Leveraging The Intersection of Talent and Diversity to Grow Your Leadership Pipeline

Mary L. Martinéz, Director, Diversity & Inclusion Practice

By focusing on the “numbers,” many organizations have seen increases in the hiring and promotion of diverse talent. A good percentage of these same companies, however, continue to struggle to retain these same diverse individuals, and fail to make long-term gains in overall diversity at senior levels. They have got the “diversity” part right, but have not yet developed talent management processes that are fully “inclusive.” This often leads to discouragement and disillusion for those who were promised the outstanding career opportunities that are not always delivered -- as well a loss for the organization of the investment of time and effort made to obtain that diverse talent.

Embedding diversity and inclusion (D&I) into the full range of talent management (TM) processes means taking a hard look at the way the organization defines “leadership,” “potential” and “readiness,” and making some changes to how talent is “spotted,” developed and selected via internal talent review and succession planning processes. It also requires an honest examination of the organization’s leadership culture: What does it take to be successful here? How can we broaden our notion of what characteristics, skills and experience a successful leadership candidate must have? Taking the following steps will help your organization increase the inclusiveness of its leadership culture and TM processes.

Identifying and Overcoming Challenges
to a Diverse Pipeline: Dig Deeper to Understand Root Causes

If your organization is experiencing the phenomenon described above, you know
that you have a “revolving” door for certain levels/functions/roles. You have the charts and graphs that show the bottlenecks and attrition points, but what are the underlying reasons for the patterns that you observe? Insights into the barriers to a more diverse leadership profile and pipeline can best be obtained through interviews or focus groups with managers and employees.

Research has shown that women, racial-ethnic minority groups, and non-headquarters nationals face some of the same obstacles to full inclusion in the leadership pool. However, these groups are not always affected equally by the same barriers. For example, women are more often held back by their bosses’ perceptions of their leadership styles than are men of color or non-headquarters nationals. Racial-ethnic minorities, on the other hand, have been found to be affected to a greater extent by manager bias and unwillingness to take a risk on “non-traditional” candidates.

These general findings may point to potential cultural barriers in your organization, but the best practice is to conduct company-specific research to identify the more subtle root causes of differences in career advancement and selection for leadership roles. This data can then be used as a motivator for increasing the awareness and changing the behavior of talent decision makers.

 

 

Using Information on Barriers to Reshape TM Processes

When collecting data on the root causes of differences in representation, advancement and/or retention, it is important to also do some investigation of how the currently prescribed processes for talent management (and the way they are actually put into practice) may be limiting the talent pool. For example, do established, formal career progressions eliminate inflow of diverse talent from a wider range of backgrounds and experience? At what point or points in the development, staffing or promotional process are diverse candidates being filtered out? Are talent decisions actually being made following the prescribed processes or are managers cutting corners and making unilateral choices based on expediency? Based on these findings, the organization may need to consider some of the process enhancements described below

Looking for Talent in the Early Career Ranks, on a Global Basis

Identifying diverse talent lower in the organization, in order to build the pool and ensure retention of diverse high potentials, can help to increase the proportions of women, people of color and non-headquarters nationals in upper level management. This means pushing the talent assessment and review processes deeper into the organization – into business unit, global and local geographic structures and into earlier career stages. This approach can have a significant impact on the diversity of the organization’s talent.

Defining Roles in Culturally Balanced Ways

As suggested above, the place to begin is with the organization’s definitions of “leadership” and the criteria used to identify high-potentials. Like other aspects of corporate culture, the mental picture that decision makers have of a successful leader is built on the biases and assumptions of those who make decisions on talent. For example, a study by Catalyst found that the majority of talent managers evaluated their senior executives as primarily displaying stereo-typically masculine characteristics. In addition, competencies related to stereo-typically male characteristics appeared more frequently in descriptions of senior executive roles.[1]

This study reinforces that corporations still have work to do in evaluating their competency and leadership potential definitions for underlying biases. For example, how is “decision making” characterized? If the competency is named “decisiveness” and the description conveys that the company values the speed of decision making, implying a more unilateral -- rather than collaborative -- style, white males may be more likely to be rated highly on this criterion.

Interestingly, the more recently recognized and broader competencies, such as learning agility and emotional intelligence, have the potential to level the playing field when it comes to identification of potential: Learning agility because it is inherently gender neutral (see,
for example, the definition proposed by DeRue, et al[2]), and emotional intelligence because it gives weight to a cluster of competencies important to leadership that, on at least some of which, women appear to be stronger[3]. This change, coupled with declining emphasis on a set job progression as the sole means for acquiring the required leadership competencies, will open up the range of candidates beyond those with stereotypical styles, strengths, and experience patterns.

Using Multiple Assessment Instruments and Assessors of Talent Potential

Although more and more companies are providing training to increase awareness of “unconscious bias” (reliance on stereotypes and assumptions without recognizing their influence on our thoughts and actions), there are other ways to reduce potential bias in assessing and selecting talent. One of the most effective means is to utilize multiple assessment tools and assessors. In the case of talent assessment or review, this can be accomplished by using an objective assessment instrument or instruments and soliciting internal evaluations from a variety of individuals with differing perspectives on the candidate. In the same way, hiring decisions can make use of a diverse panel of interviewers, rather than relying on the decision of just one hiring manager.

Adding Diversity as a Formal Discussion Point on the Talent Review Agenda

When a leadership team gathers to review progress on talent development and identify or confirm high-potential employees, D&I should be essential elements of this conversation. This should include more than a quick review of the pipeline numbers by race/ethnicity and gender. Leaders need to challenge each other to not only identify diversity (of both visible and less visible kinds, such as thinking style differences) in their talent pools, but to report on what is being done to develop these individuals and to request support from their peers to overcome any challenges related to lack of development opportunities, mentors or sponsors. Requiring senior leaders to take personal responsibility for development of their teams and other diverse high potentials in the organization is a corollary to formalizing the D&I discussion as an integral part of the talent review. In the talent review, each leader should report not only on the overall profile of his/her unit, but also on what he/she has done to sponsor, mentor and otherwise support development of diverse leadership candidates. This includes holding direct reports responsible for doing the same. By adding some different types of measures to the talent tracking report, coupled with increasing leadership accountability for progress, more concrete action to create greater diversity in leadership pools can be spurred.

Strengthening TM Metrics by Applying a Diversity Lens

The following chart illustrates ways to institute diversity-related enhancements to talent tracking. On the left of the chart are frequently used talent measures.  On the right are questions that should be asked from a D&I perspective and for which leadership can be held accountable. Based on the organization’s specific challenges (for example, difficulty in retaining senior sales representatives who make up the pool for regional sales managers), data can be collected and
reviewed as part of the regular talent review cycle and appropriate actions taken to improve talent outcomes by the business leader who “owns” the development of the individuals in this pool.

Final Thoughts

One additional impediment to embedding D&I more deeply in talent management processes also needs to be addressed: improving the partnership between the D&I and TM functions. In a few cases, companies have actually united these functions under one HR leader, but in far more organizations the D&I staff still have trouble getting a hearing from their TM colleagues. Stronger collaboration begins with a joint approach to addressing some of the issues and opportunities presented in this article, with both functions working together to more fully engage top executives in the business case for focusing on diversity in the talent pool.

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[1] Warren, A. K. (2009). Cascading gender
biases, compounding effects: An assessment
of talent management systems. New York, NY:
Catalyst. Retrieved August 23, 2013 from http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/cascading-gender-biases-compounding-effects-assessment-talent-management-systems

[2] DeRue, D. S., Ashford, S. J. and Myers, C. G. (2012), Learning Agility: In Search of Conceptual Clarity and Theoretical Grounding. Industrial and Organizational Psychology,
5: 258–279. doi: 10.1111/j.1754-9434.2012.01444.x

[3] Freedman, J. M. (2012, September 11). Women’s leadership edge: Global research on emotional intelligence, gender and job level. Six Seconds, The Emotional Intelligence Network. Retrieved August 27, 2013 from http://www.6seconds.org/2012/09/11/research-emotional-intelligence-gender-career/