Q: I’ve been giving our current diversity advisory council some thought, and it prompted a question that I’d like to get your perspective on. Have you seen companies utilize their resource-group leaders as diversity advisory-council members?

A: As resource groups have matured, they have literally earned a place at the table. That table, increasingly, is the executive diversity council. [Watch our diversity web seminar on resource groups for insights on the growing importance of these groups.]

We’ve heard from a number of companies that they are creating rotational spots on their executive diversity councils for one to three resource-group leaders. These spots usually last two years (although we’ve seen one- to four-year terms), and in some cases, the resource-group leaders are not voting members of the councils. When executive compensation is directly tied to company-wide diversity goals set by the council, the resource-group leaders usually are excluded from that. For more on resource-group leadership and selection, read DiversityInc’s exclusive resource-group research.

Their purpose on the council is twofold; they give the council insights into the middle layers of the organization and specific insights from their own affinity groups, which are incredibly valuable in determining business-related strategies to reach more employees, customers, investors and suppliers from these groups. The council experience is also a major talent-development initiative for the resource-group leaders and exposes them to interactions with the senior-most executive in the company. Kathryn Collins, former vice president of associate recruitment and inclusion & diversity, jcpenney, explains more about resource-group structures in the video below.

We started asking the question of what percentage of The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity has resource-group rotational positions on their executive diversity councils in the 2011 survey. The answer was 34 percent. We expect to see that percentage increase this year. The percentage of CEOs of DiversityInc Top 50 companies who meet regularly with resource-group leaders (defined as specific small-group meetings, not speaking engagements to large audiences sponsored by resource groups) is 88 percent, twice what it was five years ago.

So you see specifically where the trend is and why. You can get more information on this from our diversity web seminar on diversity councils, featuring IBM and jcpenney, and our recent roundtable on diversity councils, featuring KPMG, American Express and Aetna.

For more on the benefits of resource groups, read How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%. In the roundtable, Kraft’s Vice President of Diversity Jim Norman explains how resource groups not only helped the company increase its retention of Black, Latino, Asian and women employees (as shown in the video below) but also promote more women into its management ranks.

The post What Your Resource Groups Are NOT Telling You appeared first on DiversityInc.

Data from the DiversityInc Top 50, as detailed in our exclusive Resource-Group Report, shows that these resource groups are crucial to business success with multicultural communities.  When used effectively, they increase diversity in recruitment and promotions as well as improve overall employee engagement. Resource groups also are used increasingly to reach customers, clients and vendors and to help in product development.

Here, DiversityInc provides the best of our resource-group success stories, exclusively available to DiversityInc Best Practices subscribers, that offer case-study examples to help you replicate their significant results.

Resource Groups Web Seminar
One culturally competent word from American Express’s Latino group resulted in a new bestselling product and significant revenue.

Our First Innovation Fest! 10 Companies Use Diversity to Drive Change
Novartis saved millions of dollars in research when it relied on its own resource groups, while McGraw-Hill’s digital group boosted employee productivity and cross-departmental collaboration.

How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%
One of 12 case-study examples: Kraft shares how to leverage employee-resource groups to increase representation of women, especially in senior management.

Ways to Use Resource Groups
JCPenney’s Asian resource group reveals that a simple cultural custom at the point of sale can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Why Resource Groups Are Business-Resource Groups
Latino and African-American resource groups enhanced WellPoint’s quality of service to consumers with an increased awareness of family models.

For more best practices and case studies, read our other resource-group articles and watch our web seminar on resource groups, featuring insights from MasterCard and Aetna.

The post Top 5 Ways to Use Your Resource Groups appeared first on DiversityInc.

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.

The post Diversity Web Seminar on Diversity Councils: 5 Ways Diversity Management Benefits appeared first on DiversityInc.

Regardless of company size or industry, resource groups are increasingly becoming critical to business success.

In this 1,531-word article, “How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%,” DiversityInc offers the highlights from our exclusive roundtable on resource groups. Four diversity leaders from Kraft, Dell, JCPenney and Toyota provide 12 case studies of how to utilize resource groups in innovative ways to achieve measurable results and improvements in diversity metrics.

Increasing the representation of women in sales leadership roles would have been a difficult task for Kraft Foods without the help of its Women Sales Council, whose efforts at understanding flexible work arrangements and other motivating factors resulted in a 39 percent gain in sales promotions for women.

Other case studies and success stories include:

• How Dell used its millennial generational group to field-test its tablet
• How Toyota’s Latino Business Partnering Group helped develop in-language navigation systems with local accents
• How jcpenney increased its talent pipeline by 150 qualified candidates via an employee-resource-group event
• Why Kraft will utilize its employee-resource groups to sustain an inclusive corporate culture when the company splits into two businesses this year

The article also presents four video clips from the roundtable, so DiversityIncBestPractices.com subscribers can see and hear these case studies firsthand. 

Read “How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39%” at DiversityIncBestPractices.com

The post How Kraft Increased Promotions of Women in Sales by 39% appeared first on DiversityInc.

Ullman’s commitment to diversity is very personal as well. He has a visible disability (he uses a Segway because he has difficulty walking), he has two daughters with disabilities adopted from China, and he is chair of Mercy Ships International, which brings medical assistance and supplies to third-world countries.

DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti and Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Barbara Frankel interviewed Ullman at JCPenney’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. Here’s what he had to say about why diversity management is so important to the company—and to him.

FRANKEL: Why is diversity so important to the future business of JCPenney?

ULLMAN: From a practical point of view, we know today that about a third of the U.S. spending is done by people [from traditionally underrepresented groups]. We do business with half the families in America today, and clearly it’s a very important part of our customer segment. Diversity also enriches our associate experience. They have diverse talent. It energizes them to be able to do merchandising and selling and other things with customers of color.

VISCONTI: The data shows that you take those facts, which are readily available to any CEO, and really make them happen. In this company, things are much different than the average company in the United States. The attitude of inclusiveness and the meritocracy exists here that doesn’t exist in most companies. So what in your life has made you such an advocate of diversity and inclusion?

ULLMAN: I’ve been very fortunate. I grew up in a small town with almost no diversity until I went to college. From college and throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to live in Asia and work in Asia. I’ve been fortunate to live and work in Europe and France, and I also had several assignments in the United States. I actually adopted two Chinese daughters.

It is quite energizing to meet people of other cultures and have different points of view, different upbringing and different situations. From my perspective, for our associates, it’s a much more enriching experience to work in an environment where they meet different kinds of people.

Our engagement scores show that stores that have more diversity actually have higher engagement scores. We work on an integrated team basis here, so almost all of our work is done by teams that are incentivized to work together but also work with other teams. When I came seven years ago, there was certainly a willingness and openness to the idea of ramping up our openness to enriching the work experience as well as the customer experience by including more diverse people.

We believe that the way you enrich the customer experience is have people that like what they do. The only way that people are going to like what they do is if they like the people they do it with. Frankly, people work for people, not for companies, so we spend a lot of time on leadership development and making sure our managers and leaders know how to lead and know that they need to be trusted. They need to encourage candor. They should have a vision for the future, something that’s going to motivate their people to go someplace other than where we are today, and they need to differentiate talent. They need to recognize the people who are doing the best job but also coach and help people who aren’t doing as well, realize they’re either in the wrong assignment or they need to change their behavior or they’re not going to be successful.

FRANKEL: You started the diversity council two years ago, and you’ve been personally involved in that as chair. A lot of times when companies start these councils, we’re told the CEOs are too busy and that they’ll delegate it down, but you didn’t do that. Can you talk about why you did that and how you hold people accountable for those kinds of goals?

ULLMAN: It’s a relatively simplistic answer because people watch what you do, not what you say. So to the extent that I think it’s important and I’m involved, they realize it’s something they may consider important as well. I’d rather have them excited about it for all the right reasons because it’s the right thing to do, that they enjoy it, they see the benefits of it. They get their own scores on the associate survey, so they know that we take a hard look at how they lead.

When you start out by saying we’re going to teach leadership, start with the top team. We got down to the top 700 people, 30 at a time, two days in a room with classes of 30. They always say, “How can you spend this kind of time with us to spend two days in a windowless room on this topic?” I said, “I spend two days in a windowless room because I get to know the 30 of you really, really well.” That really helps them understand who they are in terms of their role in the company, but more importantly, we get to know each other. I learn more than they do. We’ve done it something like 26 times so far, and that’s made a big difference in terms of setting priorities—why this is so important, how we play it out, and what role you can play.

It’s not just a couple of people involved in this process. The council just brings together the leaders of the group and we make it clear that we’re going to hold everybody accountable.

VISCONTI: That’s still a huge commitment of your time.

ULLMAN: This is what I do. I don’t know what’s more important than having our people engaged and having them understand what we think is important.

VISCONTI: Have you factored a commitment to diversity in your succession planning?

ULLMAN: The best way to articulate how we think about it is that I’d want to take a look at the top leadership team, middle management as well as all their associates, and make sure that they mirror the customer segment that we’re dealing with. The best way to do that is to make sure at all levels that we pay attention to this. You have to have a pipeline of talent that’s diverse to be able to grow the talent within the organization. To do it properly, it takes time. I mean, you can’t really just parachute people in at different levels and have them be successful. So the best way to organically grow a diverse organization is to allow opportunities at every level. That means in the recruitment phase that we have people that understand how to recruit. Those of us in the leadership roles are on the campuses.

We’ve got to encourage people to come join us because they’re going to be comfortable here. It’s a place they can thrive. They have to see people of color thriving in the company. You can’t just say it’s something we want to do. The council is just a visual articulation of what hopefully goes on every day at the company.

FRANKEL: You are retiring in November. What would you say are the next steps, past that, in diversity management for JCPenney?

ULLMAN: I think we’re on a good trajectory, but we have a long way to go. While we’ve made great strides, the people who are most excited about it really see a different future. You want to look at the young generation, the X’s and Y’s; they’re about a 1-to-1 ratio of diverse population and non-diverse population in the United States. So those are our future customers and our current customers. The evolution will continue. As people get success in an organization, it kind of builds on itself. People see people who have done very well, that we celebrate that. We don’t try to impose some kind of artificial guideline of what should happen. We’d rather be lifted up by the organization, so I expect that to continue.

VISCONTI: What would you like your legacy to be?

ULLMAN: That my successor is more successful than I am. We recruited a fabulous leader. We worked hard to do that. My first introduction to him was two years ago, so it’s been a journey, but getting the right leaders is extraordinarily important. It’s the responsibility of a leader as they move on, as they retire, to be sure not to tell them how to do it, but to show what the opportunity is and let them do it their way. Ron [Johnson] has enormous capacity for that. He’s a people person. He’s got a great track record at Target as well as Apple, and I think he’ll embrace diversity as much as anybody.

FRANKEL: What is next for you after November? What are you planning?

ULLMAN: I’m still the deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank district here in Dallas. I’ve got Mercy Ships International, which I chair and have for the last 15 years. We’re working mostly in West Africa with people that have enormous challenges. I think we did 59,000 surgeries last year in West Africa as a volunteer organization. I’m still lead director of Starbucks. So I’ve got a few things going on. First Robotics is another board that I serve on. I have six children and five grandchildren, so I’ve got plenty to keep me distracted.

The post What Drives Innovation at JCPenney? appeared first on DiversityInc.