Diversity-management efforts to increase racial and gender representation in senior management can be difficult to implement. Our research shows that a diversity council that is chaired by the CEO and that sets company-wide goals achieves significant results in diversity management.

Data collected from The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity shows that companies with diversity councils have double the total Blacks, Latinos and Asians and 47 percent more women in executive roles as companies without councils.

Why? Diversity councils offer a structural framework that keeps diversity management on track. They monitor goals, instill accountability among leaders and provide committed, visible support.

In DiversityInc’s 90-minute diversity web seminar on diversity councils, Ana Ondina Martinez, manager of global diversity and inclusion at IBM (No. 17 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50), and Manny Fernandez, (retired) director of diversity at jcpenney (No. 35), discuss with DiversityInc Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Barbara Frankel the innovative best practices that their councils follow to increase retention and customer satisfaction and to improve their diversity scorecard.

Readers will take away:

• The common best practices utilized for diversity-council structures
• Why senior executives, especially the CEO, need to be proactively involved with council meetings and sign-off
• How IBM used specialized task forces to gather information and address individual needs from eight specific groups
• The challenges global diversity councils face
• How JCPenney’s council uses its inclusion and diversity structure to reap customer input and improve sales

Watch the full diversity web seminar on diversity councils at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

For more on diversity-council best practices, read Why Diversity Councils Move the Needle for Business Results.