement. We thank each and every attendee, speaker, sponsor, marketing partner, and supporter for being such an important part of the men's inclusionary leadership movement. See the recap report here.
THANK YOU to 2017 BETTER MAN CONFERENCE SPONSORS
THANK YOU to 2017 BETTER MAN CONFERENCE MARKETING PARTNERS
