Diversity in Corporate Boardrooms and C-suites part 2

The Diverse Talent Pipeline: Sourcing, Retaining and Refining

Written by Gwanygha’a Gana, Kevin Nguenkam and Cedric Foudjet — July 19, 2020

You cannot efficiently allocate capital without optimizing your most valuable asset — your people. So what are you waiting for to build the diverse talent pipeline within your organization? Do you not want to enjoy the social and economic benefits of a truly diverse workforce?

Impediments to progress have always been systemic racism, reluctance and complacency with the status-quo. What we require now more than ever is brave and bold leadership. Not just top-down mandates but also advocacy and allyship at all levels in Corporate America.

One of the excuses used to explain the dearth of diversity in Corporate America has been inadequate access to qualified candidates. This argument is sometimes used to defer responsibility from the abysmal diversity quotient across many Fortune 500 companies. Let’s see if the data backs that story.

As seen in Fig. 1 below from the National Science Foundation, about 28,000 Black and LatinX students graduate with engineering or computer science degrees every year. Between 2014–2018, over 900,000 Black and LatinX students graduated with science or engineering degrees. With the right systems in place within organizations, these students will be the future C-suite leaders in America.

Fig 1: Black and Brown graduation rates between 2008–2018

There is an abundance of diverse talent that has been historically underutilized, under-invested and underemployed. Intentional leadership can help source, retain and refine this talent.

Sourcing Talent

Let’s walk through one of the most ubiquitous value chains in America — oil refining. It’s easy to see the degree of strategizing that goes into sourcing the best crude slate to yield the best gasoline, diesel and jet fuel blends in a given refinery. Similarly, each company has to seek a competitive advantage by uniquely optimizing its talent.

A refinery in the Midwest that processes Bakken crude or Athabasca tar sands will have fundamentally different value operations than a Southern refinery processing sweet WTI crude. So too a CPG company with a strong presence in the Mid-Atlantic should have a different talent pipeline than Google. Both of those companies should however have equal focus on sourcing, retaining and refining talent.

2019 data from the Center For Economic and Policy Research showed that 60% of the 400,000 Black and Hispanic 4-year college graduates end up unemployed or underemployed (30% above average). Fig. 2 below reminds us that there is enough black and brown talent graduating in America; enough to fill a significant amount of entry-level corporate jobs. Therefore, as a leader, you don’t have to build new talent rigs to extract this talent. However, you must be intentional about diverse recruiting and have accountability systems to attract this talent.

Fig 2 — US citizen and permanent resident bachelor degrees awarded from 2014–2018

Retaining Talent

Recruiting diverse talent is actually pretty easy. The challenge lies in retaining black and brown talent within the organization. Many black employees deal with microaggressions and distractions that affect productivity. Some estimate that a third of black mental bandwidth at work is spent addressing distractions like “Will my mistakes reflect negatively on other black people in my firm?”. There has to be an intentional retention plan to preserve the investment made in sourcing talent. The challenge of retaining talent is a business problem arguably as important as increasing sales. Here are some steps that can be part of your retention strategy:

1. Create or amplify the work of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to build a strong sense of community among your employees. ERGs should have autonomy and resources to define their scope and success metrics. They are a powerful tool to build a culture of inclusion that can help retain talent.
2. Publish a periodic Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) report.
3. Create accountability on DEI by tying managerial performance to DEI goals. These will help drive accountability across the organization and together with a DEI report, give associates visibility on progress. This move will signal that this is truly an imperative that is actively being addressed, leading to increased retention. Companies like Wells Fargo are already onboard.
4. Empower diverse talent to have full decision-making rights within their sphere of influence. Proxy leadership positions do not help set the right culture of ownership and accountability.
5. Define what racism looks like within your organization and implement a zero tolerance policy for such behavior. Racism nowadays can take many covert forms like microaggressions, microinvalidation and microinsults. Firelight media has brought modern racism to life through videos like these. Some companies like P&G have used videos like “The Talk” and “The Look” to highlight the burden black employees face while creating cross-cultural empathy internally. Identifying and training employees to combat overt and covert racist behavior will improve employee retention. (See Table 1)
6. Don’t try to do it all alone. Find external partners like the YWCA, Mouse and Elephant and CrossRoads Anti-Racism to train employees on best-practices. Consider bringing in experts such as Ibram Kendi and Alicia Garza to teach practical racial equity tools for all associates to be allies in this work.
7. Lastly, please stop relying on your black and brown employees to shoulder the burden of driving DEI initiatives. Educate yourselves, watch some videos, read books and understand your position of privilege. White people need to fix racism in America. We’re just here to help.

Table 1 — Racial Microaggressions in everyday life

Refining Talent

When crude oil gets to a refinery, it contains valuable hydrocarbons and impurities like sand and metals. These get value-upgraded into products like gasoline for the plants. Similarly, graduates come into a company with theoretical knowledge of finance, programming, supply chain and need to be developed into refined talent and deployed across the organization. However, you cannot optimally refine talent unless you optimize your talent allocation strategy.

Today, companies create a job and then find the perfect candidate on paper to fill that position. This sometimes creates a talent mismatch that doesn’t always position employees to excel. For example, that financial analyst you hired might actually show the most potential as your next sales manager. We believe companies should adopt a personalized approach that allows cross-functional exploration within the company in addition to talent planning at levels. There is an opportunity to leverage ML/AI to create personalized talent plans and profiles that are iterated and aggregated across the firm. This can be used to allocate talent by optimizing employee and company performance.

Most executives would credit mentorship, sponsorship or coaching as an invaluable part of their professional success. Unfortunately, these networks are far too often not readily accessible to diverse employees. Leaders must go beyond the traditional leadership development programs and create career accelerators for high potential employees from underrepresented groups but beware of glass-cliff assignments. Intentional coaching is critical to refining talent.

Black and brown employees are not looking for charity. We are asking for change to systems that were not designed with us in mind. Most organizations want to do the right thing and we hope this article will give managers and associates some practical ideas that can be used to source, retain and refine talent to diversify those Corporate Boardrooms and C-Suites.

We are taking our passion for equity one-step further by launching Blackminds. This will be our way to continue raising awareness about black stories, black people, and black minds. We hope to highlight these stories over numerous media platforms.

“You must find a way to get in the way and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. … You have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate, when you leave here, to go out and seek justice for all. You can do it. You must do it.”

We dedicate this article to Congressman John Lewis The Troublemaker

Rest In Power