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enso
Building world value with shared missions and fearless creativity.

Diversity as a Shared Mission

The creative business has a serious diversity problem. The cycle of dysfunction goes something like this. We publicly embarrass ourselves. We’re all apologies and introspection, swearing that we can do better. That it’ll be different this time. Then, with the best of intentions, we fall back into the familiar rhythm of our business: briefs, proposals, pitches, client churn, quarterly numbers.

Behind closed doors, we haven’t forgotten our indignant calls for top-down reform or promises of institutional change. But when it comes to taking meaningful action, we’re genuinely flummoxed by our lack of progress. I mean, we’re smart people, right? We use our strategic and creative superpowers to solve really complex business problems every day, so why is this particular challenge so, well, challenging? We assign another task force, maybe even hire an outside consultant to aid in discovery, but progress is glacial.

At enso, we’re intentionally moving beyond the legacy agency model as we build a mission-driven creative studio. But we’re still hyper-aware of its shortcomings in solving for diversity as we grow our talent base and scale our operations for greater social impact. As we work to champion shared missions with brands, nonprofits, social innovators, and communities, we have to keep ourselves honest that any work we create will be hollow if the team behind it isn’t representative of the diverse constituents we’re serving. Thankfully, we’re not alone.

In an unexpected development, pressure to change is now coming from clients. First, it came to light that General Mills, under the leadership of CMO Ann Simonds and CCO Michael Feneule, is requiring agencies participating in its global creative review to be staffed with at least 50% women and 20% of people of color within the creative department.

Then, just days later, HP Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Antonio Lucio called on his agency partners to deliver actionable plans on how they will increase the representation of women and people of color in top creative and strategic roles. And gave them notice that HP will monitor each firm’s performance to ensure that they’re walking the talk.

Now, the opportunistic agencies will probably just enlist their overcompensated, underutilized data scientists to slice and dice their stats to meet client mandates, but many of us will use this moment as an opportunity to become more self-aware and transparent.

To that end, we’re sharing our own audit of enso’s workforce. And we will continue to share our own progress on increasing diversity at every level of our organization, with a particular focus on senior leadership and the creative department. We’ll shine a light on both the walls we hit, as well as the breakthroughs we create so others can benefit from our experience.

So what does our snapshot look like?

  • 20% of our creative department are women, a number we’re pledging to increase significantly in 2017
  • 50% of our full-time employees are women
  • 33% of our senior leadership team are women
  • 58% of our creative department are people of color

One telling insight in our data is that the ratio of creative talent we’ve pursued for full-time employment is 63% women and 37% men. The fact that our creative department is still only 20% women reflects a serious deficiency in our recruitment efforts, and supports a broader issue that industry leaders like Nancy Hill and Cindy Gallup have been raising for years. (If you’re an amazing woman creative, we’re hiring!)

A smart man once said we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. And from our perspective, opacity has been an ongoing problem as it relates to sharing our experiences, both good and bad, in recruiting a more diverse workforce. It’s understandable, given the commoditization of our business, but we need to think of successful inclusion efforts not as a competitive advantage to be hoarded, but rather as open-source intelligence that when shared can help lift up our industry as a whole.

So let’s share. Even overshare. Let’s make ourselves vulnerable in the hopes that we can activate our collective resources, learn from each other, and break the cycle of dysfunction this time around.