Category: Interviews

GC: Within Arcadis, how important is diversity and what value does it bring to the organisation?

Margot Day: From an organisational perspective Arcadis has a global strategy to continue to improve diversity and inclusion (D&I). We refreshed and re-launched our D&I programme two years ago, trying to encourage a diverse workplace that is equal for everyone regardless of sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, age or disability; and one that reflects the culture we want as an organisation and the culture that our clients want as well.

The question often posed is ‘why have a D&I agenda?’. I think that having a diverse workforce assists in our design for a globalised world; it broadens the breadth of knowledge we have as an organisation and increases the skills we can offer our clients, while improving our ability to innovate. I have heard it said that ‘strength lies in differences, not in similarities’; and I believe this to be true – a team that has experiences from diverse perspectives, cultures, ages, gender and race is more likely to come up with innovative solutions than those where there is only one ‘type’ of high ability problem solvers.

GC: The initiatives that you’re running in-house at Arcadis – how did they come about and where did the directive to really get involved with D&I come from?

MD: At a regional level in the UK, I sit as part of our UK leadership team and all people in leadership positions have taken up the helm to develop and invest in the D&I programme. For me, I am involved in the race and gender equality agenda, looking at these from both a legal perspective and as an organisation, asking what do we want to be as an organisation and how should we present ourselves in the market. Most importantly we look at how we attract and retain staff, and how we can ensure that we continue to encourage a diverse workforce.

In most in-house environments, the legal team tends to be quite diverse in terms of gender – perhaps more so than workforces generally. Arcadis as a global consultancy, design and engineering firm, is aligned to industry sectors which are not typically so diverse. There is an international legal counsel group consisting of the GCs in each region within Arcadis and while improving the way we work legally, we also seek to drive through initiatives like the D&I agenda. This approach ensures we can take account of cultural differences and feed the international perspective into the D&I agenda.

GC: Something we’ve heard from other GCs as part of this exercise, was that it can be difficult at times to separate genuine D&I initiatives from merely a box ticking exercise – how do you make sure that through diversity you find a way to impart meaningful change within your organization?

MD: In the UK, we have looked at supplier contracts for employment agencies that we use to try to make sure that such agencies tie in with our goals and put forward candidates that reflect a diverse range of people, so we can try and interview a diverse range of candidates.

Our global executive board is based in the Netherlands. The D&I agenda has been taken up worldwide among our senior management committee which represents our leaders across the globe. The D&I initiative was re-launched because there was a real need to not just show we have a D&I agenda but to actively try to address D&I issues within the organisation.

I think, if you look at the last five to ten years, every big company has said ‘we are behind the D&I agenda’. But it is important that an organisation actually reflects this, especially for new recruits and graduates, because they want an organisation to embody the right kind of values. You need to have initiatives and agendas that are actually followed through and implemented into the company as opposed to bland strategy comments made and posted around the organisation with no oomph behind them. We have seen a need to benchmark where you are now to where you want to go.

GC: From your perspective, how important are role models in driving diversity forward?

MD: If you look at anyone coming into the organisation, they will be asking ‘what is the real opportunity for me? Does this company model what they say? Do they reflect this?’. If people cannot see people like themselves in leadership positions, then it is just empty words. There has been a step-change at the leadership level of gender representation and this has been encouraged through mentoring and promoting participation in leadership-type programmes, and this allows people to see they can get to higher levels within the organisation. There is a need to ensure this mentoring continues to takes place across all D&I strands and that is the focus of many of the streams in the UK now. In addition to mentoring there is a need to focus on school children from the 11-16 range to show them the possibilities of what can be achieved as we regard this as a key stage to capture minority groupings.

Traditionally, support and enabling functions are more diverse than other areas of any business in the construction industry. Arcadis is trying to ensure diversity is reflected across all areas of the business and we are fortunate that this is an issue taken seriously by the CEO and the leadership team.

GC: What are the challenges you see moving forward, both from an Arcadis perspective and in the broader legal sector?

MD: Where next? Everyone talks about D&I, it has been a buzzword for the last five years, but you need to actually see a step-change from the top down: not just words, but something properly reflected. Over the last few years we have seen the appointment of women to board positions within FTSE 100 companies and while I am not convinced myself whether this alone drives the behaviour in terms of inclusion, it is a good start.

Now there has to be a wider agenda. In a way, gender was the easier one to kick off all of the D&I strands. But there has to be a constant reminder to people that it isn’t that gender was important and now we have addressed it and we can move on: instead, it is something that needs to be continually addressed.

On the race agenda, I think it was very much a box-ticking exercise in the ’80-’90s. There was a feeling that if organisations monitored their race relations they were satisfactorily discharging their obligations. I believe more has to be done to encourage people from ethnic minorities into our profession both from a legal point of view and a consultancy, design and engineering stance.

Encouraging people means taking actual steps towards inclusion. I have heard it said that if you do not intentionally include then you unintentionally exclude and that is why more credence has to be paid to inclusivity. You have to constantly reference back – for us as an organisation and for our clients – in terms of measuring improvements or where there has been ‘success’ in the company.

There is no one target that shows you have achieved D&I, you have to constantly feed back to the workforce what successes there have been, but still continue to strive to improve in all areas. I am excited to be involved in seeing the development of these initiatives over the next few years.

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.

The business case

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.

Being a role model

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.

Learning together

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.

Alison Gaskins (AG): As Chair of the Legal Diversity and Inclusion Council, I am ultimately responsible for fostering a culture in legal in which we can share and appreciate our perspectives and differences, and where colleagues can properly express who they are. My predecessors, Judith Shepherd and Erica Handling, did an outstanding job running D&I in the past and so it makes me think that there is something in the lawyer role that shares kinship with this effort, possibly because in the classic sense, lawyers have to operate without prejudice, taking a big picture view in all we do.

 

Bob Hoyt, Barclays Group General Counsel, is very passionate about collaboration. He sees legal as being uniquely placed to work across all boundaries and siloes within an organisation, and diversity is a great place to see this in practice.

GC: Is your diversity and inclusion strategy primarily driven by internal factors, external pressures or both?

AG: Definitely both. We want people to feel very comfortable working at Barclays. The same is true within legal – we want people to thrive, whoever they are and whatever they feel.

We have the aspiration and objective to be the employer of choice for D&I. It is not an HR-driven agenda; instead it comes right from the Barclays Executive Committee and is prevalent through our culture, activities, communities and as part of our day-to-day narrative.

Internally, we have five global agendas covering Gender, Disability, Multigenerational, Multicultural and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) and we have internal employee networks assigned to these five agendas. These are each sponsored by a member of the Executive Committee, so we have very senior sponsorship and leadership, which gives them a profile.

Externally, ultimately we are a customer-facing organisation, and one key thing you want to present back to your customer is a mirror image of local communities and themselves. Is there connectivity, sameness, a rapport… and is it felt? Even with our products and client services we try to bring in D&I. We think about vulnerable customers with innovations like talking ATMs and Skype-based banking using sign language. Our UK branch network is very innovative from a D&I perspective. We also launched a Barclays card mobile capability at Gay Pride in London.

GC: What is the impact of diversity on perceptions of the company?

AG: We try and engage with external organisations such as Stonewall and Working Mother. Where there are opportunities to actually seek recognition from them, we actively pursue this.

We offer a lot of in-house training and we take opportunities to get that externally referenced as well because it is important to validate our progress without it becoming a numerical exercise. External affirmations help endorse what we are already doing.

GC: What is the role of the in-house Legal team in creating diversity and inclusion initiatives? Can the Legal team have an effect on the identity of the organisation?

AG: My predecessors Judith Shepherd and Erica Handling were hugely influential in this space, and created a connection in the mind of the organisation regarding the effectiveness of legal in this whole agenda, primarily (but not exclusively) from a gender perspective. If you think about the role lawyers play as custodians of managing risk, there is a sense that what legal takes seriously is a mark of what Barclays takes seriously – a connection of influence there.

We think about our functional role in two ways: one is ensuring that lawyers feel part of the central agenda of the organisation and are not working in isolation. That goes back to there being a natural affinity of value here – legal working without boundaries across Barclays.

The other is our commitment in Barclays and in legal to dynamic working. Dynamic working can be defined as a method of making sure that all colleagues can structure and balance their work and life successfully. Flexible working often constitutes a change in your working hours, while dynamic working may be just doing the same hours from a different place. It becomes about the value of outputs, not where and how. People associate flexible working with the working mothers agenda, so dynamic working pushes it to a broader meaning and audience.

With our dynamic working and multigenerational working (responsibility for elderly parents can be a big factor), we try to acknowledge that people are both parents and carers. These discussions can start with our well-funded employee networks, which are driving that agenda for change.

GC: Multigenerational working sounds interesting. What are the specific challenges involved in introducing a commitment to this?

AG: Our multigenerational agenda has been part of Barclays’ diversity strategy for years. The core of the agenda is to support colleagues through each stage of their lives and careers. We do this in many different ways. Through our employee network groups; for instance, the Working Family network (which supports working parents and caregivers), the Emerge network (colleagues who are in the early stages of their careers, primarily Generations X and Y) and our Military network (colleagues who are typically entering banking as a second or third career). Or through the dynamic working campaign, which is about helping people manage their working lives.

And then also through various other programmes and initiatives, like our ‘Be Well’ campaign, which supports good health and wellbeing, and Barclays’ ‘Bolder Apprenticeships’ programme, which aims to address the increasing rate of older – generation unemployment.

We’re soon going to have five generations working together in the workplace and so I think you will see a keener focus on how we foster more intergenerational understanding. This will certainly be one of our focus areas at Barclays.

GC: What are the key challenges you face around getting buy-in across departments?

AG: One challenge we face at Barclays is trying to remain impactful within a very complex, global organisation and operating structure. We have colleagues with multifaceted roles in Barclays and it is, at times, challenging for global diversity campaigns to touch different individuals in a real and authentic way.

However, the biggest challenge is not the buy-in, it’s getting people to figure out what to do. We don’t have an army of people behind the employee networks – it is astonishingly small in terms of people driving the agenda. But it needs to be led from the top down and embedded in every part, irrespective of how big or small you are. It is about whether people feel accountable at all levels and all areas. It is not about the job title – everyone needs to feel responsible. That’s where employee networks step in, because people are deciding for themselves what works. It becomes an inclusive approach.

A really big part of all this is that anyone can be a part of the network group. You just need to be sympathetic.

GC: What are the future challenges for Barclays in regards to D&I?

AG: D&I takes time to permeate, and part of it is not knowing what’s on the horizon: you can’t always anticipate huge societal changes. Our multigenerational programme is a really good example of that − increased retirement age and longer working lives were there far earlier than anyone actually started thinking about them as an employer. It is about seeing those societal shifts happening, and ideally pre-empting them. In our Emerge network (with millennials), we talk a lot about what it means to be a millennial, and then a large, 325-year-old organisation like Barclays looks at that and thinks ‘What do we do? We aren’t geared up for that type of employee!’ But the reality is that they are coming, they are here. We are trying to plan for the unexpected.

The other question is how you keep momentum going. You have to keep your nerve. You need someone at the helm who is senior enough to carry clout and credibility, but if that figurehead leaves, you have to keep on. It needs to be about more than one person.

The first thing to say about the LGBT dimension of diversity is that it is the one ‘strand’ that can choose to be invisible. The importance of role models is probably therefore even more pronounced because people can come into work and choose to be ‘invisible’ in a way you cannot if you are a woman, or if you are from a particular ethnic background, or if you are disabled. Some types of disability are not visible, of course, but it seems to me that role models become even more important in these contexts, especially high profile and successful role models who address that issue of invisibility.

People may recall what that meant for J. P. Morgan; in 2002 we addressed the issue very tangibly with a cross campus poster campaign which subsequently got wide coverage in the legal press: ‘The Only Gay In The City?’ and ‘Let’s Get One Thing Straight’ and it was enormously impactful. We put it everywhere, across the trading floors, etc (taking it a step further from the usual internal communication areas), and things snowballed from there.

Back in mid-2000, we, along with a number of the other investment banks, were involved in ‘Out In The City’, which was an annual evening event involving panels of employees from various functional groups with a Q&A and presentations. We collectively put money into a pot and brought together a cadre of 60/70 high calibre students, who just happened to be LGBT. We held the event at a neutral venue and gave an opportunity for each of the graduate recruitment teams to have a stand, as well as formal and informal networking with staff. I would often chair the Q&A panels. I can remember talking to students who said ‘I never thought I would meet a gay MD at an investment bank’. Time has moved on, of course, but I believe experiences like this could be invaluable for some aspiring lawyers.

Although there is an element of truth in the statement that you have to be ‘counted in order to count’, I am generally quite skeptical of statistics. I know it is a component of many RFPs, but I have always said that statistics are only one element of the toolkit you could use to assess progress on inclusive workplace environments. I am a greater advocate of ‘soft cultural indicia’ – the messaging you are sending out in your corporate DNA – which are somewhat subjective relative to hard numbers. Clear signals of these are employee networking groups and other support structures including workplace benefits. I can remember a conversation at the establishment of the Joint Associations Committee on Retail Structured Products (which I chair): ‘Well, we are going to comply with the law and regulation so why do we need industry principles or best practices?’ Law firms have made leaps and bounds on this and there has been some very creative thinking in firms about leveraging diverse networks of lawyers across the spectrum of business relationships with clients – for example the annual Art Exhibition that Clifford Chance organises for LGBT clients and counsel.

Fundamentally though, I think it all comes down to professional credibility – to competence, commitment and character. I am keen to be the managing director of J.P. Morgan who is gay – not a gay MD at J.P. Morgan. And one ambition is to be the first Lord Mayor of the City of London who is openly gay – not The Gay Lord Mayor. Professional credibility and achievement comes first (being really good at your job), not diversity as some sort of predefining label – because that is just the wrong way around. That then makes the diversity conversation resonate more effectively and more strategically within an organisation, otherwise it can rapidly generate the perception of a clique with its own set of terms, which is rather ironic when it is supposed to be about inclusion not exclusiveness. If there is a credible business outcome on talent, on organisational effectiveness and performance, then that gets more traction with decision-makers than someone who is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as only advancing a self-interested agenda, however ‘worthy’ it might be at face value.

I am also keen to ensure that we focus on the fact that we firmly contextualise this in work, about the success of the bank, to help people fully contribute and succeed in their jobs, and attracting talent. It is not about being especially ‘nice’ to gay people or supporting worthy causes that have little to do with the day job. There are many things out there that people can support in their own time, but where this has a material impact for J.P. Morgan is in the context of the business.

J.P. Morgan is rightly proud to have been a front runner in LBGT initiatives, but it has been an iterative process. There was an element of nervousness at first: partly people were unfamiliar with the issues, and also there was just a degree of ignorance. I genuinely don’t mean that at all pejoratively. I think there was perhaps a bit of hesitation about asking the questions, but a great deal of goodwill. I can remember we had a successful networking event at the V&A which leveraged an exhibition of Kylie Minogue’s costumes. We threw an event there off the back of this and I wrote a briefing paper to Bill Winters, our former CEO, and other senior colleagues. It was an aide memoir of the different vocabulary used in the LGBT community (such as ‘Why is Stonewall important?’ and ‘What’s the “T” in LGBT?), trying to answer some of the questions not asked before that point. There was an element of a learning curve but there was no resistance or hostility at all. In a sense we were pushing at an open door – it just had to be articulated. This was in 2003/2004, and I would be very surprised if that was necessary in most organisations now. Society has moved on, but the private sector’s paradigm has definitely shifted too, certainly in professional and financial services. I suppose it is valid to ask whether you are actually affecting change or harnessing the undercurrent of change that is already flowing under the surface? I think there has been a bit of the ‘right place, right time’ here, but someone had to edge it constructively forward.

We are confident that LGBT candidates have applied to J.P. Morgan in part because they see the legal department as a welcoming and inclusive place. I have people in my own group who are LGBT and if you asked them whether that was relevant in their deciding to come to us, I think they would say yes. There has also been academic research that demonstrates that places that are welcoming to LGBT are also generally welcoming to women, and that women were looking at that material and basing judgments on where they wanted to work based on that information. Visible role models communicate powerfully that you can be successful, and that being who you are is a non-issue.

What are the strategic imperatives and benefits for J.P. Morgan? Well, I think a balance of different perspectives and the way in which that informs an individual’s approach to an issue, from who they are and what their life experiences have been, can only be of benefit to a franchise which is fundamentally about people and service. The classic example is law firms. You assume a basic technical competence in the law, so beyond that, what are the differentiators? How creatively do they think? Who sees the different angle to the obvious? This is also true for financial services to an extent. If are homogeneous in your recruiting, you do yourself, your clients and your shareholders a disservice, because the creative energy comes from difference. This is an incredibly vibrant and healthy thing and it ultimately contributes to the bottom line.

I think the ‘buzzwords’ that get knocked around are ‘talent’, ‘people development’, etc, but the plain fact of the matter is that the best people come in all shapes, sizes, colours, sexualities and so forth, and any firm premised on people capital that fails to get that fundamental fact won’t succeed in the face of the competition that does. So do I think I personally approach things in a way that is informed by my own professional and personal experiences, that it is different than the way, for example, a heterosexual man or a woman might approach things? Yes, I do – though it doesn’t make me anymore right or wrong with the answers!

I think lawyers are in a unique position on this topic, being potentially powerful advocates and respected and trusted advisers. However, one of the differences between a lawyer in a bank and a lawyer in a law firm is that in a law firm you are the ‘front office’ – the revenue generators – and when you go in-house you reverse that and become a cost (!). What both law firm and in-house counsel have in common is an inherent sense of equity, fairness and justice, as well as the intellectual rigour of the discipline. Most lawyers I know have a basic instinct to do the right thing irrespective of their practice area. It is fundamental to the DNA of a lawyer, even when it isn’t necessarily popular or what people want to hear on a particular issue. There is just an inherent dislike of injustice, discrimination, unfairness, that speaks very powerfully to equality of opportunity and fair treatment of all people.

Carolyn Jameson (CJ): We try to address diversity in everything we do. For instance, we adopt flexible working hours. We don’t really have core hours and essentially we say to people, ‘you work to suit you’. It really helps personally for me − I’ve got three kids.

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I think there is something about risk aversion within the legal profession, and I think there is this notion that if you widen your intake, to diversify your staff base, you might somehow lower standards or you might compromise excellence. There’s no evidence for this whatsoever – and there’s partly no evidence because they’re not hiring these people in the first place!

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Diversity and inclusion within National Grid and the legal team has been a priority over the last 12 years. We have an aim to mirror the populations we serve. National Grid does a lot of work in communities; we are involved with work on power lines and digging up streets – we are out there and people expect to see a diverse workforce.

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Do lawyers have a key part to play in diversity and inclusion (D&I)? My gut says yes, we have elevated responsibilities in terms of fiduciary duties and as regulated professionals, so I believe we should hold ourselves to a heightened standard, but everyone has a role to play. I wouldn’t want to say that legal has an obligation to do anything different to the rest of our colleagues, but the fact is we are often, as a profession, at the forefront of things. I don’t think anyone should abdicate their responsibility towards D&I – because it is ultimately about doing the right thing.

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GC: Can you give me an idea of how and why you started Rare Recruitment?

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GC: Is your diversity and inclusion approach primarily driven by internal factors or external pressures?

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