“Marriage” is not a tradition that a bunch of people concocted to be mean to other people with. But we allowed the left to have people believe that it was structured that way.

I would go so far as to say that there are some people who think marriage is an evil Republican idea, simply because they’re the ones that want to hold on to it. So far as I’m concerned, once we started talking about “gay marriage,” “traditional marriage,” “opposite-sex marriage,” “same-sex marriage,” “hetero-marriage,” we lost.  It was over.  It was just a matter of time.

Limbaugh then downplayed the right to marriage equality further by analogizing that he’s the one being discriminated against.

[Marriage] was not created as something to deny people ‘benefits’ … discrimination is not an issue, and it never was …

If I were to say, ‘The Obama family has more rights than I do … I want to be Rush Hudson Obama the First. It’s not fair that I can’t be an Obama. Look at all the benefits the Obamas have! By the way, the Obamas, only one of them got elected to anything, but look at all the benefits they get that I don’t get … They’re discriminating against me!

This is the same Rush Limbaugh who called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute” for advocating women’s right to birth control and tried to make a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

The post Rush Limbaugh: GOP Let Same-Gender Couples ‘Bastardize’ Marriage appeared first on DiversityInc.

“Success requires more innovative problem solving, and more innovative problem solving demands diversity and inclusion,” Shi said. Watch clips from his presentation below. Or you can view the full presentation from Toyota and download the slides at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Stephen Howard, Corporate Manager of Debt and Derivatives, Toyota Financial Services, shared how Toyota’s Treasury Department uses the diverse backgrounds and thoughts of its team and its suppliers to generate  significant business results.

“Working together with MWBEs is a sustainable platform. It’s good for business. It improves our ever-changing national demographic for the better,” Howard said. Watch clips from his presentation below. Or you can view the full presentation from Toyota and download the slides at DiversityIncBestPractices.com.

Toyota Motor North America is No. 41 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50.

The post Toyota: ‘Innovative Problem-Solving Demands Diversity & Inclusion’ appeared first on DiversityInc.

“We identified high-performing, high-potential individuals from these different demographic groups who demonstrated leadership and who could step up and, as busy as their schedules are, really take this on,” said, Ford. “Your’re doing this because you have passion; you believe in the mission of the company.”

Hilton’s resource groups enhance the company’s culture, talent and marketplace strategies by allowing employees to feel valued—and bring their whole selves to work, said Ford.

The post Hilton: Which Employees Make the Best Resource-Group Leaders? appeared first on DiversityInc.

“It’s not about what I think I represent but what our people think I represent,” said  Kelvin Womack, Principal, Deloitte, at DiversityInc Innovation Fest! Wolmack detailed Deloitte’s best practices to retain and develop talent by leveraging the connection between diversity, innovation and stronger collective thinking.

Additionally, Womack says this inclusive leadership is key in helping LGBT employees feel comfortable enough to “come out” at work, which can drastically improve retention among this group. He explained how the firm improves its innovation potential and marketplace success by leveraging its inclusive culture and encouraging employees to bring their whole selves to work.

The post What’s Deloitte’s Top Leadership Imperative? appeared first on DiversityInc.

Cloutier also explained (video below) how the company has changed its recruitment efforts to align job codes to find talented veteran employees. ADP particularly values veterans for their history of service and leadership experience.

ADP is No. 27 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50.

The post ADP: What Technologies Can Increase Veteran Recruitment? appeared first on DiversityInc.

LUKE VISCONTI: What led you to be a supporter of diversity and inclusion? How has it impacted the success of your business units?

DAVID EPSTEIN: There are two drivers for me. One is that I grew up in an atmosphere my parents created where people are people, regardless of whether they’re male, female, from any given country, religious background or sexual orientation. I’m interested in what a person can contribute, what their unique experiences are.

The second driver is that, back in 2000, Dr. Daniel Vasella [Chairman and former CEO of Novartis AG] gave me the opportunity to run Novartis Oncology, a global business unit. For the first time in my career I ran discovery, development and commercialization. We operated in more than 70 countries. I had the opportunity to build that team from scratch. I picked people based on their experiences and how I felt they treated other people. My philosophy is that you treat others in the way you expect to be treated.

I ended up with a team that came from all over the world. We had phenomenally productive discussions. At the beginning, it was very difficult because we had different cultural backgrounds and the norms within which we communicated were different, but after a while I saw the power of people with different backgrounds and what they could contribute to business ideas. Once we got that group working as a high-performing team, we were able to accomplish feats that nobody thought were possible.

The business more or less didn’t exist when I was asked to create Novartis Oncology in 2000. We pulled together what oncology products and pipeline we had within Novartis, which represented about $1.5 billion in sales. We had three products, two of which were not robust: one was going generic, and the other was a licensed product but the license was coming to an end. The business was about to disappear.

We built, over 10 years, a $10-billion business, the No. 2 oncology business in the industry. More importantly, people who work in that business say there is a unique focus on creating the environment and the atmosphere, which drives people to do what’s right for customers and patients. An environment that brings people together in a way that’s unique: People can be open, be themselves, and passion fuels what they do together.

Now, I’m trying to create that here in the bigger Pharma business. We’re making progress: You see a much more open, a much more inclusive atmosphere. You see that we’re increasingly hiring people of varied backgrounds. You’re seeing more women in management, more people from emerging markets sitting on the leadership team. It’s starting, but it’s a long road. It takes years and commitment.

Authentic Leadership

VISCONTI: When I interviewed Dr. Vasella, he said, “I love other cultures.” Do you think it was his influence, his leadership that was an inspiration? 

EPSTEIN: Daniel influenced me in a lot of ways; I found him to be a very authentic leader. I take great pride in my authenticity. When I speak, there is no hidden agenda. People around me know what I think. They know that I will listen, that I will debate. I might be the guy who makes the decision, but they’ll know where I’m coming from. It engenders a lot of trust.

If you have weaknesses as a leader, you should be willing to discuss those with your team. If you make a mistake, you should admit it, whether it was a business decision you made, the wrong person you hired, or how you treated someone.

The second thing I owe to Daniel is that he believed in me. He gave me some unique opportunities, such as running the Oncology business or being chosen as head of Pharma. If he hadn’t made that choice, I never would have had the opportunity to grow and become more worldly, more diverse, more inclusive.

VISCONTI: How do you translate the Novartis values across different cultures while respecting local traditions? 

EPSTEIN: It’s not about everybody being in the same place at the same time or having to do everything exactly the same everywhere. For me, it’s a journey. Everybody is moving along that journey to become more inclusive, to put together the best possible team, to get their teams to operate in a high-performing way. Yes, you may have to do it uniquely in China versus Japan versus somewhere else. I think that’s OK.

Sitting still is not acceptable. Having a team that all looks and sounds and thinks the same is not acceptable. How you do it will vary and, being a global company, we’re fairly adept at making those changes. Sometimes there’s friction and you have to have a discussion.

VISCONTI: I’ve heard it put that this work is fatiguing at times—a good fatigue—but that it’s also very invigorating.

EPSTEIN: For me, it’s not fatiguing. I get great satisfaction from developing people and seeing teams do great things that no one thought was possible.

You can have lots of people that look and sound like you and your organization will work fine, but you will never be great and you will never capture the upside. Or you can decide to go for a more diverse and inclusive atmosphere. If you don’t do the work, don’t have the right leadership skills and those people don’t work together, it may actually be worse than having a homogenous team. You just don’t get anything done.

On the other hand, when you lead a very diverse group of talented people and have created the right atmosphere, you’re unbeatable. So it’s worth it. As a leader, you have to have your sights on that far-off horizon.

For the person who comes into a job and thinks they’re only going to be there two or three years, it might not seem worth it. In every job I’ve taken, I have adopted the mind-set that I will be here forever. I want to leave a legacy of an extremely well-functioning organization that is delivering unique value to patients. That’s ultimately what drives me. I take personal pride in seeing people be successful.

VISCONTI: How has Novartis made efforts to address diversity in drug trials? Has this approach changed over time?

EPSTEIN: If you look back 10 years, we were a very U.S.– and Euro-centric company. That’s where the business was. That’s what we knew how to do.

Over time, we began to realize a couple of things. One is that one size does not fit all. A drug for every patient with a given disease doesn’t exist anymore. Medicine is more personalized, which forces you down the road of understanding differences in people—these differences can be genetic, dietary, about lifestyles, or many others.

Second, the world has shifted. Much of the growth opportunity in healthcare comes from emerging markets. Patients in these markets need to be included in trials to make sure we are developing the right medicine for them. About six years ago, for example, we started a project in Japan. We typically launched in the United States and Europe, and five to seven years later, we’d launch in Japan. We wanted to get to the point where that gap was down to one or two years. This year, we have a drug that was approved first in Japan, the U.S. and Europe a bit later.

In the U.S., we are trying to better adapt to the needs of various ethnic groups, and we’re increasingly doing clinical work that includes them. We need to see the data for an African-American patient or a Latino or a Japanese person living in America. We look at women versus men, we look at different age groups, so all these things are being incorporated into our business. Companies that do this work have an advantage in the marketplace. They can talk with the customer and make a different kind of connection.

VISCONTI: Do you see ultimately being able to give people pharmaceuticals customized to their genetic type?

EPSTEIN: If you look at what’s in our portfolio right now, I would say close to 90 percent of the medicines moving from discovery into the clinical-trial phase are targeted based upon a person’s genetic makeup.

Our new medicines will come along with an assay, which will become a diagnostic in the marketplace. If we have three patients in the room that have a given disease—whether it be breast cancer or rheumatoid arthritis—we will be able to tell in advance, thanks to a genetic test, which patient is likely to respond. Then all the clinical trials are done with those responding patients. You can imagine how it changes the health-economics benefit. There’s no more waste. There are no longer expensive, long trials with groups of patients who simply will not benefit from a certain drug.

In our company, we’re investing in R&D and we’re driving innovation and it becomes a competitive advantage. Some companies have chosen to be more focused on short-term commercial opportunity and have not continued to evolve their innovation capability. This creates a bigger gap between us and them.

VISCONTI: Can you connect the company’s focus on diversity and inclusion, cultural awareness and cultural competency with your philosophy on research and development?

EPSTEIN: There are a couple of connections. One is we can recruit people, the best people, from anywhere in the world, which is a major advantage. And when you start to recruit these people, they bring in even more people from those regions or those backgrounds.

Working with diverse cultures and backgrounds, you’re also more likely to design your clinical trials in a way that looks for subgroups or different patient characteristics

It’s largely about talent. It’s about getting the very best people in the door and then making the investment to get them to work together in a high-performing team. That means training your leaders to be inclusive—and we do have inclusive leadership training. We just rolled out a program called Leaders as Coaches. It teaches people specific coaching skills as leaders—for example, how to have a conversation with your team members so challenges and options can be addressed openly and in a reflective manner. We also do high-performing team training where the leader and their direct team work together on a multitude of things.

When you first explain to people that we are going to do this, you get the classic reaction: “I have to take two or three days out of my schedule to do this? I have to think differently?” After they’ve been through it, something interesting happens: They say, “This has made me a better leader and it’s had an immediate impact on how we all work together and what we can achieve.

Our strategy is to win in primary care, specialty care and oncology. We want to become the best pharmaceutical company by 2016. There are four major pillars: growth, innovation, productivity and people. The people pillar is very clearly spelled out as becoming more diverse and inclusive, to invest heavily in high-performing team workshops and education so that we can bring out the best in people. We’re very explicit about it.

The post Novartis’ David Epstein: A Diverse Team Can ‘Accomplish Feats Nobody Thought Possible’ appeared first on DiversityInc.

Read this article in our digital issue. Sign up to receive DiversityInc magazine.

“Our leaders are so moved by our people and they care so deeply about what they think that I knew if I brought their voices to our work, they would really hear me,” she says.

Twaronite launched a “listening tour” in October 2011, when she started her position. Beginning in Dallas, she traveled all over the Americas region—Atlanta, San Jose, Detroit, San Antonio, São Paulo, Brazil, Mexico City, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Secaucus, N.J., Memphis, New York City, Stamford and Hartford, Conn., Charlotte, Orlando, McLean, Va., and Washington, D.C.

In each location, she met with different types of employees—diverse in racial/ethnic/gender/age/orientation/disability demographics, diverse by position and job function, diverse by level of technical skills.

“I worked with our HR department to make sure they preselected people who had proven track records in their day jobs. I wanted the best perspective on what makes people high performers,” she says.

The HR representatives gave the employees topics in advance and lots of direction about being candid and open with Twaronite. Her main questions concerned whether people felt they could bring their whole selves to work, what made them feel included or excluded, and how their team leaders factored into their feelings of inclusion or exclusion. Sessions generally had between 10 and 35 participants, and her team met with a few thousand employees total.

Simultaneously, Twaronite reviewed numbers from an engagement survey and compared them with employee ratings and what she heard directly from the employees themselves.

“We are an accounting and consultancy firm—we really like the numbers. So if I see data with extreme positives, we can replicate it in other places,” she says.

Her key findings were that when people said they felt included, they better absorbed real feedback, like on-the-job coaching. Flexibility in their workplace and from their manager correlates to higher inclusion levels. And employees who had more interaction with clients and senior executives also felt more included.

What made employees feel excluded? “When people acknowledged that someone was different but didn’t want to learn more about them,” Twaronite says, noting as an example a young Muslim woman who is a star performer but felt excluded because no one on her team asked about her religion. “She wanted to share who she is and her coworkers felt they needed to be respectful and cautious,” Twaronite says.

Although Twaronite’s schedule is understandably extremely busy, she plans to continue her traveling listening tour indefinitely. “It’s really relevant to be sensitive and close to your customers [in this case, the employees] so you can see consistencies and inconsistencies,” she says.

Related Video: “How Ernst &Young Gets Its Diversity Message to 50,000 Employees Every Day”

The post How Ernst & Young Improved Engagement, Innovation for 167,000 Employees appeared first on DiversityInc.

Video Minutes

0:00:00 Why Diversity Matters at Brown-Forman

0:01:35 Why a Non-Drinkers Resource Group?

0:09:17 Mission: Acceptance for Non-Drinkers

0:12:47 Benefits to Employees

0:14:06 Changing Corporate Culture

0:17:52 Full Support of Management

0:20:53 Benefits to Company

The post Can a Resource Group for Non-Drinkers Benefit This Liquor Company? appeared first on DiversityInc.

DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti recently interviewed Thomas F. Zenty III, CEO of the Cleveland-based hospital system. (University Hospitals is one of the 2012 DiversityInc Top 5 Hospital Systems.) Zenty discussed the dramatic impact of the Affordable Care Act and how the hospital’s diversity efforts in the workplace and the community are helping it survive. Read this article and other CEO interviews in our digital issue, and sign up for DiversityInc magazine.

Zenty spoke on this topic at DiversityInc’s event last month, Diversity-Management Best Practices From the Best of the Best. Click here for video of his talk.

Luke Visconti: What is the intersection of solid diversity-management initiatives and the reduction of healthcare disparities?

Thomas F. Zenty III: Many studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between people of diverse backgrounds being willing to seek care and knowing that people who look like them will actually be providing that care. So the intersection between diversity and disparities is rather significant. We want to make certain that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure that people of color will be able to work in our organization, hold positions of leadership—caregivers, clinicians and support staff—in order to make people of all backgrounds, colors and faiths feel comfortable coming to University Hospitals to receive the world-class care that we provide.

Visconti: How is diversity and inclusion a competitive differentiator for a hospital?

Zenty: There is no better way to gain the pulse of what’s happening in the communities that we serve than by having people who live and work in those communities actively engaged with us at every level. From an employee perspective, it’s critically important that we have people of diverse backgrounds who will bring skills, talents, perspective in order to help us to do a better job as we look to achieve our mission. We think it’s critically important for diversity to be well represented across our entire health system at every level, be it gender, religion, race, color. In fact, we’ve recently reached out to the Amish community because one of our hospitals has a very large Amish population, and we realized that we did not have a member of our board who was of Amish descent. As a result, we added a new Amish board member to our hospital, and he’s brought a lot in terms of a better understanding of the Amish community and the healthcare needs of that community.

The point is we need to look into the community to better understand who are the communities that we serve? Who best represents those individuals within those communities that we serve? And how can we engage them at every level, either as employees, as members of the board, as leadership-council members? And we want to make sure that we’re engaging everyone in the communities that we serve.

Visconti: You’re very personally involved in the community. Why?

Zenty: It’s critically important for an organization of our size in a community of this size, as the second-largest private employer in Northeast Ohio, to make certain that we’re going to be focused on diversity at every level within the communities that we serve. Our organizational values include excellence, diversity, integrity, compassion and teamwork. And diversity is one of the key components of the cornerstones of the work that we do every day in taking care of our patients and meeting our mission. As the leader of this organization, it’s critically important for us to be actively engaged in community activities to make certain that we’re not only aware of what’s happening in the community, but play a leadership role in advocating on behalf of many different agenda items. One of the key ones, though, is in the area of diversity in Northeast Ohio.

Visconti: University Hospitals has a 100 on the Corporate Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s index of equality for LGBT people. Why is that important to you?

Zenty: The LGBT community is very important to us for all the other reasons that I stated in all the other populations that we serve. They’re very much a part of our community. We want to make certain that they’re recognized and represented. They have actually recognized us for our work in this regard, which we’re very pleased about.

Visconti: Your chief diversity officer reports directly to you. You also have hands-on interaction with people who are responsible for delivering results in diversity management. How important are these two things?

Zenty: It’s critically important that the chief diversity officer reports to the chief executive officer. Donnie Perkins is our chief diversity officer and does an excellent job in the role. However, it’s also important to note that we have a very close working relationship with Elliott Kellman, who is our chief human resources officer, because so much of what we do in workforce planning and workforce development is structured around the importance of diversity at every level in our organization.

In our organization, we selected the top 24 people from within our health system to be part of an education-and-training program in conjunction with Case Western Reserve School of Business. We’ve engaged 13 physicians and 11 non-physicians who were at senior levels in our organization who we feel have the potential to grow and develop in the years to come within University Hospitals’ health system. They were selected on the basis of their accomplishment. They were selected on the basis of diversity. They were selected on the basis of their ability to grow and develop within our organization. It’s an 18-month program, but we’ve seen great success thus far. One of those individuals has already been promoted to a new senior position that was recently created in our organization.

But at the other end of the spectrum, we’re also concerned that we don’t have enough people of color in our management ranks. So we put together a mentorship program, which will include people at the senior administrative level who will choose people who have promotional capability within our organization, who will be working with each of us to make sure that they will be given the opportunity to grow and develop within our organization in both non-management as well as in management roles, so that we can encourage more people of color to get actively engaged as supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents.

Visconti: How are you holding your senior team accountable for diversity-and-inclusion results?

Zenty: Our senior team is very actively engaged with Donnie’s leadership in making certain that we are focused on diversity at every level within our organization, looking at the healthcare needs of the people who we serve, making certain that our employees are given equal opportunity for promotion and growth within our health system, making certain that people who are in middle management have opportunities to grow into senior-management roles, and making certain that we are focused on doing everything that we can to prepare the next generation of leader who will be people of color and of diverse backgrounds. Likewise, it’s important to mention that our board has been focused on diversity over the past many years. And I’m pleased to report that the Council on Economic Inclusion has awarded us for two years in a row recognition for the diversity of our board. If we receive it a third year in a row, we’ll go into the Hall of Fame, and we’re hoping that that will be achieved. This actually starts at the top, beginning with our board, and then filters throughout our entire organization.

Visconti: What do you see as the greatest challenge facing University Hospitals? And how does diversity and inclusion factor into the solution?

Zenty: The greatest challenge will be how to address the changes that we’ll be facing under healthcare reform. One of the key things that we will focus on in the area of diversity is to make certain that the 32 million more Americans who will now have access to healthcare insurance that didn’t have it before, that they will be well represented both within the communities that we serve as well as well represented in the patient populations that we care for. We have a number of very strong specialty clinics that will focus on the needs of specific elements within our population. But we want to make certain that as we see this influx of new patients arriving, we clearly understand what their needs will be—which is more than just episodic acute-care needs, but the continuum of care of services that we’ll be able to provide to them in the years to come.

Visconti: I found University Hospitals’ website to be exemplary in its ability to communicate your mission, your values, how diversity ties into all of this, your corporate citizenship, your engagement with the community. Why is it so important to communicate this?

Zenty: University Hospitals really wants to be a leader in the area of diversity. We’ve been in existence since 1866. We’ve been a very active and vibrant part of this community for that same period of time. And we want to make certain that we’re going to be leaders in the area of diversity—to set the example, to set the tone toward diligently making great things happen in the world of diversity, and to make certain that we’re going to focus not only on the needs of our patients, but also on the needs of those within our organization, to make certain that everyone will be able to realize their fullest potential.

The post Interview With University Hospitals CEO Tom Zenty: Diversity Leader, Innovator, Community Citizen appeared first on DiversityInc.

Monsanto, No. 44 in the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50, is one of nine leading companies that presented at our Innovation Fest! diversity event held in New York City.

For closed captions, press the CC button in the YouTube player.

Video Minutes
0:00:00 About Monsanto
0:02:32 Monsanto’s Recruiting Challenges
0:05:36 A New “People Strategy”
0:07:38 Three-Part Talent Acquisition Model
0:09:05 Integrating Talent Acquisition and Diversity
0:13:43 Leadership Liasons
0:15:17 Nine Employee Networks
0:16:19 Diversity Action Plan
0:17:57 Talent Development Scorecard
0:19:02 Quarterly Diversity Calendar
0:19:57 Success Stories

The post How to Find, Hire & Integrate Global Talent Into Your Workforce appeared first on DiversityInc.