THAT
COMPANIES FELL FOUR CASE STUDIES
COMPANY A
FACTORS
Consumer-
Facing
Company
Company A has had reasonable and consistent performance on
the list for the past few years but was never a standout.
This company has two related issues it needs to address if
it wants to stem the decline and compete in an industry where
its peers are rapidly accelerating their diversity-management
efforts. The two issues are its CEO’s lack of personal involve-
ment with diversity management and a failure to consistently
communicate, internally and externally, that diversity is essential
to the business.
CEO NOT PERSONALLY INVOLVED
CEO DOESN’T MEET WITH ERGs
LACK OF DIVERSITY IN TOP
LEVELS OF MANAGEMENT
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS
IGNORE DIVERSITY
CEO SUPPORT IS ESSENTIAL
Let’s first examine the CEO commitment issue. In our 12 years of
assessing companies through the DiversityInc Top 50, we have never seen
a company improve its diversity-management efforts and, subsequently,
its human-capital results without visible CEO commitment. The CEO
of this company has made some public statements that indicate a lack
of cultural competence for at least one traditionally underrepresented
group. What would have helped him—and his senior executives—
understand the consumer ramifications of his actions would be more diversity
at his top level and more interaction with employee-resource groups.
Unfortunately, both are lacking here.
The top level of this company, CEO and direct reports, is all white, and
the next two levels down are almost all white. The CEO, therefore, is not
being exposed to multicultural viewpoints from his senior managers. The
lack of diversity at the top of the company is likely to have a cascading
impact on recruitment, retention and talent development, DiversityInc Top
50 data analysis shows. That correlation holds true for this company, where
new hires of Blacks and Latinos fell about 7 percent year to year, promotions
into first management jobs for Blacks and Latinos fell 22 percent and for
women fell 16 percent year to year, and management promotions fell about
CEO COMMITMENT INCREASE DECREASE vs.
Companies that rose
on the DiversityInc
Top 50 list show
substantially more
progress in key
diversity-management
areas than companies
that declined.
12.3%
Bonus tied
to diversity
33%
CDO reports
to CEO
100%
Have executive
diversity council
100%
Council establishes
or signs off on
diversity goals and
metrics
COMPANIES
THAT
INCREASED
COMPANIES
THAT
DECREASED
67%
5%
17%
50%
