A company’s diversity council’s oversight and reliance on goals and metrics have a direct impact on human-capital results, DiversityInc Top 50 data shows. We invited three chief diversity officers from companies with some of the best track records on councils’ impacts on management demographics to discuss their councils, best practices and results.

Consider these statistics, which come from analyzing the data of the 535 companies that participated in The 2011 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity survey: Companies with executive diversity councils have almost twice the number of Blacks, Latinos and Asians and 47 percent more women in senior management than companies without executive diversity councils.

Three chief diversity officers—Jennifer Christie of American Express, Raymond Arroyo of Aetna and Kathy Hannan of KPMG, Nos. 13, 19 and 29, respectively, in The 2011 DiversityInc  Top 50 Companies for Diversity—sat down with DiversityInc’s Luke Visconti and Barbara Frankel to share their companies’ experiences with executive diversity-council structures, using the councils to set and meet diversity goals and holding executives accountable for reaching those goals.

Among their significant findings:

• Diversity-council structures are important, and more than half of the councils of DiversityInc Top 50 companies set demographic goals for their organizations. Aetna’s diversity council has 24 members, 90 percent of whom are senior executives, and three of whom are employee-resource-group leaders. KPMG’s council has 20 partners and three external board members. American Express has transformed its council model into a global council model.
• Councils are increasingly chaired by the CEO. Fifty-four percent of DiversityInc Top 50 companies have the CEO chairing the council, up from 32 percent five years ago. Christie says of American Express: “We used the [DiversityInc] benchmarking data to actually set goals with our diversity councils. All of our market councils have specific goals that they have to set, and we measure against them. For example, we looked at the increase in women and African-American talent at different levels of the organization, depending on how our representation is falling and where we had gaps.”
• Sixty percent of companies with executive diversity councils tie executive compensation to council goals, and 60 percent have rotational positions for employee-resource-group members, as Aetna does.

For the full 2,661-word article, click here. For our webinar on diversity councils, featuring Prudential Financial and Northrop Grumman, click here.