I think it’s absolutely critical for a company to embrace diversity and inclusion. At Salesforce, we operate in a very competitive industry – one that is evolving every day and where innovation isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’, but a business imperative.
Diversity for me has been an issue I’ve been passionate about throughout my career. It’s certainly something which has evolved over time, but it’s rooted in my upbringing. My parents were very involved in the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s, so from an early age it has been ingrained in us as children that concepts like civil rights, diversity and valuing differences were the right thing to do.
Continue reading “Mark Roellig, general counsel, MassMutual”
A diverse workforce means you have a diversity of experience and a diversity of opinion, which translates into better products and better services. We service customers worldwide and our team has to reflect that in order for us to remain competitive.
A number of years ago, while interviewing an individual for an open position on my team, he shared a very personal concern with me. He told me that he was gay and that was causing him concern about how he would be perceived, should he be out in the workplace with his colleagues. He also worried that he may be treated differently because of his sexuality.
Continue reading “Mike Cammarota, senior director of legal services, Accenture”
Rhanda Moussa: ‘Bring your whole self to work’ is our team’s new lens in which we define, progress and measure the strategic direction for diversity and inclusion across legal. We broadly work from three guiding principles, focusing on attract, retain and develop.
As a white man, I don’t scream diversity. But as the first-generation son of Russian immigrants who came to the US in the 1950s, I know all too well what it feels like to be a minority. When my parents came to America, they didn’t speak a word of English. Despite being highly educated (English was their fifth language), I saw them be treated as if they were stupid simply because they struggled to express themselves in a language other than one of their own. This experience shaped my character and how I think about diversity, both personally and professionally.
Continue reading “Alex Dimitrief, general counsel, General Electric”
Maternity policy is a conversation that has been around for decades; the problem statement is our most valuable resource is our people. We have a group of working women who are assets to the organization. We invest in them via time, finance and development, and we lose that tremendous value they have with the insight, the skillset and experience because someone chooses to have a baby.
Continue reading “Megan Doberneck, general counsel, Vodafone Americas”
The idea for the Denniston Fellowship originated from my own frustrations with other diversity and inclusion initiatives. We participated in a diversity summer internship program in 2013 where a law student spent a few weeks of the summer with a law firm and three weeks with our team.
Continue reading “Tom LaFrance, general counsel, GE Transportation”
Reflecting on the MCCA’s 20th anniversary, I do think there has been a significant shift in the last 20 years. I think that is as a result of the elevation in the role of the in-house lawyer; Ben Heineman, former general counsel of GE, is credited as the godfather who revolutionized the role of in-house lawyers.
He believed in hiring the best and wooing the best talent to his legal department. As a result of his model, GE lawyers are always considered to be at the top of the tree. More generally, perception of the role has shifted from mediocre at best to being considered at the top of your game if you are a GC at a Fortune 500 company. Today, in-house lawyers and general counsel have so much more power than maybe even they realize, particularly in regards to D&I where they can control a lot more.
The MCCA focus when we started was to diversify the profession and ask how corporate counsel can play a role in that. If you look at percentages now, they are still terrible. But if you look at raw numbers, they have significantly improved. The MCCA’s role was critical then for that reason and is equally critical now for a different reason. We see that overall numbers have improved because more people are going to law school, but what hasn’t changed is overall diversity at the top.
My focus and vision for the MCCA is that we need to change representation at the top. Overall applications for minority law students are now down more than the general population; if you parse that out, applications for Asian American students are down the most. When there are fewer people coming through the pipeline, there are less for recruiters to choose from. One hypothesis is that diverse people are looking at the equation of how much they would spend on law school, how much they would have to work in a law firm, and still see no chance of making it to the top.
In the US in recent years, we do have the highest number of firsts and trailblazers thanks to the legacy of President Obama: The first African American attorney general, first African American woman attorney general, the first Latina to the United States Supreme Court. There has to be change at the top and that’s true in law firms and companies as well. In serving consumers and shareholders they are not serving just Caucasian men and women, but the legal profession remains predominantly white. 84% of the profession are white, and 92% of the upper-echelon roles – top general counsel and equity partners – are white.
We are developing a number of new programs to tackle this.
Our survey, which was conducted in association with Vault, looked at the top 200 law firms in the US and how small numbers are for African American, Hispanic and Asian Americans as law firm partners. This program is to help partners at these firms formulate a strategy for business development and execution, where they can learn the skills required to continue to grow a book of business, because ultimately in law firms today that’s what matters. Many have shared that once you make partner there aren’t the same developmental resources available. That is why we will collaborate with those partners to provide access to professional resources where possible. We’re also giving law firm associates the opportunity to network with junior in-house lawyers to help in this sphere.
The c-suite program is an effort by MCCA in collaboration with prominent diverse Fortune 500 general counsels to effectively change the landscape of the legal profession at its highest levels. In order to achieve this goal, the suite program provides a platform for the senior leaders to achieve three sub-goals: identify, develop and promote talented diverse lawyers. The c-suite program is structured with panels, workshops and recruiters to achieve those three sub-goals.
I conducted similar programs before I took this role for the Asian American community. It doesn’t mean that if you attend this you will become a Fortune 500 GC. But it will give people information and skills so that they are ready when they get the call. We are working with influential people and reaching out to Fortune 500 GCs who can lend their names and muscle to the program.
There are key practical steps that every in-house counsel can take regarding diversity. Lots of Fortune 1000 companies have very small legal deptartments. Those lawyers can actually make a huge impact, as you can really look at the diversity of the law firms you are hiring and keep them accountable. The effects of this can be big, for example, if you are a small company that has ten lawyers, you probably won’t have huge amounts of transactions or litigation, but when you use outside counsel you are using them for larger matters. Well, as an in-house lawyer today you have much more power than you did 20 years ago. You can say you can have my work but I want to know I have diverse lawyers really working on my slate. It’s about making your counsel accountable and checking it is really happening.
Looking at this as part of our 20th anniversary next year as I feel we all need to be working together in the profession but one thing that it hasn’t happened is a concerted collective effort.
Ingeus principally provides employability, skills and training, youth and justice services for the governments, with its largest market being in the UK. People come to Ingeus because they have barriers to employment for all sorts of reasons, many of which are protected characteristics under the Equality Act. We also run probation services through our Community Rehabilitation Companies in the Midlands, and many of our service users are ex-offenders so, again, there’s quite a big diversity angle. We need to consider race, age, disability, LGBT issues, and all sorts of other factors when designing programmes for our clients.
We have an equality and diversity committee that meets two or three times a year. It does two things: it reviews our performance outcomes for diverse classes of service users under our contracts,, and it sets a diversity strategy for the wider organisation. I’m involved and lead that Committee because of my background in doing lots of diversity-related work at my former company, Balfour Beatty, and leading external LGBT networks.
We set ourselves targets related to parity of outcomes for groups of service users from different backgrounds. The government wants to see up-to-date policies and procedures about how we deal with diverse groups, so this year we’ve created a handbook for all of our frontline staff to help them understand barriers faced by people with protected characteristics under the Equality Act.. We also became a ‘B Corp’ last year [a for-profit business that has a social purpose], and so are assessed against a number of criteria, many of which touch on diversity.
An understanding of different diverse classes of people can only help in our service delivery. Overcoming barriers faced by clients can lead to better results, which leads to better results in our contracts, which means that we win more contracts. It’s blindingly obvious that an understanding of diversity is going to be a real benefit for us as an organisation. I also certainly believe that engaging with diversity and inclusiveness is one great way to improve staff engagement, if you do it in the right way. A diverse organisation, one that reflects our end users, is likely to make Ingeus a better place to work for everyone.
When I was at Balfour Beatty I spent a lot of time generating a business case for diversity, and we approached quantification of the benefits in two ways. The first was a ‘negative’ way of looking at it, which was focusing on the cost of getting it wrong. Every time you have a discrimination claim, you’re highly likely to lose several days of staff time, due to stress and grievance. There are legal costs, a lot of management time invested in investigating complaints, and so on. A lot of discrimination claims could have been avoided with some diversity training. Taking a negative lens and quantifying the cost was a way of justifying the training.
On the ‘positive’ side, there’s lots of work now being done by external organisations where you can look at how well companies with diverse boards are doing compared to those without. By and large, diverse companies tend to outperform others, so all that evidence is mounting up in terms of a business case for diversity.
When I was at BP, SABMiller and Balfour Beatty, they were all fairly masculine industries − oil and gas, beer, construction − and certainly the legal team in each of those organisations was pretty much the most diverse team. I’ve always found that when you have a diverse legal team, people from other parts of the business tend to want to come and talk to you, because it’s a bit different from the rest of their day job. And one of the biggest roles of in-house lawyers is to be the glue that connects various parts of the business together. In some organisations, people don’t talk to others in different departments, but at some point in time most departments have to come and talk to us. If you have a diverse team that people want to come and talk to, it can make that part of your job easier.
Obviously a lot of in-house counsel tend to get involved in ethics and compliance and we’re often required to uphold the Code of Conduct of the organisation, implement it, and investigate whether there are breaches of it. We’re often called upon to investigate things like discrimination and harassment, and therefore we need to be seen to be perfect at diversity really. It is not good enough to just be impartial, when you are investigating, you need to understand the root causes of issues and not bring your unconscious biases to bear in presuming any outcomes.
When you are at GC level you’re viewed as a very senior person in the organisation. I found that as soon as I started engaging with, and talking about, diversity, people listened because it was coming from me. And it didn’t matter that it wasn’t really purely legal subject matter. If you are from a diverse group (I’m LGBT), then the more senior you are, the longer your shadow is. You get to a certain point where it’s not acceptable to hide away: you need to be seen to be a role model.
When I created the LBGT network at Balfour Beatty, there was a man who saw the ad and came to the programme. He mentioned to me that he was interested in transgender issues, we had a separate meeting and by the second event he had come for the first time dressed as herself. By the third time we had a plan in place to go through her transition at work, and now she works as Christina and is fabulous. She took over the running of the network when I left. Balfour Beatty now has a fully engaged employee, who is very loyal to the organisation, and who is delivering so much more than just the day job she was delivering when she was Chris and not Christina.
You can add to your role modelling with mentoring role as well, identifying smart people within your networks who have some potential and then offering them development opportunities. I’ve spotted some really sharp talent as a result of that network that otherwise might have gone under the radar. There is also reverse mentoring. In terms of my leadership skills, it has made me more empathic, a better listener and it’s actually helped me do my legal day job as well.
One of the critiques that often gets levied at you when you’re setting up a network is: ‘If we do this, everyone else will start complaining that they’re not getting all this support or this attention, so therefore we should do nothing’. I think that’s a cop-out approach. Actually, if you set up programmes where people see that they would be supported if they created such a network, then it inspires people to do more than just their day job − something really beneficial for the organisation.
I worked very closely with my head of HR at Balfour Beatty Services, who was running the women’s network. It was immensely helpful for both of us to have each other focusing on these two separate strands of diversity, but to then come together as part of a wider diversity committee. We talked about the concept of diversity and overarching programmes that we could put in place where your diverse characteristics are almost irrelevant: it’s more around measurements and the business case for diversity and things that apply right across all diverse characteristics. I learnt a hell of a lot about all sorts of diversity as a result of being engaged in my particular strand. Obviously there is gender, race, disability and age all intersecting with LGBT issues, and you need to understand about all those things to be fully effective.
I think it’s important in companies to have role models who look like you, but it works even better when you have allies who don’t look like you. The problem with diversity sometimes is that it makes people who don’t fit into that category feel uncomfortable. What’s being exposed is people’s unconscious biases. But when you’ve got someone up there who isn’t from that group saying ‘this is the right thing to do, and how awesome, look at all this amazing challenging stuff going on’, then it gives a bit of credence and support to the people who are trying to make the changes and be the role models.
One of the things I did when I left Balfour Beatty, is to help found a network called ‘Off Site’, which is a network for LGBT people in the infrastructure sector. We’ve had three meetings now and we have between 70-100 people show up, from SMEs up to bigger organisations. I’m a firm believer that it shouldn’t just be the big organisations that get the benefit of these events, but the only way that smaller organisations are going to get the benefit is if they join up across sectoral initiatives like Off Site. You can come in your own time, there’s none of that work pressure around it. Smaller companies can identify those networks and point employees in the right direction to get those connections, and they might bring back good ideas for the company.