Actively Listen and Learn

By actively listening and learning, I mean set up a formal process for taking the pulse of the organization. I’ve worked with CEOs who have set up town halls at which anywhere from one hundred to one thousand or more employees can start talking and listening. Those CEOs have also organized more-intimate roundtable discussions with smaller groups, typically of fifteen to twenty. You too can use both formats. Either way, think of this as a listening tour that gives the CEO a chance to hear from people at all levels of the organization.

The way a town hall is structured will depend on whether your staffers are mostly in the same geographic area, in which case you can bring everyone into an assembly hall with speakers on stage, or whether they’re spread out and can only assemble virtually. Typically, the meeting will last between forty-five and ninety minutes. You might start with a discussion of company values, led by the CEO or another senior leader in the organization. It can also be highly effective to have a guest speaker or a small panel of speakers discussing topics related to diversity and inclusion. After the discussion, you invite the audience—the employees, that is—to ask questions.

At roundtable meetings, the idea is for the CEO to listen to what the attendees have to say. The meetings can be in person or virtual and should include associates at every level, with participants from a variety of divisions and job functions. If you have factories or warehouses, plan to visit them and invite both managers and workers to the discussions. If your operations are far-flung, a series of face-to-face meetings of small groups will require the CEO to embark on a heavy travel schedule for two or three months—an investment of time that I guarantee will produce quantifiable returns over the long term through new innovations and new ways of solving problems.

In both formats, your key objectives are twofold. The first goal is that the CEO and other senior leaders engage with staff members, perhaps at levels the leaders haven’t tried before, to hear what’s going on in the hearts and minds of their employee base. Be prepared to use these sessions to give voice to those who have been voiceless within the organization. The only way to find out who has been voiceless is to be open to listening—and to conceding that all is not right. In her highly acclaimed book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, journalist Isabel Wilkerson points out that in order to transform, you have to identify old ills, similar to the way a doctor needs to know a patient’s medical history in order to treat the symptoms. (See “More Resources for Understanding Racism” in the appendix.)

I know what many business leaders think at this stage. How are employees going to feel safe speaking so freely to the CEO? The answer is that of course, you can’t always expect breakthrough discussions in your first listen-and-learn sessions. No doubt it will be difficult to get meaningful, constructive feedback in a room filled with people from multiple levels. In most workplaces people are used to a hierarchy and to limits on how much they can safely speak their minds. Still, I like to have these open forums at which everyone is encouraged to speak up, because it’s a way of showing that I’m trying to create a shift in the culture. I’m working with a number of CEOs now who started with companywide meetings and then set up other venues that employees can use to follow up—anonymously if they prefer. Venues for continued feedback might come in the form of surveys, internal blogs, Slack channels, or messages that are filtered through a point person in HR, who then distills the findings and passes them along to senior management.

Lisa Wardell started conducting listen-and-learn meetings before the George Floyd murder and subsequent shakeup, and she received honest feedback in the form of follow-up messages and emails. After a series of companywide discussions about Black Lives Matter and police brutality, she received a message from an employee who wrote, “My spouse is a police officer, and I don’t appreciate your talking about police brutality this way.”

“I think that’s the brave person,” said Wardell, who made sure that the company had platforms that allow everyone to express opinions of all kinds.⁴

When I started at Jamba Juice and held town halls and roundtable meetings to get a sense of where we stood, culturally speaking, I wasn’t sure how comfortable anyone was going to be speaking candidly with a new CEO. I wanted to create an environment where associates were fully engaged and felt that they had value to add to the culture and the company overall—but how could I be sure I was drawing them out? So I passed around index cards and asked everyone to fill out the cards anonymously, stating what they most wanted me to change and what they didn’t want to see change.

The second big objective of all listen-and-learn venues is to demonstrate, and make sure everyone understands, that the company is renewing its commitment, or embarking on a commitment, to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Be honest in these discussions about where the company stands.

And in any format, what’s key to a successful outcome is that the leaders do more listening than talking. When you do talk, personalize, using your own life and career experiences. Ask the people who work for you to do the same. If you’re a CEO who hasn’t spoken candidly in the past, just be clear about what you know and don’t know about race, diversity, and inclusion. As business leaders start to realize how critical it is to take a stand in this moment, I’ve seen many establish the authenticity they need by speaking out and admitting, “I’m on a learning curve.”

Of course, a large percentage of CEOs and board members are not comfortable having this conversation, and that’s completely understandable. We’ve never had conversations about structural and systemic racism in the workplace before. It’s doubly uncomfortable if you’re a corporate leader who’s always considered it your job to have all the answers. Examining social justice and racism is more about asking questions than providing answers, however, which means that when you’re willing to ask questions, you set an excellent example. You show everyone that their CEO and senior managers are working, just as they are, to educate themselves and get better at DEI, taking bolder actions as they learn.

But what questions should a CEO ask to show that they genuinely want to understand what it’s like to be powerless or marginalized and how the organization can change things for the better? How do you ask in a way that assures low-level employees that they can trust you to do right by them? How do you lead a conversation about race and inclusion?

Begin with a brief story about what brought you to this room. I always tell my staff about my humble beginnings and how my mother understood my potential, but that same potential wasn’t recognized in the same way with employers. If you come from privilege, acknowledge it, then explain how you came to the realization that the company could do a better job of being inclusive.

Then ask some targeted questions, such as:

• Have you ever experienced behavior that seems discriminatory in this workplace?
• How can we make this a better workplace for you?
• What are three things you’d like to see change in this workplace?

At roundtables you can invite the participants to introduce themselves. Introductions will be useful, because often those in attendance will be from cross-functional teams and therefore they won’t necessarily know one another. But add value to their introductions by asking each participant to talk about what they’re working on and what most excites them about their work—you’re trying to get a sense of their passions and their potential.

Let your audience know that you are going to take their comments to heart and come back in several weeks—announce a specific date—with an action plan on how everyone is going to work together on achieving a more inclusive culture. Let them know that the results will not be instant. Typically, it takes two to three years to achieve all of your goals, though you’ll set up incremental milestones.

Enlist and Align across the Senior Leadership Team

Every new DEI effort must reach people at multiple levels throughout the organization, and its success will require commitment from everyone. After your listening tour, share the findings with senior management and the board of directors. When a transformation fails, it’s often because the buy-in stops at the top level or one level down. Some other high-priority item comes up and the DEI effort takes a back seat, or too many senior leaders are resistant to change, or the CEO doesn’t create a system that ensures management will carry out the hard work. In the chapters that follow, I’ll discuss what it takes to enlist additional partners from HR and middle management as catalysts for a cultural transformation, but first, you must ensure that from here on, DEI is going to be woven into the fabric of the organization from the top, so that it is not just an isolated initiative but is also part of the way you do business.

Alignment generally starts with making the business case for DEI—and that is something that should be easy with all of the studies over the past decade showing the correlation between diversity and performance. You can remind your managers that diversity allows a company to solve problems more completely and drives innovation in ways that can take you much further. But with the business case established, your role needs to be one of leading a conversation about race and diversity.

I worked with a cohort of a dozen CEOs who belonged to the J.E.D.I. Collaborative for the natural-products industry, helping guide them in making these uncomfortable conversations more palatable to all participants, and any number of creative ideas for breaking down barriers to such discussions emerged. One CEO, Blair Kellison, who heads up the organic tea company Traditional Medicinals, assigned Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race as required reading for his entire management team. He bought a copy of the book for every employee, and then invited author Oluo to speak at a Zoom town hall for the entire company. The straightforward message in Oluo’s book served as a kind of leveling tool for conversations. It gave everyone a common set of talking points, ideas, and even language for taking some important actions in the way they hire and promote people.

With these conversations, you give all senior leaders a chance to educate themselves. It is also helpful to bring in external resources, the way Leslie Stretch at Medallia has brought in a diverse group of business leaders, myself included, to talk frankly about their own lived experiences and why businesses thrive when they’re inclusive.

From there, you have to let your senior teams know that there will be lucrative incentives for those who carry out an intentional DEI strategy—and consequences for those who don’t. A certain percentage of executive bonuses should be tied to meeting a set of goals in this area. Your mandate will be buffered by the increasing possibility that even if you don’t push for this, shareholders and other stakeholders will. There’s no choice, because good performance increasingly includes deliberate acts to foster diversity and inclusion.

Inevitably, those goals will include more diversity right where you’re all sitting: in the executive suites and the boardroom. The more diverse your top ranks are, the more likely the senior teams will be to embrace an intentionally diverse culture. The leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder, in its annual Global Board Diversity Tracker report for 2020, says it takes at least three underrepresented voices in a boardroom to truly change the internal dynamics. “Rather than seeing one person as the token stand-in, a larger group allows the individuals to be heard for their perspectives rather than for their perceived identity,” the report says.⁵

But if you look around the room and pretty much everyone present is white, that brings up one of the biggest challenges of all in this cultural transformation. How do you persuade your white executives and board members to create changes that they might not believe to be in their best interests?

When I started at Jamba and held meetings at which I described the agenda and how we were going to work, I knew I’d encounter a certain amount of resistance. You have to go in knowing that some executives will have a different view on how the company should address racism. Give everyone the opportunity to get engaged and involved—or, if they prefer, they can free up their future.

However, there is always a place at the table for those executives who support the new initiatives with empathy and an eye toward embracing the challenges of a transition. The cultural transformation will take several years, and one of the most important contributions that senior leaders can make is to intentionally begin recruiting, developing, and promoting talent based on new criteria, striving to create a leadership-succession pipeline that looks more like society at large, and in all probability, more like the company’s customer base.

Audit the Culture

Auditing is a more formal process for determining how your corporate culture is working for its stakeholders. I think of the audit as a kind of archeological expedition.

You have the known artifacts in the form of written statements: “Our Mission” and “Our Values.” Beyond those statements, however, you have to dig to find out how policies are working in practice and how people experience the company. It gives you the current state. It grounds you in facts: policies, people, who has been promoted, the pipeline, how high into the ranks efforts have reached. If you are in the retail or restaurant industry, most likely you’ve got great diversity in the frontline workforce, but as you move up to middle management, people of color and women taper off. In the restaurant industry, about 49 percent of the frontline workers are people of color, but the farther you go up the hierarchy the whiter and more male representation becomes.⁶ Needless to say, systemic factors have created this scenario, and several generations of affirmative action have not created a significant shift. Business leaders are in a good position to change the picture. The audit shows you where the ceiling for advancement begins for certain demographics.

Many companies already use third-party survey firms to conduct pulse surveys and employee-engagement surveys; I’ve listed a number of these firms in the “Resources for Workplace-Experience Audits and Employee-Engagement Signaling” in the appendix. Third-party auditors can give you a snapshot of how the company looks to your employees, customers, suppliers, and others in the value chain. My colleague, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law Joan Williams’s Workplace Experience Survey identifies basic patterns of racial and gender bias, where they’re playing out, and the impact on employees’ feelings about belonging and staying with the company. At Jamba Juice I regularly used a version of the Gallup Q¹² Employee Engagement Survey. This is an audit tool that asks for employee responses to such statements as “I feel that I belong here,” “I have the tools to get my job done,” “I have a best friend at work,” and “My compensation is commensurate with others performing similar jobs.” These are critical measurements of whether the respondent feels comfortable in the work environment. You’re looking for an assessment of who feels included.

Because the survey is kept anonymous, it can ask questions about a person’s ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, age, education, job level, whether they have disabilities, and such. With this data, you break down the responses into segments to determine whether there are noninclusive patterns: Do Black employees feel, in the main, that they are not getting the tools they need to do their jobs effectively? Do women of color at the associate level feel near unanimously that they are being overlooked for the most important assignments? Audit results can show whether there are systemic ways in which some people are being held back, as well as how your company’s results compare with those of the industry in general.

I’ve worked with any number of CEOs who were surprised—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively—by the results of a corporate audit. I always tell them that whatever they learn, it’s okay. A large wholesale distribution company, for example, found that of its ten distribution facilities, several had highly inclusive practices—and others didn’t. That’s what the audit is for: it identifies the blind spots, and then you embark on a corrective course. The distribution company used the findings to start examining the way things were done in the inclusive facilities, and then operationalized its best practices throughout the company.

Some CEOs have chosen to make their change and learning efforts very public, which in itself can be a way of showing that you understand the systemic flaws in society and are going to make your company a high-profile role model that others can follow.

Bracken Darrell, the CEO of the computer-peripheral and software manufacturer Logitech, is one such business leader who took stock of society and his own company and realized he could do much more. In looking at how he could be a more active change agent, he found that he could make a big difference in facilitating the growth of smaller supplier businesses owned by women and people of color by committing to supplier diversity. That led Darrell to issue a public diversity pledge in which he promised to increase the number of suppliers from underrepresented groups across the globe: “We believe our supply base should be reflective of the diversity of the communities and markets that we serve,” Darrell said in a company strategy statement.⁷

While it isn’t essential for a company to issue a splashy public statement about its efforts to become more inclusive, out-loud reflections such as Darrell’s can give other business leaders permission to recognize that none of us is perfect, not one of us has all the answers, yet we can still take the initiative to make improvements in our own organizations that will ultimately encourage others to be part of the solution.

Those CEOs who prefer to keep a lower profile can communicate their intentions internally, although I do recommend making public statements about anything you do that will have an impact on the community, such as training disadvantaged students, distributing food in needy communities, or sponsoring inner-city education or sports programs. That’s something Todd Schnuck at Schnuck Markets has started doing, spearheading a number of efforts to support underserved communities in St. Louis and southern Missouri. The most immediate advertisement for the company’s stand is a T-shirt that says “Unity is power” on the front and “We stand together against racism” on the back. But to put the message into action, the company has a foundation to address food insecurity and is looking at the best ways to get more food donations into the neighborhoods that need them the most. Schnuck Markets also made a $100,000 investment in fighting education disparities by providing computers and Wi-Fi to disadvantaged students so that they could study from home during the pandemic.

Document What You’re Doing Now

Once you have a grasp on how employees and stakeholders perceive the corporate culture and practices and you’ve gained a sense of what is and isn’t working for whom, you can match perception to reality. It’s now time to assess all of the existing programs and practices to see what’s working well and what needs to improve.

Don’t try to judge the findings of your audit; just compile everything into a factual “state of the organization.” How many white people do you have in your management ranks versus people of color? How many LGBTQIA+ people? Take a hard look at how you hire people. Do you have diverse slates of candidates? Do you mandate a diverse slate? What are the processes for promotion? If you pull out a list of high-potential candidates, how much diversity is in that list? You can bring in third-party resources to audit this process and assess how your company stacks up against the industry as a whole. Document all of your current programs, best practices, and gaps.

Then set a destination and begin making changes to reach it.

I’ve talked about how Brian Cornell at Target has been vocal about making the company a force for social change. As part of this effort, he has turned to Laysha Ward, who is the company’s chief external engagement officer and another ideal executive for this moment. Her role is to strengthen the Target brand with external stakeholders. On the job she runs the Target Foundation, sustainability programs, and community outreach. On a personal level, in early 2020, she told Black Enterprise magazine something that echoes exactly what business leaders should be saying now: “I wish I’d learned sooner it’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help and that I didn’t have to have all the answers. We all get better together.”⁸

Target has also documented both its racial and gender breakdown across all levels of the organization and its goals for greater DEI in the future. In a very focused assessment of African American representation, Cornell found the company behind the curve. He issued a public statement revealing that in Target’s workforce of nearly 350,000 team members, about half were people of color and 58 percent were women. The percentages declined significantly in the leadership ranks, with 42 percent of Target’s leadership team composed of women and 24 percent composed of people of color. Also documented were the positive findings that Target had doubled the representation of company officers of color since 2015 and had a board in which a third of all directors were women and nearly half were Latinx or Black. Cornell has committed to doing still more, with a goal to increase representation of Black team members across the company by 20 percent by 2023, bringing in a more diverse workforce through a sharper focus on advancement, retention, and hiring.⁹ To help meet these goals he’s doubled down on programs that include cross-functional mentoring, STEM leadership, development training, and more than one hundred employee resource groups. Performance and compensation evaluations for the top three hundred leaders in the company are closely tied to turnover and DEI metrics.¹⁰

The poster CEO for how not to document your progress in achieving diversity is Charles Scharf at Wells Fargo, who in June 2020 stated in a meeting, and then in a memo to employees that was seen by Reuters, “there is a very limited pool of Black talent to recruit from.”¹¹ Although Scharf was in the process of creating new diversity initiatives, the comment led to widespread backlash when Reuters published the memo in September of that year, and Scharf quickly issued an apology for “making an insensitive comment reflecting my own unconscious bias.” His original statement was one that I’m fully aware reflects what a lot of business leaders believe, but it was a case of a leader being underprepared for this moment and less than thoughtful about how to assess what needs to be done.

If Scharf had said in his message: “I’m perplexed; others are doing a better job of this, and we’ve got to do something more,” that would have been an indication that this was a business leader who was starting to recognize that he needed to figure out how to recruit and develop more diverse talent. That kind of proactive stance always goes over better than damage control. You lay out exactly what you’ve done to achieve a workforce that looks more like society at large, and if your list comes up short, be up-front about it. Then review your recruiting practices and tap into the multiple resources out there that can be of help in broadening your search.

Establish Benchmarks

You’ve listened. You’ve brought all of your managers on board, even if that necessitated some changes. You’ve audited and documented the current state. Now you need to measure progress against benchmarks—not just internal benchmarks of your goals but also measurements that show how your results stack up against those of industry competitors, other businesses in your geographic purview, and society at large. This establishes a way to gauge progress, quarter by quarter and then more exhaustively on an annual basis, quantifying how your company is doing when it comes to recruiting, promotions, retaining, and having a workforce in which everyone feels that they are valued.

Set goals: What do you want the demographics of the company to look like in the future? By when? What is the vision? What hiring practices do you want to put in place? How many people of color do you want to have in senior management, and by when? How many women and people of color do you want to have on the board, by when? How do you want people to experience the company? How are you getting feedback on the organization from your workforce? What are they saying? How are you engaging the community, and how would you like to engage it further? What is your action plan to change the metrics? Then keep score of the progress (see table 3-1).

Some companies have formed working groups to monitor their benchmarks so that the companies can continue to hold themselves accountable over the long term. Schnuck Markets, for example, holds weekly meetings, and then I, as a board member, meet with the working group once a month. In those gatherings we review our progress in meeting targets and refine our approach accordingly.

Build Action-Learning Teams or Task Forces

Professor Reginald Revans pioneered the concept of action learning in the 1940s, when he was working with managers of the UK Coal Board, and since then it’s been used in myriad ways in the business world. Basically, it’s a process that involves a small group working on real problems, taking action, and learning as individuals, as a team, and as an organization. It helps organizations develop creative, flexible, and successful strategies for dealing with pressing problems.¹² Throughout my career, I’ve found that setting up action-learning teams is the most inclusive way to help catalyze an agenda, solve problems, reshape culture, and answer strategic challenges. If the problem you’re addressing is the need to meet the goals and measure up to the benchmarks you’ve established as necessary for a more diverse and inclusive culture, consider setting up action-learning teams, a time-tested way to ensure the best foundation for a transformation. The directive comes from the top, but diverse voices are actively engaged in building the future.

What is action learning, after all, if not a way to teach others to become leaders, thinking critically and working collaboratively? Because the team’s whole purpose is to work together to innovate and solve previously intractable problems, the members are likely to be bolder about proposing unheard-of big ideas than they might be if they were flying solo.

Two of the world’s best-known proponents of action learning were Jack Welch and Roger Enrico. In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy outlines how both CEOs taught others to lead by teaching them to take on real challenges and own the outcomes. As CEO of PepsiCo, Enrico would lead nine executives at a time through five days of action learning. He would tell them about his own experiences in the business and coach them on their personal operating styles. He had each participant take on a “grow the business” project that would have a significant dollar impact on the company. He would coach them on the objectives and implementation and then send them out to work on their projects, returning several months later to review their progress. Welch, when he was CEO at GE, taught leadership every couple of weeks at GE’s Crotonville management development center. One of the questions he would ask participants in the most senior program was, “If you were named CEO of GE tomorrow, what would you do?” He used the question “to orchestrate a no-holds-barred discussion in which he jousted with participants and honed their analytic abilities and leadership instincts by having them also joust with each other.”¹³

The problem-solving groups start with a team, task force, or work group of fifteen to twenty people whom the CEO handpicks, with breakout groups of five to eight people. The group comprises managers from various levels. When your goal is transforming your corporate culture into one that fully embraces DEI, it’s helpful to instruct the action teams to think big in this way. At Jamba Juice I made the teams diverse by design, choosing previously overlooked employees for the ALTs. If you do this, your action-learning teams are likely to be far more diverse than the company’s workforce as a whole.

I’ve found that the most effective ALTs always include strong representation from middle management. You can’t make the track to promotions more diverse unless you have middle managers as part of the effort; they’re the key to breaking systemic barriers.¹⁴ Why? Middle managers are typically the ones who control who get the high-profile assignments that put junior-level people into the pipeline for greater responsibilities, and the bias of middle managers can go a long way in explaining why many diversity initiatives fail. In an organization of 100,000 people, you might have no more than 150 people controlling the work experiences of everyone else. At every organization I’ve helped lead, I’ve found that you need effective policies to embed diversity and inclusion into the DNA, but middle-level managers hold the key to delivering it. (In chapter 4, I’ll talk in more detail about how to enlist middle managers as catalysts for transformation.)

The action teams will work closely with the CEO and other leaders, such as the chief human resources officer (CHRO), functioning as the steering committee for the change effort. Typically, the assignment will take place over a period of sixty to ninety days, though I’ve seen groups achieve objectives in as few as thirty to forty-five days. The team members should meet once a week to examine the issue, to determine the objectives and the priorities for reaching those objectives, and to make recommendations. Typically, the teams should have no more than one or two critical items to examine. They should take on specific challenges, with a time frame to deliver recommendations on one or two granular questions. A clear agenda, a specific timeline, and some minimum threshold of deliverables will produce stronger, more-effective innovation. I’ve found that ALTs will almost always exceed your expectations as long as they have a clear assignment and clear parameters, with clearly spelled-out processes, check-ins, milestones, and deadlines.

At Jamba Juice we used action-learning teams to study several growth initiatives. One team took on the question, How should we expand internationally? Another looked at the question, How will we get Jamba Juice stands into more airports? Another figured out how to make significant changes to the menus at the franchised restaurants in a couple of months. Previously, changing menus was an eighteen-month project. I was looking for faster innovation—and all of my teams, by design, were highly diverse in terms of work experience, background, ethnicity, and gender. Mike Fuccillo, who was my director of marketing and communications at Jamba and who headed up about ten different ALTs during my time there, now tells me that the head of the design team came into his office shrieking about having to change the menus so quickly.

“But then he saw that he could do it,” Fuccillo recalls. “It was all about taking out the fear factor and getting everyone on board to just get things done.”¹⁵

These days I often advise companies about setting up diverse ALTs to study diversity itself and to help speed up the development of their DEI initiatives—and I’m always stressing that point about the fear factor and how a group of diverse minds can eliminate the fear of doing things differently.

I’m now serving on the board of the Bay Club Company, which operates luxury sports and fitness resorts all over the West Coast, and helping advise its action-learning program. The CEO, Matthew Stevens, launched a diversity task force in the summer of 2020, and since then company leaders in four locations have formed teams that are deploying action-learning principles to answer the following question: How can we create an inclusive environment where individuals of all backgrounds are celebrated and can thrive? They’ve come up with multiple actions. They’ve created a video for all employees discussing why an inclusive environment is important, conducted an education series, had task-force members lead safe-space fireside chats with employees, and started a cultural-celebration space in their monthly newsletter, highlighting employees’ ethnic backgrounds. The latter, says Stevens, is a way of “learning more about the things that make us different and the things that bring us together at the same time.”¹⁶

Develop an Action Plan

You’ve promised your employees that you’d have a plan ready by a certain date. This is the action plan. Factoring in all that you’ve learned from your listen-and-learn sessions, management meetings, surveys, and audits, and from the ongoing education everyone is getting from discussions about race, organizational climate, and belonging, it’s now time to draw up a thoughtful, comprehensive blueprint showing how you will incorporate changes into the organizational culture over the next several years.

Set goals for each quarter of the year ahead. In the first quarter, you should launch an executive diversity council. This group should include the CEO, the head of HR, the chief diversity officer and others on the diversity-and-inclusion teams, and leaders from key business units or divisions of the company.

Other goals for the first year might look something like this:

Q1

• Develop a community-engagement initiative.
• Increase supplier diversity.
• Launch a communication initiative to let all employees know about your plans to hire and promote more people from underrepresented groups.

Q2

• Launch a DEI council with specific roles, responsibilities, and deliverables.

Q3

• Form employee resource groups for Black/African American, Latinx, and LGBTQIA+ associates.

Q4

• Begin a comprehensive DEI training program.
• Develop a strategy and targets to evaluate and support supplier diversity over the long term.

These are examples, but every company’s action plan will be tailored to the company’s most pressing needs.

The action plan should also spell out longer-term commitments for the next two to three years. This is where you can set specific representation goals. You might state, as Target and Starbucks have, that you will:

• increase the number of Black and Latinx senior managers by a certain percentage by a certain year;
• increase the representation of Black, female, and LGBTQIA+ board members by a certain percentage the year after that.

The action plan is something you can circulate throughout the company, stating the basic goals so that every employee at every level is aware that you’re building an intentional culture step by step. You should, of course, plan to hold more town halls and smaller meetings over the next few years, as well as send out newsletters or messages through the internal website, letting everyone know how the company is doing when it comes to meeting the goals set in the action plan. That will be an ongoing challenge, but the goals will be a natural extension of your business strategies if you build a design for change throughout the organization—a plan that I’ll explain in chapter 4.

Key Takeaway

Start talking openly about race and systemic racism in the corporate world, and then start changing the systems and structures.

Checklist for CEOs

  Call a series of town-hall meetings that include the entire workforce.

  Organize roundtable discussions with smaller groups of managers.

  Discuss the transformation with all executive leaders to be sure the senior teams are aligned.

  Conduct an audit of the culture.

  Tabulate the results and identify the problem areas.

  Document what you’re doing now and what needs to be accomplished.

  Establish benchmarks and goals with time frames.

  Set up action-learning teams to enable the work.

  Develop cross-functional dialogue.

  Establish an action plan and road map.