Moving the Needle on DEI

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Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm alison beard. In March 2012, our guest today gave one of the biggest speeches of her life. At the time, she was a middle manager at Procter and Gamble, the huge consumer goods company. She stood on a stage at its world headquarters with video cameras live streaming to locations around the world and said.

I am Shelly McNamara, the Vice President of human resources in beauty and grooming. I am a mother, a life partner, a sister, and an aunt. I am also gay.

She went on to talk about how important it is to feel like you can be your real self at work. Today, Shelley is Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer at P and G, which means that she's responsible for making sure that all of its 100,000 employees feel welcome and valued in the organization. And after more than a year of pandemic and political and racial tensions in the US and other parts of the world, these issues have become even more.

Critical for businesses to address.

So we're going to talk to Shelley about how she's built on her own experience to make things better for others and what advice she has for leaders trying to do the same. She also has a new book out. It's called no Blanks, no A Path to Loving Self and Others. Shelly, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Alison. Great to be here.

So let's start by talking about privilege, something you mentioned in that speech in 2012.

You know, some people might look at.

You and say, you're an educated white woman, a senior leader at a big company. You have lots of privilege. They might not know, which I do, from your book, that you grew up with 14 siblings and a mom who worked nights and weekends, that is a nurse, or even think that it's a big deal that you're married to a woman. So how do you think about privilege and encourage others to consider their own?

Well, first, I want to acknowledge that absolutely there are some advantages or privileges that I've had in my life and that I benefit from. And you named a couple of them, right? One is being white and another is having the opportunity to have a great education. I would also say because of my membership in a few different communities, one of those being the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community. There are also disadvantages I've had, or lack of privilege, if you will. And I write about a couple of Them. In my book, I write about having a long term life partner and our inability to both legally marry and legally have responsibility or legal rights over our own children. I mean, a third one is cultural, which is sort of being at the other end of jokes or negative narrative that I internalized and began to feel shame about. So, absolutely, human beings were complex. It's rarely all or nothing. And as you say, I have a mix of that. I think what's important for me and what's been important on my journey is to pay attention to where I do have privilege and to use that to benefit others who don't. What I've learned is that the importance of allyship. Right. So straight people, when straight people got louder and more clear about their support for people who are lgbtq, there were some changes that we made. Sea changes, really. Members of the LGBTQ community, we help drive a lot of that. And we, we couldn't have done that without our allies. And so I feel the same thing about racial equality. I do know the experience of being white, and I know that it has made a number of things easier for me. And as a result of that, I take the work of driving racial equality and using the insights that I have for my own journey and my passion for equality to address the issues of racial inequality.

And as a senior corporate leader, how do you balance the needs of various marginalized or underrepresented groups and really make sure that all these different types of people feel heard and seen?

You know, first is my job is to serve the 100,000 employees at P&G that sit in 70 or 80 countries around the world. And in the space of equality and inclusion, we, you know, number one is we rest on a very, very strong foundation. Specifically, we have, I call these just foundational concepts and choices that we've made. And one of those choices that we' made is that we want to reflect all of the consumers that we serve around the world. We want to reflect the consumers. So as a result of that, it's very important to us to build a diverse representation of employees. Another thing in our foundational choices is that we respect all. And as time goes on and you want to be relevant in the moment, you get more and more clear about what does that mean in today's moment to show respect for all. And third is we're very clear that it requires us in order to do those two things, we have to intentionally and thoughtfully work on creating a community, a culture, and an organization where everybody feels seen, valued and heard. So we have to pay attention and talk about what's getting in our way. We have to talk about what are the patterns that drive gender inequality. We have to talk about the representation of the organization and where we don't reflect the consumers we serve. And we have to ask ourselves the tough question, what's getting in the way of that and what do we need to do about it?

And the global reach of your organization is very interesting to me. Sitting in the United States, I think about sort of the demographics of this country, but you're having to look at all of the places you operate and say, okay, who in this country is underrepresented? Where are. Do our employees not reflect our customers? So how granular do you get with sort of each region of the world or country?

You know, our work, we have some parts of our work in equality, inclusion that is more advanced and some that's less advanced. And in the US I think I would say that's one of the geographies in the world where we're more advanced in terms of what we've been doing and how long we've been at this work. It also happens to be where our global headquarters is. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. So statement one is, yes, absolutely. You can't take in 80 countries and say, what do we do in 80 countries? You really have to start to break that down. And we think about our business in terms of regions of the world, and then we think about our business in terms of specific countries. Within the US we look at multicultural groups, and we dissect within that African American, Hispanic, Asia Pacific, Native American. And so we look within and we segment and we actually have targets within the US of what we want and what we aspire to have our organization look like. We've been very clear that we aspire to have our organization be represented by 40% of multicultural employees. And then we segment within and we work on plans with our business leaders to make that happen. From a gender point of view, we can make that a more global look because around the world, women are about 50% of the population. The MBAs that we recruit or the business students that we recruit or other degrees are generally, women are also represented, you know, in a substantive way. So on a global level, we've said we want to. We aspire to be. To have equal gender representation, really, at every level. So that one's a bit easier. Then when you get to the sort of multicultural or racial or ethnic differences, there's a different answer depending on what geography you're at. But what I would say is we are doing thoughtful and intentional work to see where are those countries. And we've started with some of the biggest countries where there's some of the biggest need countries, like Brazil or the UK for example, where you can see patterns of discrimination and marginalization and disadvantage in some of our consumer groups. And when I say consumer groups, it also means talent groups. So black and brown people in Brazil are. About 51% of the population in Brazil identifies as black Brazilian. And what I can say is that that is not what our talent base currently reflects at P and G. But we're working hard to say, how do we make progress against that?

And then you layer in lgbtq, maybe disability, neurodiversity. So it's very complex.

It is. Your original question was around the granularity of it. And so what I went to was representation in terms of target groups that are specifically identifiable and recorded by the government. And there are other groups, other identity groups and other people and groups that you mentioned on a global basis. The areas that we look at and intentionally do work for are lgbtq, which is relevant around the world, people with disabilities and gender. So those are the three that we've been working on for some time. We're also at a turning point, maybe I'd say a new chapter in our work because we are in the midst of launching a new platform, a new data platform, and that is going to, as we do that, we are expanding the data fields that we're giving employees the opportunity to self identify. The data fields are not the same for every country, but we are going to have the opportunity, as an example in countries like the US to provide more opportunities for identifying along the gender, orientation, sexual orientation, disability or ability level, which is terrific because it's going to give us a whole renewed data set to understand our employee base and figure out where we both have challenges and opportunities that we need to address. For someone like me, who's been working in this space for years, I can tell you the progress that we've driven as, and I've driven with my teammates around the world to make progress in gender. I can't tell you today what our representation looks like in some of the other communities because we don't have the.

Data for a long time. It did feel like DEI was siloed in a lot of companies within the HR department, sort of not at the C suite table. Is that changing? And if so, how do you recommend that we make that sustainable?

Well, I will say that for us, it is built in. So you know what we talk about is the difference between having our diversity, equality and inclusion work built in or bolted on? And we've worked very hard to ensure that we're building it in. We have an active strategy in the areas of employees. We have a series of actions in our brands. We do work with partners around the world to help expand equality, and we do work in our communities to activate work. So we have a very comprehensive strategy, and it's owned from the top. I report to our CEO, and the plan and strategy we have is owned and driven by him and his leadership team. It's not my plan. It's our plan. It's our collective plan. And I believe very deeply that it's important in this work to be clear on the why are you doing it? And then the how, both. Right. And what impact do you want to make or what measurements do you want to have? And so I do think that companies need to ask themselves, you know, what does it mean for them and why?

So what advice do you have for people working in organizations that are just beginning this journey, perhaps sparked in the United States by the racial turmoil that we've seen over the past year and a half? People working in diversity and equity inclusion, but just who don't have that traction yet, how do they get it?

You know, I was talking with someone the other day who was asking my advice on this as someone who was new in my role at a different company. And one of the things that I said to her was, you have to be clear on the outcomes you want. And one of the reasons that my title is Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer is because it's focused on the outcomes. Those are outcome statements. And equality is the experience of being equal. Inclusion is the feeling of belonging. So first is this work of getting clear on what is it that you aspire to create or do. What are the anchors for your company that are congruent and consistent with this work and this intent? And then who are the change agents? Who are the business leaders that understand the relevance of this conversation and this work to business growth? Right. Who are those? Because they're there. They are seeing and understanding, and what is the data that tells them that? And then lastly, you start to socialize that, start to build that narrative in that conversation that says, this is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is what we aspire to create. And here's the data that tells us this work is important and good. And then building it into the work and not bolting it on, but building it as a core part of the.

Strategy and what about moving people into senior leadership roles? How do you work to do that? And what best practices do you have to share with other companies?

There was a chapter of work that we started at P and G around 2015, and I was a part. I was one of the leaders who was a part of that. And what we did is we got very transparent and very visible. We made our data very visible on representation. And we looked at it and we said, now how does this compare to who we say we want to be? We disaggregated the data, we looked and we said, here's our executive suite, the senior executive suite, here's the broader executive suite. And how many women are there? How many men are there? We're in the US Data, right? How many African Americans do we have here? How many Hispanic? We look to say, are we to ask ourselves the question, are we living up to who we said we are and what we want to be? And then what we had to do was take apart the talent system itself. All of those levers that ultimately determine. There's a phrase, I'm trained in organizational transformation, that's my educational background. And there's a phrase that says, every system is perfectly designed or every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And what that really means is when you have the outcomes and the results. And we were looking at our representation data by level, by segment of the population, and we weren't representing who we said we wanted to. We had to take apart that system and say, we have to change this system. We had to do things like say, every manager starting at the second level of management will have a designation of potential. Because what happens is people get promoted. And then if you ask, why don't you have a more diverse group? It's like, oh, we didn't have available, there were any women available or there weren't whatever. And the truth is, as you go back into the system, you realize the system was perfectly designed to get the results again. So we had to change things like, no, everybody will get a designation. So now it's transparent. Is Shelly considered at level? Is she considered one level at potential or two level of potential? When we were at our key bands of management, we had to. We said, you have to show your pipeline of talent. Now who is in the pipeline to go to band four of management of leadership. And if it's not diverse enough, it doesn't represent the holistic range of humanity that we want. We're going to ask you to do more work and you're going to Build towards that. Another example that I'll give you, Alison, is attrition. And there were myths that we were losing some of our black and brown employees at a higher rate because they were so highly recruited and they didn't want to live in the Midwest, they wanted to live on the coast. And those were some of the stories that we told ourselves. And when you got into the data and we did focus groups, what we realized was one, the attrition rate was much higher than it was for the majority culture at early bans in the company. And we said that's not acceptable. And then we found out some of the reasons why and what we needed to fix it. And I can tell you, it took us a little while, but we are now, for the last couple of years we have our attrition rate of our African American employees is at the same as our Caucasian employees.

So what were some of the reasons why they were leaving?

One was career, and I mean visibility and commitment to career development. Another was community, both a sense of community within the company and within the environments in which they're part of. So in that one, we've invested quite a bit more in being very public about not only our desire to build a diverse organization, but also to do some of the community based work. So I'd say career and community were two of the biggest reasons.

Obviously, we've gone through this huge reckoning. There's a growing realization that equity and inclusion and belonging is important in many companies all around the world. But you do also see increasing complaints about companies being too woke and worries that some groups, particularly white men in the United States, are now being marginalized. So how do you respond to that?

Well, one, and I said this earlier, you know, my job is to have all 100,000 employees at P and G feel welcomed, be welcomed, and have the space to be their authentic self. So straight up, that's, that's my job and I have to make that happen. The other thing that, that we're real clear about is, is again, I think data helps is the data tells us that we have some work to do. We're committed to do the work that's necessary to be the company we say we want to be and to serve the world's consumers with the products. And we believe that addressing where we have inequities is important work to do. And we don't shy away from that. That's not a political choice, it's a business choice. And I know there's a lot of narrative today that may question that or may Wonder about that. And I mean, that's all I can say is it's an and so there's a commitment to build and develop all of our employees, but we won't shy away from those things that are getting in the way of accomplishing what we set out to do.

So white men aren't being marginalized in the broader corporate world. It's more that everyone who's qualified and, you know, has potential is rising together.

Yeah, I mean, you know, my job and our job is to, you know, you say, you know, is to. Is to cast a net for finding great talent. That's what we do. And we cast a broad net and say we want to get a broad range of talent and a broad range of humanity. We don't set out to say there are people we don't want. We set out on the positive. We say this is what we want. We want a broad range of humanity. And the population we serve has changed. So when we say we want to look, we have an aspiration to be 40% multicultural in the U.S. the reason we say that is it's behind a business choice. We want to reflect the consumers we serve. And so that's not a choice to leave out, it's a choice to reflect. And we don't set out to marginalize anyone.

When you're leading at such a large company, how do you make sure that all of this is happening on every single team? Ideally every day? You can set the strategy at the top, you can put policies into place, but the interactions between bosses and managers, you don't have direct control over that. So how do you make sure it's happening on the ground?

Yeah, you're right. I mean, on the ground behavior on the ground, engagement is really important. It's what shapes the culture. And two things I learned in. In my educational background that are really important. One is that leaders shape culture by how they behave, how they show up, what language they use, who they include, who they don't. So leadership behavior is incredibly important. A second thing is what you measure. It tells people what's important. It drives the activity system of an organization. So what are we doing and what do we do? I would frame it into three buckets for me, one is it's about expectations, accountability, and capability. We have set very clear expectations about when we look through this filter or this lens of equality and inclusion of what we're going to do as a voice, as a company, all of our leadership is very clear. And my job is to work with my colleagues to make sure and have that message come from the top of, what do we expect of leaders? The second thing is accountability. We have mechanisms and systems and rituals that hold people accountable. Matter of fact, one of the things that I'm, you know, I'm. I'm working on now is looking at, you know, our CEO looks at a collective body of evidence as he, you know, assesses the performance of his executives each year. He looks at how they do on market share, on, you know, pricing and profit, on, you know, all kinds of things that are relevant for the business. And one of those things he looks at is related to the organization and what have those leaders done to grow and develop an organization? And so we hold them accountable. And then the third is capability and culture. I call this third lever, capability and culture. What we do, and that's where your question started, but I wanted to make sure you got all three of those, is that we've worked on three core areas related to culture for the last few years. One is helping all of us understand implicit bias, and that's continued learning, continued growth. The conversation around bias has been one we've had for a few years, and we're continuing to learn and grow. And it's really become more commonplace in our dialogue, right, for people to own up to it, like, hey, I'm a bit biased here, or wait a minute, I gotta check myself on this one. I'm a little biased because of et cetera. So the learning around bias has been essential for us in terms of culture. I think a second one for us is privilege, and you asked about that earlier. But really understanding in what domains do I come in with privilege or advantage, and how do I own that and then make sure that I. That I correct for that. So that's a second concept we work on quite a bit. And then the third is what we call the, you know, again, social science, but it's inside or outsider group, and, you know, we have more work to do there. But really noticing the patterns, when you bring human beings together in groups, there's patterns that happen. And those patterns are, you know, there's an insider group and there's an outsider group, and there's. There's patterns to how. How things unfold. And you have to correct for things so that everybody feels they have a voice, they can participate, they can engage. So our capability work is endless. But those are three of the concepts we've worked on quite a bit.

And drawing on your own experience as a lesbian and your work with colleagues who come from marginalized groups, what's the one Thing that you would like to see managers, not just at P and G, but at other companies do to make their employees feel more included.

I absolutely want all leaders to identify what can they do? I say they, what can we do? I'm a leader and I know that I have the ability to act and behave and speak in ways that have people feel more or less included. I know that. And so what can leaders do? I think it starts with learning who's in front of you. Like, being curious about the people who work with you and for you and learn about them. I love the phrase of lend me your eyes. Lend me your eyes for a day. Lend me your. What does the world look like from where you sit? And I mean that in a general way. I mean it like, what if we all approached each other from that place of curiosity? Like, how might the world be? And the second piece is if underneath it, what I was committed to as a leader, what if I was committed to say, I don't want anyone who's around me to feel less than. I do not want that. I want everyone to feel as powerful, as strong and as valued and supported as everyone else. So I think I like the combination of those two things. One is the curiosity about learning who's with you and who's working with you and for you. And then our job as leaders is to unleash their greatness, right? So in finding out who's in front of you and how do they look at the world, but then learn, what are their pride points? Right. What are they proud about? About their. Their strength areas, their skill areas, things they've made happen in the world in their work and how. And your job is to create a space for them to. To do that again, to. To make that greatness happen.

Terrific. Well, thank you so much. That's good inspiration for all of us. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, elson.

That's Shelly McNamara. She's Chief Equality and Inclusion Officer and Executive VP at Procter and Gamble. She's also the author of the book.

No Blanks, no A Path to Loving Self and Others. This episode was produced by Mary Dew.

We get technical help from Rob Eckart. Adam Buchholz is our audio Product manager.

Thanks for listening to the hbr ideacast. I'm alison beard.