[Jobs] articles on diversity
Reyazuddin, Yasmin
Yasmin.Reyazuddin at montgomerycountymd.gov
Fri May 19 09:31:19 CDT 2006
The following articles appeared in Washington Post on May 1, 2006
Multicultural Marketplace Shows Need For Diversity
By Larry Liebert
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
At Marriott International Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/> , executives are aiming this year to buy 12 percent of their goods from suppliers owned by minorities and women, putting the power of the corporate purse to work in the service of diversity.
Lockheed Martin Corp. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/LMT/> , meanwhile, has engineered a "diversity maturity model," part of a broad management philosophy that, the company hopes, will transform an aging and largely white workforce.
Others see diversity almost as a state of mind: Stung by accounting scandals attributed to a "culture of arrogance," mortgage company Fannie Mae <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/FNM/> now includes "a diversity of thought, ideas and style" among its goals, said Emmanuel Bailey, the company's chief diversity officer.
Diversity -- equal parts moral concept and business imperative -- has become an increasing concern to some Washington area executives as companies organize to compete in a global and multicultural marketplace. Outsourcing has drawn U.S. firms close to affiliates and contractors in Asia and elsewhere; the Washington region is expected within a few years to become "majority minority."
"Unless somebody is asleep at the switch, they should be getting the message that they have to relate to the people buying their goods, products and services," said Weldon Latham, a senior partner at the Washington office of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and chair of a group within the firm that counsels some of the nation's largest companies on how to enhance diversity.
As part of the preparation of The Post 200 ranking of major local firms, reporters surveyed 28 Washington area companies about their diversity policies and workforce statistics.
Some have made clear strides in appointing minority and female executives and board members. More than one-fourth of Marriott International Inc.'s board of directors is minority, for example, as is half of the board of gas utility WGL Holdings Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/WGL/> Others with a progressive reputation have not gone as far: The board at mortgage giant Fannie Mae is 8 percent minority.
Of the 28 companies surveyed, 8 declined to respond, including The Washington Post Co. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/WPO/> , and four others said they could not provide the information because of ongoing mergers or other reasons. Numbers aside, Latham and others agreed that diversity has become an important part of the corporate dialogue, informing day-to-day decision-making and long-term strategy. Diversity programs of some sort are becoming more common, and the set of strategies is wide-ranging -- from the broad to the specific.
Local utility Pepco Holdings Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/POM/> , for example, awarded chairman and chief executive Dennis R. Wraase a $601,920 bonus last year based not only on exceeding the company's earnings targets, but also on meeting its goals for recruiting and promoting minorities and women. Wireless giant Sprint Nextel Corp. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/NXTL/> gives a job satisfaction survey to 10,000 employees each quarter that includes the question, "How satisfied are you with your company's emphasis on diversity?"
As noted recently by Robin Pence, vice president of communications for international energy company AES Corp <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/AES/> ., successful companies must deal across a range of cultures and backgrounds, even in their own back yard. The 267 employees at AES's Arlington headquarters represent 28 nationalities and speak 33 languages.
"We are in 26 countries, on five continents, and 90% of our people live and work outside of the U.S.," she wrote in an e-mail response to inquiries about diversity. "Three out of the four presidents that lead our businesses around the world are nonwhite non-Americans."
Staff writer Dina ElBoghdady contributed to this report.
Taking an Engineer's Approach at Lockheed Martin
By Jill Dutt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
When Bob Stevens took over as Lockheed Martin Corp. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/LMT/> 's chief executive in 2004, he faced a mammoth demographic problem: About 100,000 of the company's 135,000 workers would be retiring in 10 years. To keep its edge, Lockheed would have to replenish a workforce heavily recruited from the military with young engineers, scientists and managers drawn from all backgrounds and able to think across traditional borders.
The need was urgent, especially because Lockheed's core customer, the U.S. government, was concentrating on homeland security and disaster preparedness, requiring Lockheed to expand its scope from military hardware systems to keep pace. The company needed a leadership pipeline full of professionals with diverse backgrounds and skills to meet multidimensional needs.
With an engineer's precision, Stevens rethought the issue of diversity from the ground up, commissioning the expected studies of best practices but also trying to move beyond a philosophy that treated race or gender as an end in itself. The first result was a mathematical model meant to measure such seeming intangibles as how effectively managers create an inclusive atmosphere. The second was a business process now being rolled out that identifies and rewards leaders who inspire new ways of thinking.
"Talent is the critical resource that's going to drive success in the 21st century, period," Stevens said in an interview. "Any person in business today that would look to a single source of talent would be by design sub-optimizing the strategic horizon of that business. We are not about to do that."
Lockheed's approach to diversity is unique in many respects but is also in step with how many of America's largest corporations approach the topic. The notion of "inclusion," not numbers of diverse hires, is gaining prominence. Executives say that they can hire thousands of people from diverse backgrounds out of college but that if the company's management cannot really listen and respond to their unique voices, those employees will move to a company whose management can. Companies also link diversity efforts to business goals, not morality, because global competition necessitates it.
Lockheed is "clearly doing some things other people aren't," said Joe Watson, chief executive of Reston-based executive recruiter Strategic Hire Inc. and author of an upcoming book, "Without Excuses: Unleash the Power of Diversity to Build Your Business." "Diversity is not about kumara, with everybody loving and hugging each other. At the end of the day, diversity is a business imperative."
Too many executives, Watson added, suspend their sense of business logic when diversity is raised as a topic, thinking it a fuzzy, gray area that cannot be measured. "What Lockheed seems to recognize is that the face of the workforce is fundamentally changing. To be successful in meeting revenue and earnings targets and their commitments to shareholders, they have adopted the tools of diversity to keep their employees," Watson said.
The algorithm that emerged from Stevens's first effort at rethinking diversity -- a piece of intellectual property called the "diversity maturity model" that the company is trying to patent -- is a core management tool, with a portion of executives' bonuses tied to improvements in their unit's ranking. Counting the race and gender of employees has only a small impact on the result. Rather, the model assesses the potency of each unit's recruitment and development programs and surveys employees and customers.
"We did not want this to be a program around women and minorities," explained Shan Cooper, vice president of diversity and equal-opportunity programs at Lockheed's headquarters. "We still wanted to look at that, but our focus is on the culture and the environment. . . . This is the first time we're really holding people accountable for their people strategy."
Stevens's second effort, called "full spectrum leadership," identifies the attributes that managers are expected to embody.
"This is an environment of opportunity, but you've got to bring your A game," Stevens said. The leadership program defines what that A game has to look like: not just an ability to get financial results but also one to shape the corporate environment itself, build effective relationships, energize a team and model personal integrity. To sharpen those skills, Lockheed built a leadership training center near its Bethesda headquarters and offers robust mentoring and leadership programs for emerging executives. Such efforts are central, Stevens said, to keeping Lockheed ahead as it transforms from a missile- and plane-making defense company to a global security corporation.
When Lockheed executives discuss diversity, they pointedly stress that they are not talking about "EEO," or the equal employment opportunity laws the company follows as a contractor to the federal government. Those legal requirements are important, executives say. But they are not the main focus of broader, more vital diversity efforts that center on making sure everyone who works with the company feels included, valued, and able to move up the ranks as recognition of their talent and effort.
"EEO is a compliance-based model," Stevens said. "We understand it. We respect it. And we comply with it. Diversity for us isn't the compliance-based model. It's an opportunity-based model."
Lockheed has nearly 124,000 employees in the United States; 21 percent are minorities and 25 percent are women. In its senior executive ranks, meaning the 52 positions that require board approval, there are four minorities and eight women. Its 15-member board of directors, which recently created an ethics and corporate responsibility committee to focus, in part, on diversity, includes two women, one of whom is African American, and one black man.
It's not that Lockheed never has problems with workplace issues; it has been sued in the past by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A Lockheed spokesman said the company has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to discrimination and harassment. There are multiple channels to lodge complaints, through each unit's equal opportunity officer or human resources representative or directly to one's manager or the ethics hotline. Every complaint is investigated and acted upon if evidence is found to support it, according to the policy.
Linda Gooden, president of Seabrook-based Lockheed Martin Information Technology, one of the corporation's fastest-growing units with more than 16,000 employees around the world, manages her company with a strong emphasis on personnel development.
"I'm a lot more focused these days on age than ethnicity" to improve staff diversity, Gooden said. She believes racial issues in the workplace may be less divisive in coming years because new graduates expect diversity. "Generation X is very different," Gooden said, explaining that she watches her stepdaughter's friends, who are diverse and comfortable with their differences.
Gooden likes to find promising young managers to assign to "stretch" assignments, meaning jobs more demanding and complex than they have handled previously. One veteran Lockheed employee said reaching down to less-experienced but talented employees was not the norm at the company until recently. It used to be that promotions were based more on length of service, as in the military. Employees expected to move up slowly, as their age and experience mounted.
Stevens and Gooden knew that model of entitlement for long-timers had to change. "You have a hugely interesting mix of demands that we believe a highly diverse, professionally talented workforce is best able to meet," Stevens said.
Two recent contracts were shaped by the team working on them, Gooden said. For a Social Security contract to develop an automated electronic disability payment system, Gooden tapped 200 recent college graduates to write the software application. She wanted it to be Web-based and figured she would leverage their experience growing up with the Web.
Meanwhile, a female program manager led another contract to track deadbeat dads for the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. The manager "understood from a gender perspective the importance of the program," Gooden said. "Not that men couldn't have done it, but there was much more passion. . . . Diversity helped us understand what mothers faced. Diversity helped us understand the bigger picture."
Gooden's company recently won the high-profile Sentinel contract from the FBI to link technology systems among the bureau's offices, allowing its agents to search and share information among one another and with other intelligence agencies. A previous effort led by another contractor was scrapped after hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted building a system that did not work and investigators alleged fraud and mismanagement.
The Sentinel program team is also led by a woman, Sandy Gillespie. "She's very good with customers," Gooden said. "She came in to do one job and won five others."
When Stevens is asked if he thinks it unusual for two women to be leading the company's high-stakes effort at the FBI, he brushes the question aside. The real genius, he said, was Gooden's ability to see that her company's work modernizing the technology systems at the Social Security Administration had lessons for how to handle the FBI.
"You might say, 'What would work for the Social Security Administration have at all to do with law enforcement?' And you would have really missed a huge opportunity to contribute meaningful value," Stevens said. "That's part of weaving this fabric of a global security company that taps into diversity, including different perspectives, different points of view and different experiences, and taking the time to ask, 'Is there any part that is relevant to this diverse set of experiences that we have had that we can apply to this mission here?' Now, Linda has the rhythm of that embedded in her professional life."
Judy F. Marks, president of Rockville-based Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, is also leading several high-profile contracts, including one to modernize the security and surveillance systems in New York City's subway system, a job she is well aware carries huge risks and responsibilities. "We're not talking about bleeding-edge," she said. "We're talking 100-year-old tunnels."
Marks, like Gooden and Stevens, focuses on building strong connections to universities, stressing the need to graduate more engineers and scientists. Marks estimates that Lockheed hires a full 5 percent of those eligible for security clearance from each year's U.S. graduating classes with degrees in engineering and computer science. "We concentrate on how to open that pool, how to get high scholars interested in science degrees, even middle scholars," she said. She said schools are having more success attracting women and minorities to those disciplines; when she graduated in 1984, she was one of eight women in a class of 135 engineering majors.
Among Marks's nearly 2,500 employees, about 31 percent are minorities and 30 percent are women; more than half are engineers. Only 29 percent are 51 or older, so her company is among the younger at Lockheed.
The management challenge in bringing in such large pools of new employees lies in teaching them the standards and expectations of the corporation without trying to make everyone homogeneous. Lockheed needs the knowledge of a generation who grew up with instant messaging, iPods and cell phones.
"There's a value to having the right information at the right time," Marks said. "That's the challenge we're all trying to solve in different ways" for federal clients such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
"We won't tell you how to design software," Marks added, but Lockheed will train employees on its process for coding, selling and delivering software to customers. "But we need our people to ask, 'Why not have a chat function' " built into new programs?
While Lockheed focuses on feeding the pipeline, Stevens is also aware that the top ranks of the corporation remain dominated by white men. Both Gooden and Marks are examples of how that is changing, and both said they were confident that headquarters leadership would change in time -- something top female executives, of course, have been saying for decades.
This time, though, they were right. On Friday, Lockheed announced that Joanne M. Maguire will replace retiring G. Thomas Marsh as head of the company's space systems business, one of five executive vice presidents of operating units reporting to Stevens. That is a company first. Stevens vows she won't be the last.
Big Companies Widen Their Networks
By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
African American entrepreneur Christopher Powell, who founded a furniture supply and moving business in the District in 1989, at first found Marriott International Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/> impenetrable.
Eager to sign on as a supplier for the Bethesda-based company, he made repeated calls to Marriott's procurement department, which were not returned.
"They were not easy to get into," Powell said.
In the mid-1990s, he happened upon Marriott's diversity department when he was invited to a meeting to discuss better relationships between Marriott and minority-owned businesses. At the time, Powell's Configuration Inc. had several small contracts with the federal government and about 20 employees.
After the meeting, Marriott diversity officials introduced him to the right contacts in procurement and he won a contract worth more than $1 million to supply furniture, dishes and moving services to a Marriott hotel. The help was invaluable, he said.
"A lot of times you can't get to these guys," he said. "Somebody has got to get somebody to hear you."
Programs to encourage supplier diversity date back to the late 1980s, when they were created to give small, minority and women-owned companies more opportunities to win contracts with big companies. They have since become a large part of the corporate diversity goals set by many of the Washington area's largest companies.
Interest in working with diverse suppliers arises from the understanding that a company that promotes women and minorities to management positions transforms itself internally, but when it gives business to minority-owned firms, it can set off changes that ripple far beyond its offices.
Armentha "Mike" Cruise, owner of the Aspen Group Inc., can speak to that. In 1996 her Silver Spring company was a tiny personnel services firm with a few small contracts and no large clients. She needed to drum up business.
Early one morning, she called Barbara B. Lang, who was mortgage company Fannie Mae <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/FNM/> 's chief supplier-diversity officer. The cold call turned warm. Lang helped Cruise get a contract with a larger staffing firm, and the business was on its way. This year Aspen expects about $30 million in annual revenue.
"Barbara was ahead of her time," Cruise said. "Once she opened the door, she gave us our big break. She gave us an opportunity to show what we could do."
Cruise described the relationship with Fannie Mae as a model for efforts to build supplier diversity. Fannie Mae's chief executive had given Lang the authority to come up with inventive ways to do more business with companies owned by women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. She used that power to require the larger company to work with Cruise when a large staffing contract was being rebid.
The first year, the larger company got 75 percent of the contract, which was worth about $4 million; Cruise got 25 percent. The next year, Cruise got 35 percent. By the fifth and final year, Cruise had the entire contract to herself and Aspen had doubled in size. With 200 affiliated temporary workers, Cruise was able to sign up other large clients.
What it took, Lang said, was a determined fight within Fannie Mae to break into a closed circle of large mainstream companies.
"You tend to do business with people who have delivered before," said Lang, who is now president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. "It's not a matter of racism as much as it is of people getting work done quickly."
Pepco Holdings Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/POM/> , one of the region's largest public utilities, is required by state public service commissions to do a portion of its business with minorities.
Last year the company spent $54.6 million -- 14 percent of its total budget -- on goods and services from minority-owned businesses, and has set a 14 percent goal for this year.
When Rhonda J. Lynch, Pepco's manager of minority business development, launched the company's supplier-diversity program 19 years ago, few minority-owned businesses were large enough to provide the services or manufacture the products it needed.
Today, several such companies make transformers, for example. That tracks with recent census data that show significant increases in the number of black- and Hispanic-owned businesses in the Washington area.
Pepco's large and complex system of departments and purchasing processes can be formidable. Lynch and an assistant help hundreds of minority business owners understand it and Pepco's requirements for business insurance and corporate structure. "When you've got a business of our size, it's hard for a small business to navigate through," she said.
P.W. "Dee" Carroll, president of Computer Temporaries Inc. in Largo, is one beneficiary. Carroll, who started her temporary staffing company in 1989, has worked with Pepco since she met Lynch 13 years ago at a conference of minority suppliers. Later Lynch steered a tiny contract toward CTI, to fill one open security position.
Other small contracts with Pepco followed, and last year CTI had revenue of more than $13 million. The two companies solidified their relationship recently through a state of Maryland mentor-protégé program. Though the program does not guarantee CTI future contracts, it offers access to Pepco's resources. Pepco paid Carroll's expenses for a training workshop at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and helped reestablish CTI's board of directors, and design a new logo and Web site.
CTI does 70 percent of its business with the private sector, Carroll said, and she hopes that Pepco's help in polishing its structure and image will open still more doors.
"We are dependent on the commitment of majority corporations to do business with small minority-owned businesses," she said.
Marriott has worked to expand its relationships with minority suppliers as part of a plan to achieve company-wide diversity goals.
Going beyond buying products from a variety of suppliers, it has also contracted with minority businesses in areas such as financial services. For example, Marriott hired a minority investment advisory firm to do some stock repurchasing, and made deposits in minority banks, said George Muñoz, chairman of a Marriott board of directors subcommittee that promotes diversity.
"Normally the financial services side tends not to have as many minorities, Muñoz said. "But it's extremely important for the creation of wealth in the minority community and great talent exists out there, we just have to pursue it. The financial services area is kind of the last bastion of the inner circle."
Last year, Marriott spent $347 million -- or 11.7 percent of its U.S. budget -- directly with minority and other suppliers that satisfy its diversity goals. For this year, it raised its goal to 12.2 percent. Marriott also requires its prime vendors to contract with small, diverse suppliers. For example, a large information technology company that wins a bid to service Marriott's computers agrees to subcontract about 12 percent of its business to minority-owned companies.
David M. Sampson, senior vice president for diversity initiatives, said his eventual goal is to make supplier diversity a part of Marriott's contract business review process, which determines whether a prime contractor will get more business with the company. That would help address a complaint of minority business owners who say that prime contractors sometimes promise to work closely with minority businesses and renege with no consequence.
"Every time we sit down with a supplier we state that [supplier diversity] is important to Marriott, and many contracts have language that asserts the importance of diversity," Sampson said.
For Marriott, the equation has become clear.
"Our relationship to the minority community has to be a two-way street," Muñoz said. "If we want business from the minority community -- and we do -- then we must also reciprocate with business with that community. So having owners come from minorities, having us buy talents and products from the minority community is good for us."
Staff writer Sandra Sugawara contributed to this report.
Workplace Diversity
Jill Dutt
Assistant Managing Editor, Financial
Monday, May 1, 2006; 12:00 PM
Jill Dutt , assistant managing editor for financial news at The Washington Post, was online to discuss workplace diversity. An article <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901732.html> she wrote examining Lockheed Martin's efforts to create a more diverse company is part of the Post 200 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/business/special/10/index.html> , the annual report on the Washington area's top companies.
A transcript follows.
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Jill Dutt: Hi, everyone! Thanks for participating in this chat. I am in *sunny*, actually rainy, Minneapolis today attending a convention of business editors and writers. My Internet connection is a little funky, so please bear with me if I drop out for a couple of minutes if my connection goes down. But I'll keep my fingers crossed that won't happen. So, onto your questions
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USA: I am a patent examiner - I've been one for almost a decade. When I started out, everything seemed good - however, as I got promoted up the ranks and entered law school, I noticed that I started being treated differently and unfairly. I notice that the Patent Office does not seem to value a diverse workforce, and mistreats especially it's African-American patent examiners with law degrees. There are almost no African-American employees in top level management positions. I don't believe that all African-Americans are unqualified and that this is the reason why they have not emerged into these ranks. What advice could you give to me and other African-American employees at the USPTO in terms of braving the environment there? What advice could you give to US Patent & Trademark Officials themselves in terms of how to handle workforce diversity?
Jill Dutt: First, let me say that I'm a reporter and editor who just published a story today about how one company, Lockheed Martin, approaches the challenge of managing a diverse workforce. I am NOT a diversity expert, so I can't really give advice about what companies and agencies should be doing, but I can tell you what experts and managers told me.
So, first to the specifics of your question: you see few role models, people of color in authority at your agency. Second, you don't feel your ideas are valued.
Smart companies today recognize that they have to do more than just hire people of different race and ethnicity. They have to make sure their management chain of command inspires and acts on the diverse ideas and approaches that come up from a diverse workforce. So, one thing some companies do is conduct 360-degree evaluations of their managers to see if they are inspiring and acting on good ideas, or are stuck in their old ways. Companies are also requiring managers to come up with more specific succession plans, so if a mid-level manager is leaving his or her post, the more senior manager has assessed all available candidates and has a good pipeline of diverse people to choose from. This is an attempt to get away from just the "old-boy network" and going to the go-to person.
Tying a manager's bonus to these metrics seems to focus the mind.
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Baltimore, MD: How does an organization/business get past the lip-service concept of internal diversity? Moving from saying it's important to actually instituting policies that make a difference? Lessons learned?
Thanks.
Jill Dutt: Take a look at three stories we published in the Business section today. Lockheed, for example, took a system engineer's approach to your question. It broke down all the management steps needed to create a more inclusive environment and now ranks each business unit on how "mature" its diversity programs are. These include not only recruiting strategies, but also management succession plans, leadership training opportunities, etc. I spent four days at Lockheed watching two very skilled executives doing their things and it was instructive to watch how they integrated their business decisions with their personnel management issues.
One specific thing is thinking about diversity as diversity of ideas and experience, not race and gender. The manager's role is to apply that wealth of diverse experience to current business opportunities and find more creative ways to get that business.
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washingtonpost.com: Here are the three articles Jill mentioned: Taking an Engineer's Approach at Lockheed Martin <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901732.html> ; Big Companies Widen Their Networks <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901724.html> ; Multicultural Marketplace Shows Need For Diversity <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901722.html>
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Washington, D.C.: More of a comment than a question. Lockheed Martin, and many other companies, offer domestic partner health benefits to their employees as part of their diversity efforts to recruit and retain the best talent. The federal government is really behind the ball on this and other issues important to the gay and lesbian community. Obviously, there are political reasons for that, but I imagine that as the government's policies ignore this facet of diversity, Agencies will have a hard time competing for talent with companies like Lockheed Martin.
Jill Dutt: As skilled employees look for places to work, the policies and benefits being offered by possible employers are becoming increasingly important. People are looking for places where their ideas will be valued and that they will be comfortable.
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Bethesda, Maryland: Do you think Lockheed Martin will be able to change the definition of "diversity" outside their company?
Washington Post writers, like most people outside Lockheed Martin, are almost always referring to race and gender representation when talking about a political "diversity appointment" or a business making a "diversity hire".
Lockheed Martin seems to be fighting an uphill battle to redefine the word diversity to mean "an inclusive culture" rather than "diverse representation of races and genders".
Jill Dutt: Bob Stevens, Lockheed's chief executive, has focused on changing the notion of "diversity" within his company. As more people learn about Lockheed's approach, I'll bet he will be asked to share his perspective with other Fortune 500 companies.
A key insight, I think, is that hiring "diverse" employees is not enough. Corporate cultures need to find a way to allow those diverse ideas filter through and reshape a company's approach to its core business.
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Burke, VA: Do you know of any plans (at Lockheed or anywhere else) to ensure that the so-called "corporate culture" does not discriminate against those of us who come in from different cultures and may exhibit behaviors that are culturally-rather than performance-based? One example could be sustaining eye contact during interviews, another showing an inordinate level of respect for figures of authority, or even frequently touching others.
Jill Dutt: I talked to managers about these cultural differences and what I heard back is that these are things people need to be talking about within their workplaces. When people notice these little things, sustaining eye contact or, the inverse of never making direct eye contact, there should be a way of bringing up these different styles, to understand the cultural influence behind them. Too often, people make assumptions about what these small differences mean, seen only through the prism of their own personal experiences.
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Washington, DC: Dear Ms. Dutt:
I have a question about the definition of "workplace diversity." It appears that the term has come to mean diversity only in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
I happen to believe that "workplace diversity" should also refer to employees having myriad opinions and perspectives. For example, on the surface, my agency is very diverse. However, my officemates are ALL Democrats. As a moderate Republican, they'll often dismiss my perspective by saying "I don't know anyone else that thinks like you." Since when is hearing different opinions a bad thing?
My point is that diversity has to go beyond the surface to include our thoughts and minds. Groupthink is never healthy for any organization and I fear that, in our politically correct world, in seeking out diversity, we are missing the forest for the trees.
Jill Dutt: You make a key point about "groupthink." Over and over again, when I talked to senior executives, they say they fear this. Smart companies recognize that they will lose their edge if everyone approaches topics from the same experience and cultural base. This is a key reason that "diversity" is taking on a meaning much broader than just race and sex.
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Washington, DC: Hi Jill. I am an interior architect who worked in Alexandria VA until last August and now works in DC. Is this diversity thing inclusive of gay & lesbian employees? Is the diversity drive also inclusive of us? I worked for a nation-wide firm until last August in Alexandria since May of 2003. Until December of 2004, I'd worked in a tightly-knit group who worked on a major government project. Everyone on that project was aware that I was gay and seemed to not care. AI&E firms are notoriously gossipy and my status leaked into the rest of the office. When I went to work on projects that were part of the rest of the office, I found that, although my previous project managers had praised my work, none of the non-government project managers wanted to use me, even though there was a need on their projects. After about 7 months of forcing my way into projects, getting told I wasn't working up to speed and even being accused of making a pass at a client (which was a complete fabrication) I put in my notice. When I asked to project managers whom I'd worked on the governmental projects with advice on what was my downfall, they quietly confided that the male project managers (architects) were uncomfortable with me because I was gay.
Jill Dutt: It sounds like that Alexandria firm lost a valued employee because it was not an inclusive environment. I did sense that top executives at big companies recognize the business imperative in bringing out the best in everyone, but I am not so naive as to think that every company, every manager is going to change overnight. I wish you the best as you look for the right place to succeed.
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Burke, VA: I'm glad to hear that! However--is any of these employers being proactive and ensuring that these discussions actually take place--i.e., the effect of cultural differences on the day-to-day workplace. As you so well describe it, my concern is that people do notice the little things (such as sustaining eye contact or never making direct eye contact), and that an organization's leaders need to take it upon themselves to bring up these different styles, to help their employees understand the assumptions we make. Do you know whether anyone is doing anything about this aspect of managing a diverse workforce? Thanks!
Jill Dutt: Some companies, like Lockheed and Marriott, do extensive employee surveys. Issues like this should be captured in questions about how comfortable employees feel with their work environment. If a manager comes out of a survey appearing to be tone-deaf about such matters, that could be part of their annual evaluation, in which they receive encouragement to have more open conversation about such things. As our moms said, it's the little things that count.
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Annandale, VA: Yeah, groupthink, that's a good term. Like when a corporate boss told me he couldn't hire me for a position in 1975 because he "had to hire Black." When I told a Black co-worker that story year's later she said, "he shouldn't have told you." I guess that's an example of groupthink, if you are a white male take it on the chin because you don't matter.
Jill Dutt: That sounds like short-sighted thinking from someone who doesn't get what diversity really means. White men, I know plenty of them, and they are incredibly diverse.
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Washington, D.C.: Do you foresee any changes for the positive in the field of Diversity Management within the Federal Government, despite the poor track record shown by most agencies so far?
Jill Dutt: I didn't talk with anyone from the federal government in preparation for this story. I know that Steve Barr, our fabulous Post columnist who writes the Federal Diary, delves into this topic a lot. Perhaps you could direct your question to his next chat? I'll be very interested in his answer.
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washingtonpost.com: Federal Diary Column Archive <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032400643.html>
_______________________
Washington, DC: I'd just like to make a plug for including people with disabilities in corporate (all) "diversity" programs. It's amazing how often race = diversity. With a staggering 70% unemployment rate among people with disabilities, companies, needing to address workforce shortages in the coming years, should be looking, now, at this under employed, yet extremely talented group of Americans. People with disabilities have so much to offer and with just a little foresight from companies in terms of accommodations, which often benefit their entire workforce, they can be reaching out to a group ready and willing to work. They obviously need to be paid a living wage (as do all workforce groups, including immigrants), but employing people with disabilities could offer a double benefit by removing their dependency on social security and thus potentially helping decrease the coming crisis in that public program (in 2030 only 2.2 workers per beneficiary will be contributing compared to 42 workers per beneficiary in 1945!!)
Jill Dutt: Good point.
_______________________
DC: Jill,
Is there any concern in the diversity field that evolutionary psychology will show real difference in average intelligence and/or professional inclinations of people of different genders and ethnic groups/races, and that the cause may be partially genetic?
Jill Dutt: I didn't hear anything about that. But, you know, what does average intelligence really have to do with business success. You can have a company full of people with outstanding IQs and the company can fail spectacularly. There is book smart, social smart, strategic smart, tactical smart, and lots of other smarts. Top companies are looking for ways to capture all those different intelligences to improve their bottom lines.
_______________________
Woodlawn, Maryland: In your article of Workplace diversity, you state that there is confusion with the term "diversity". Some people believed that workplace diversity means your race, culture, and sex.
Are you making the point that diversity is really the learning styles of individuals in the workplace?
Jill Dutt: Different learning styles is certainly part of it. Age is also part of it, especially at big companies like Lockheed, where top jobs are dominated by people over 50. It's great to have so much experience and wisdom, people there say, but they need to encourage the younger generation to come forward with meaningful ideas. Especially folks who have graduated in the past few years, the kids who grew up with the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging and, yes, Nintendo. They have lived an "always-on," "total information" environment and could have very good ideas about how to tie together our communication networks and what privacy and personal issues arise.
Diversity in perspective seems to be increasingly important to managers.
_______________________
Arlington, Va.: So at all these companies that are strategically pursuing diversity, aren't a lot of the middle- to upper-level managers -- the ones who have to carry these policies out -- likely to be people who have political misgivings about any kind of diversity imperative? Doesn't that create a disconnect that undermines the end result?
Jill Dutt: Middle-management jobs are TOUGH. Managers do need to make their numbers, to fulfill the company's commitment to shareholders. How managers make those numbers is the key: good managers can inspire their team, can bring out creative ideas that make people say, "wow" and win new business. Global competition is constantly bringing new ideas to the fore and companies need to stay ahead of that change with their own new ideas. Tapping a rich pool of diverse employees is an increasingly important way to stay ahead, experts say.
Also, if managers have a portion of their bonus tied to their success at managing an inclusive environment, they will be incentivized to push on this.
_______________________
Annandale, VA: You might not print this, but it's one story. I graduated a poor white male with a BA college degree in 79 and have found myself the low guy in the workforce hierarchy with affirmative action since then. I worked hard and all I saw is how diversity is more important than promoting a hard-working white male with medium intelligence. I got out of the Federal work force in the 80s because of it and worked for many minority-owned 8A firms (which I couldn't create). I did well in those small firms but didn't realize the capital gains that they created for themselves. There are many like me who see diversity as being "anybody but you." I gave up a long time ago trying to climb a management ladder. Good luck to the next generation--maybe it will be less discriminating.
Jill Dutt: There are plenty of workplaces out there that are clueless about good management. If someone is hard-working and has good ideas, there ought to be ways for their ideas to be valued, their talents to be recognized. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. I wish you luck as you pursue your career.
_______________________
Bowie, MD: As much as companies try to diversify their workforce, an old boy network still exists. I used to work for Northrop Grumman, and it was that way. People set in their ways and thoughts. As much as companies try and market themselves as being diversified, most of the company doesn't care because the bottom line is there's still work to be done regardless, and work is what pays the bills, not diversity.
Jill Dutt: I hear what you're saying. Diversity consultants and corporate executives say the best corporations now get that the bottom line is directly connected to increasing diversity of the workforce. Tom Watson of Strategichire notes that in the Washington region, we're going to be a majority minority area within the next 5-10 years. If customers are increasingly diverse, a company would be foolish and its CEO derelict (Tom says) if they don't change their approach and really embrace diversity. In my story today, I noted how Lockheed was able to shape a contract to track "deadbeat dads" for the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, by relying on a female manager who could see the big picture of how to help single-mother households. Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology, said she believed a man could have done a good job directing that contract, but the woman did bring a certain level of passion and creativity that made the work Lockheed did special.
_______________________
Orange, CT: What have you seen are characteristics of companies that are good at promoting an inclusive work environment?
Jill Dutt: Good question. First, the mandate comes from the top, from the chief executive, and even the corporation's board of directors. Second, there are clear policies and even written instructions for managers to follow. The more managers know, specifically, about what is expected of them, the better they perform. Third, there is a robust feedback loop, in which employees either by name or anonymously, feel comfortable telling managers whether their tactics are working or not. Fourth, add measurement tools. Benchmark where a company is today vs. best practices, and then set goals for improvement that are measured regularly.
_______________________
Jill Dutt: Looks like time is up. Many thanks for all your good questions.
Women, Minorities Make Up New Generation of Lobbyists
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
When Anne Wexler was fresh out of Jimmy Carter's White House, the Old Boys Network on K Street was not always kind to her. During one particularly brutal meeting in the 1980s, Wexler and her partner Nancy C. Reynolds were laughed at by a roomful of male lobbyists when the women predicted the White House would embrace the telecommunications position they were all working to advance.
But the men were not laughing at them for long. Soon afterward, President Ronald Reagan did exactly what Wexler and Reynolds said he would, and the newcomers were granted the respect they deserved. As a token of esteem, one of the men in the room gave each of the women a day at an Elizabeth Arden spa as a reward.
Wexler is a Washington pioneer. In 1981, she became the first woman to own a lobbying firm and was among the first to make a business out of combining disparate interests into coalitions as a basic advocacy tool. "When I started, there were very few women in lobbying," Wexler recalled. "It was completely male-dominated."
Now women are a significant part of the lobbying scene. In fact, lobbying, which for years was almost entirely a white man's game, has become increasingly diverse as women and people of color have attained more positions of power and influence.
Women-owned firms are proliferating, and a few are, at least for now, all female. Women also hold important positions in both lobbying and law firms. They direct the Washington offices of major corporations for such industries as oil and communications.
There are many reasons for the change. The biggest is the rising number of women who have entered government at the highest levels. The number of women in Congress has exploded in the last generation. In addition, presidents have placed special emphasis on hiring women in senior White House and cabinet positions since Richard Nixon's day.
Those freshly minted, high-ranking women hired lots of other women to help them. And when they all started to look for post-government jobs, lobbying became as natural a place for them to turn as it was for the men who came before them.
Lobbying trends have also benefited the cause of women in lobbying. The Old Boys Network, when it was in full swing in the 1960s and earlier, made it easy for the long-established men in power to rely on personal ties to win official favors. But those insular days are long gone.
Today lobbying is less about back scratching than it is about case making. A lot of lobbying involves researching and presenting facts and, at those things, men and women are on equal footing.
"This town has shifted business models from the Old Boys Network to a focus on substance, competence and credibility," said Stephanie E. Silverman, a principal of Venn Strategies LLC, a woman-owned lobbying firm. "In the old model it was difficult if you were a woman. In the new model you can be a man or a woman and it doesn't matter."
Women are particularly prominent in lobbying firms that trade more on their expertise than on their access. Linda E. Tarplin, for example, is considered one of Washington's top health-care lobbyists and is part of an all-woman, all-Republican, all-health-care lobbying company called Tarplin, Downs & Young LLC. Silverman's firm specializes in tax matters. Women are also pervasive in lobbying on international trade.
"You do have different industry segments that are more dominated by women than others," Tarplin said. "In the health-care world, there are a lot of strong female lobbyists."
Women have also banded together in their own lobbying firms to foster work environments that better fit their family lives. Nueva Vista Group is owned by three Democratic women with young children (the oldest is 7), and they set their schedules based on their personal needs.
"That's why a lot of women get into this," Nueva Vista partner Andrea LaRue said. "It's carving out a niche that you feel comfortable in and being able to define the space completely on your own."
Women have had such positive experiences as lobbyists that a few are into their second generation on the job. Silverman's mother, Anita K. Epstein, has been a lobbyist since 1978 and, like her daughter, loves the profession. "This is an important job that we do," she said. "It's a shame that some people don't hold it in high regard."
Patricia Griffin of Nueva Vista is also the daughter of a lobbyist -- Patrick J. Griffin, the former top lobbyist for President Bill Clinton on the Hill. Like her dad, the younger Griffin is adept at her work. But she also notes that women lobbyists still have a long way to go. "You're often still the only woman in the room, or only one of two or three," she said. "The culture is still very aggressive and white-male-oriented."
Lobbying is more diverse than ever, but the evolution to equality is not yet finished.
We Told You So
The Food Products Association and the Grocery Manufacturers Association are, in fact, going to merge, as this column predicted last November. And in what might be a sign of the times, the president of the merged entity will be a Democrat -- former congressman Calvin M. Dooley of California, who has been head of the food products group. The Republican who directs the grocery manufacturers, C. Manly Molpus, will be retiring.
Eventually the name of the combined organization will be, simply, Grocery Manufacturers Association, according to a news release. It will represent nearly 300 companies from the food, beverage and consumer products industries.
But maybe more is happening here that is in clear sight. Is it possible that the goodies are telling us something about the future control of Congress by choosing a Democratic chief executive? Who knows, maybe K Street is a leading political indicator. Stranger things have happened.
MARRIOTT'S DIVERSITY PROGRAM
Monday, May 1, 2006; D10
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT: The Human Capital Review program, headed by William J. Shaw, Marriott's president and chief operating officer, identifies leadership talent throughout Marriott, with an emphasis on women and minorities.
Results: Of Marriott's 407 senior executives, 86 are women and 32 are minorities.
Of Marriott's 41 top executive vice presidents, four are minorities and 11 are women.
SUPPLIER DIVERSITY PROGRAM : Marriott has a Web site where small businesses can register for work. Marriott assesses each registrant's sales, capabilities and products, and tries to respond to the registrant within eight weeks. It then works with the business, explaining what kinds of products and services Marriott is trying to buy, and how to navigate Marriott's procurement system. Marriott keeps a database of minority and women-owned companies for hotel managers to use. In February, Marriott set up a system to track what is being bought from minority and women-owned businesses by each hotel.
Results: In 2004, $210 million, or 10 percent, of its total procurement budget went to suppliers owned by minorities and women.
In 2005, $347 million, or 11.7 percent, went to 11,000 minority and women-owned suppliers.
Marriott has a goal of 12 percent by 2008.
Prime suppliers also are expected to buy 12 percent of their goods and services from firms owned by minorities and women. Marriott asks them to report their diversity spending semi-annually.
DIVERSITY OWNERSHIP INITIATIVE: Last year, Marriott set up a program to increase the number of its hotels owned by minority- and women-owned franchisees. It holds seminars on the economics of the hotel business, where wealthy minority investors can hear experts talk about underwriting criteria for securing loans, as well as details on hotel construction, refurbishing and operations.
Results: When Marriott began the initiative, about 250 of its 2,700 lodging properties were owned or under development by minorities.
At the end of 2005, about 300 of its 2,800 lodging properties were owned, operated or under development by minorities, including a Residence Inn in Columbia. that was bought by Integrated Capital Inc., a real estate equity group that specializes in the hospitality business.
At Marriott, a Matter of Numbers
Monday, May 1, 2006; D10
The huge challenge that lay ahead for corporations hit George Muñoz, a director at Marriott International Inc. <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/> , when he realized that minority students were in the majority at public high schools in the nation's 25 largest cities.
"This is our workforce of tomorrow," Muñoz told himself.
At the time, in the mid-1980s, Muñoz was president of the Chicago Board of Education, but the understanding eventually informed his leadership of an unusual board of directors subcommittee at Bethesda-based Marriott, which promotes diversity throughout the company's operations.
The two-year-old subcommittee spent its first year building a business case for diversity. Muñoz said that if businessmen are not convinced there is a bottom-line reason for programs, diversity efforts usually fail.
The subcommittee analyzed the impact that diversity programs could have on morale at Marriott, where the workforce is 59 percent minority, as well as the correlation between employee satisfaction, customer service and profits. It also collected information on black, Asian and Hispanic consumers, and on governments and companies that give preference to hotels with strong diversity programs.
"A lot of our key corporate customers are asking us about what we're doing in this space, what are we doing in diversity. What does our workforce look like? They ask about the ownership make up of our hotels," said David M. Sampson, senior vice president of diversity initiatives. "Our ability to mirror the communities where we do business has helped us get additional lodging deals, particularly in top urban markets."
Then, the subcommittee shifted its focus to Marriott programs to promote women and minority executives, minority suppliers and minority hotel ownership.
William J. Shaw, president of Marriott International Inc., established the subcommittee and gave the chairmanship to Muñoz, a former president of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and assistant U.S. Treasury secretary and now head of Arlington-based Muñoz Group Investment Banking Group LLC.
The subcommittee includes two other directors, Debra L. Lee, chairman of BET Holdings Inc., and Harry J. Pearce, chairman of Nortel Networks Corp. <http://financial.washingtonpost.com/custom/wpost/html-qcn.asp?dispnav=business&mwpage=qcn&symb=NT&nav=el> and former chairman of Hughes Electronics Corp., as well as Shaw and six senior Marriott executives.
Its efforts included setting up a group that reviews Marriott's 400 highest-ranking managers and picks those who will be groomed for the top jobs. "We look at who our highest potential people are, and as part of that, look at how we are progressing against our goals on the diversity front," Shaw said. "We make sure we have not just identified people, but we have development plans for everybody."
-- Sandra Sugawara
Yasmin Reyazuddin
Information & Referral unit
Department of Health & human services
401 Hungerford Drive (1st floor)
Rockville MD 20850
Phone 240-777-1245 (info line)
240-777-1556 (personal line)
Fax: 240-777-4636
TTY: 240-777-1295
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The following articles appeared in Washington Post on May 1, 2006
Multicultural Marketplace Shows Need For Diversity
By Larry Liebert
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
At http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/ Marriott International Inc.
, executives are aiming this year to buy 12 percent of their goods from suppliers owned by minorities and women, putting the power of the corporate purse to work in the service of diversity.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/LMT/ Lockheed Martin Corp.
, meanwhile, has engineered a "diversity maturity model," part of a broad management philosophy that, the company hopes, will transform an aging and largely white workforce.
Others see diversity almost as a state of mind: Stung by accounting scandals attributed to a "culture of arrogance," mortgage company http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/FNM/ Fannie Mae
now includes "a diversity of thought, ideas and style" among its goals, said Emmanuel Bailey, the company's chief diversity officer.
Diversity -- equal parts moral concept and business imperative -- has become an increasing concern to some
Washington
area executives as companies organize to compete in a global and multicultural marketplace. Outsourcing has drawn
U.S.
firms close to affiliates and contractors in
Asia
and elsewhere; the
Washington
region is expected within a few years to become "majority minority."
"Unless somebody is asleep at the switch, they should be getting the message that they have to relate to the people buying their goods, products and services," said Weldon Latham, a senior partner at the Washington office of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and chair of a group within the firm that counsels some of the nation's largest companies on how to enhance diversity.
As part of the preparation of The Post 200 ranking of major local firms, reporters surveyed 28
Washington
area companies about their diversity policies and workforce statistics.
Some have made clear strides in appointing minority and female executives and board members. More than one-fourth of Marriott International Inc.'s board of directors is minority, for example, as is half of the board of gas utility http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/WGL/ WGL Holdings Inc.
Others with a progressive reputation have not gone as far: The board at mortgage giant Fannie Mae is 8 percent minority.
Of the 28 companies surveyed, 8 declined to respond, including The http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/WPO/ Washington Post Co.
, and four others said they could not provide the information because of ongoing mergers or other reasons. Numbers aside, Latham and others agreed that diversity has become an important part of the corporate dialogue, informing day-to-day decision-making and long-term strategy. Diversity programs of some sort are becoming more common, and the set of strategies is wide-ranging -- from the broad to the specific.
Local utility http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/POM/ Pepco Holdings Inc.
, for example, awarded chairman and chief executive Dennis R. Wraase a $601,920 bonus last year based not only on exceeding the company's earnings targets, but also on meeting its goals for recruiting and promoting minorities and women. Wireless giant http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/NXTL/ Sprint Nextel Corp.
gives a job satisfaction survey to 10,000 employees each quarter that includes the question, "How satisfied are you with your company's emphasis on diversity?"
As noted recently by Robin Pence, vice president of communications for international energy company http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/AES/ AES Corp
., successful companies must deal across a range of cultures and backgrounds, even in their own back yard. The 267 employees at AES's
Arlington
headquarters represent 28 nationalities and speak 33 languages.
"We are in 26 countries, on five continents, and 90% of our people live and work outside of the
U.S.
," she wrote in an e-mail response to inquiries about diversity. "Three out of the four presidents that lead our businesses around the world are nonwhite non-Am
eric
ans."
Staff writer Dina ElBoghdady contributed to this report.
Taking an Engineer's Approach at Lockheed Martin
By Jill Dutt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
When Bob Stevens took over as http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/LMT/ Lockheed Martin Corp.
's chief executive in 2004, he faced a mammoth demographic problem: About 100,000 of the company's 135,000 workers would be retiring in 10 years. To keep its edge, Lockheed would have to replenish a workforce heavily recruited from the military with young engineers, scientists and managers drawn from all backgrounds and able to think across traditional borders.
The need was urgent, especially because Lockheed's core customer, the U.S. government, was concentrating on homeland security and disaster preparedness, requiring Lockheed to expand its scope from military hardware systems to keep pace. The company needed a leadership pipeline full of professionals with diverse backgrounds and skills to meet multidimensional needs.
With an engineer's precision, Stevens rethought the issue of diversity from the ground up, commissioning the expected studies of best practices but also trying to move beyond a philosophy that treated race or gender as an end in itself. The first result was a mathematical model meant to measure such seeming intangibles as how effectively managers create an inclusive atmosphere. The second was a business process now being rolled out that identifies and rewards leaders who inspire new ways of thinking.
"Talent is the critical resource that's going to drive success in the 21st century, period," Stevens said in an interview. "Any person in business today that would look to a single source of talent would be by design sub-optimizing the strategic horizon of that business. We are not about to do that."
Lockheed's approach to diversity is unique in many respects but is also in step with how many of
Am
eric
a
's largest corporations approach the topic. The notion of "inclusion," not numbers of diverse hires, is gaining prominence. Executives say that they can hire thousands of people from diverse backgrounds out of college but that if the company's management cannot really listen and respond to their unique voices, those employees will move to a company whose management can. Companies also link diversity efforts to business goals, not morality, because global competition necessitates it.
Lockheed is "clearly doing some things other people aren't," said Joe Watson, chief executive of Reston-based executive recruiter Strategic Hire Inc. and author of an upcoming book, "Without Excuses: Unleash the Power of Diversity to Build Your Business." "Diversity is not about kumara, with everybody loving and hugging each other. At the end of the day, diversity is a business imperative."
Too many executives, Watson added, suspend their sense of business logic when diversity is raised as a topic, thinking it a fuzzy, gray area that cannot be measured. "What Lockheed seems to recognize is that the face of the workforce is fundamentally changing. To be successful in meeting revenue and earnings targets and their commitments to shareholders, they have adopted the tools of diversity to keep their employees," Watson said.
The algorithm that emerged from Stevens's first effort at rethinking diversity -- a piece of intellectual property called the "diversity maturity model" that the company is trying to patent -- is a core management tool, with a portion of executives' bonuses tied to improvements in their unit's ranking. Counting the race and gender of employees has only a small impact on the result. Rather, the model assesses the potency of each unit's recruitment and development programs and surveys employees and customers.
"We did not want this to be a program around women and minorities," explained Shan Cooper, vice president of diversity and equal-opportunity programs at Lockheed's headquarters. "We still wanted to look at that, but our focus is on the culture and the environment. . . . This is the first time we're really holding people accountable for their people strategy."
Stevens's second effort, called "full spectrum leadership," identifies the attributes that managers are expected to embody.
"This is an environment of opportunity, but you've got to bring your A game," Stevens said. The leadership program defines what that A game has to look like: not just an ability to get financial results but also one to shape the corporate environment itself, build effective relationships, energize a team and model personal integrity. To sharpen those skills, Lockheed built a leadership training center near its
Bethesda
headquarters and offers robust mentoring and leadership programs for emerging executives. Such efforts are central, Stevens said, to keeping Lockheed ahead as it transforms from a missile- and plane-making defense company to a global security corporation.
When Lockheed executives discuss diversity, they pointedly stress that they are not talking about "EEO," or the equal employment opportunity laws the company follows as a contractor to the federal government. Those legal requirements are important, executives say. But they are not the main focus of broader, more vital diversity efforts that center on making sure everyone who works with the company feels included, valued, and able to move up the ranks as recognition of their talent and effort.
"EEO is a compliance-based model," Stevens said. "We understand it. We respect it. And we comply with it. Diversity for us isn't the compliance-based model. It's an opportunity-based model."
Lockheed has nearly 124,000 employees in the
United States
; 21 percent are minorities and 25 percent are women. In its senior executive ranks, meaning the 52 positions that require board approval, there are four minorities and eight women. Its 15-member board of directors, which recently created an ethics and corporate responsibility committee to focus, in part, on diversity, includes two women, one of whom is African Am
eric
an, and one black man.
It's not that Lockheed never has problems with workplace issues; it has been sued in the past by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A Lockheed spokesman said the company has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to discrimination and harassment. There are multiple channels to lodge complaints, through each unit's equal opportunity officer or human resources representative or directly to one's manager or the ethics hotline. Every complaint is investigated and acted upon if evidence is found to support it, according to the policy.
Linda Gooden, president of Seabrook-based Lockheed Martin Information Technology, one of the corporation's fastest-growing units with more than 16,000 employees around the world, manages her company with a strong emphasis on personnel development.
"I'm a lot more focused these days on age than ethnicity" to improve staff diversity, Gooden said. She believes racial issues in the workplace may be less divisive in coming years because new graduates expect diversity. "Generation X is very different," Gooden said, explaining that she watches her stepdaughter's friends, who are diverse and comfortable with their differences.
Gooden likes to find promising young managers to assign to "stretch" assignments, meaning jobs more demanding and complex than they have handled previously. One veteran Lockheed employee said reaching down to less-experienced but talented employees was not the norm at the company until recently. It used to be that promotions were based more on length of service, as in the military. Employees expected to move up slowly, as their age and experience mounted.
Stevens and Gooden knew that model of entitlement for long-timers had to change. "You have a hugely interesting mix of demands that we believe a highly diverse, professionally talented workforce is best able to meet," Stevens said.
Two recent contracts were shaped by the team working on them, Gooden said. For a Social Security contract to develop an automated electronic disability payment system, Gooden tapped 200 recent college graduates to write the software application. She wanted it to be Web-based and figured she would leverage their experience growing up with the Web.
Meanwhile, a female program manager led another contract to track deadbeat dads for the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. The manager "understood from a gender perspective the importance of the program," Gooden said. "Not that men couldn't have done it, but there was much more passion. . . . Diversity helped us understand what mothers faced. Diversity helped us understand the bigger picture."
Gooden's company recently won the high-profile Sentinel contract from the FBI to link technology systems among the bureau's offices, allowing its agents to search and share information among one another and with other intelligence agencies. A previous effort led by another contractor was scrapped after hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted building a system that did not work and investigators alleged fraud and mismanagement.
The Sentinel program team is also led by a woman, Sandy Gillespie. "She's very good with customers," Gooden said. "She came in to do one job and won five others."
When Stevens is asked if he thinks it unusual for two women to be leading the company's high-stakes effort at the FBI, he brushes the question aside. The real genius, he said, was Gooden's ability to see that her company's work modernizing the technology systems at the Social Security Administration had lessons for how to handle the FBI.
"You might say, 'What would work for the Social Security Administration have at all to do with law enforcement?' And you would have really missed a huge opportunity to contribute meaningful value," Stevens said. "That's part of weaving this fabric of a global security company that taps into diversity, including different perspectives, different points of view and different experiences, and taking the time to ask, 'Is there any part that is relevant to this diverse set of experiences that we have had that we can apply to this mission here?' Now, Linda has the rhythm of that embedded in her professional life."
Judy F. Marks, president of Rockville-based Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, is also leading several high-profile contracts, including one to modernize the security and surveillance systems in
New York City
's subway system, a job she is well aware carries huge risks and responsibilities. "We're not talking about bleeding-edge," she said. "We're talking 100-year-old tunnels."
Marks, like Gooden and Stevens, focuses on building strong connections to universities, stressing the need to graduate more engineers and scientists. Marks estimates that Lockheed hires a full 5 percent of those eligible for security clearance from each year's
U.S.
graduating classes with degrees in engineering and computer science. "We concentrate on how to open that pool, how to get high scholars interested in science degrees, even middle scholars," she said. She said schools are having more success attracting women and minorities to those disciplines; when she graduated in 1984, she was one of eight women in a class of 135 engineering majors.
Among Marks's nearly 2,500 employees, about 31 percent are minorities and 30 percent are women; more than half are engineers. Only 29 percent are 51 or older, so her company is among the younger at Lockheed.
The management challenge in bringing in such large pools of new employees lies in teaching them the standards and expectations of the corporation without trying to make everyone homogeneous. Lockheed needs the knowledge of a generation who grew up with instant messaging, iPods and cell phones.
"There's a value to having the right information at the right time," Marks said. "That's the challenge we're all trying to solve in different ways" for federal clients such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
"We won't tell you how to design software," Marks added, but Lockheed will train employees on its process for coding, selling and delivering software to customers. "But we need our people to ask, 'Why not have a chat function' " built into new programs?
While Lockheed focuses on feeding the pipeline, Stevens is also aware that the top ranks of the corporation remain dominated by white men. Both Gooden and Marks are examples of how that is changing, and both said they were confident that headquarters leadership would change in time -- something top female executives, of course, have been saying for decades.
This time, though, they were right. On Friday, Lockheed announced that Joanne M. Maguire will replace retiring G. Thomas Marsh as head of the company's space systems business, one of five executive vice presidents of operating units reporting to Stevens. That is a company first. Stevens vows she won't be the last.
Big Companies Widen Their Networks
By Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
African Am
eric
an entrepreneur Christopher Powell, who founded a furniture supply and moving business in the District in 1989, at first found http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/ Marriott International Inc.
impenetrable.
Eager to sign on as a supplier for the Bethesda-based company, he made repeated calls to Marriott's procurement department, which were not returned.
"They were not easy to get into," Powell said.
In the mid-1990s, he happened upon Marriott's diversity department when he was invited to a meeting to discuss better relationships between Marriott and minority-owned businesses. At the time, Powell's Configuration Inc. had several small contracts with the federal government and about 20 employees.
After the meeting, Marriott diversity officials introduced him to the right contacts in procurement and he won a contract worth more than $1 million to supply furniture, dishes and moving services to a Marriott hotel. The help was invaluable, he said.
"A lot of times you can't get to these guys," he said. "Somebody has got to get somebody to hear you."
Programs to encourage supplier diversity date back to the late 1980s, when they were created to give small, minority and women-owned companies more opportunities to win contracts with big companies. They have since become a large part of the corporate diversity goals set by many of the
Washington
area's largest companies.
Interest in working with diverse suppliers arises from the understanding that a company that promotes women and minorities to management positions transforms itself internally, but when it gives business to minority-owned firms, it can set off changes that ripple far beyond its offices.
Armentha "Mike" Cruise, owner of the Aspen Group Inc., can speak to that. In 1996 her
Silver Spring
company was a tiny personnel services firm with a few small contracts and no large clients. She needed to drum up business.
Early one morning, she called Barbara B. Lang, who was mortgage company http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/FNM/ Fannie Mae
's chief supplier-diversity officer. The cold call turned warm. Lang helped Cruise get a contract with a larger staffing firm, and the business was on its way. This year
Aspen
expects about $30 million in annual revenue.
"Barbara was ahead of her time," Cruise said. "Once she opened the door, she gave us our big break. She gave us an opportunity to show what we could do."
Cruise described the relationship with Fannie Mae as a model for efforts to build supplier diversity. Fannie Mae's chief executive had given Lang the authority to come up with inventive ways to do more business with companies owned by women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. She used that power to require the larger company to work with Cruise when a large staffing contract was being rebid.
The first year, the larger company got 75 percent of the contract, which was worth about $4 million; Cruise got 25 percent. The next year, Cruise got 35 percent. By the fifth and final year, Cruise had the entire contract to herself and
Aspen
had doubled in size. With 200 affiliated temporary workers, Cruise was able to sign up other large clients.
What it took, Lang said, was a determined fight within Fannie Mae to break into a closed circle of large mainstream companies.
"You tend to do business with people who have delivered before," said Lang, who is now president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. "It's not a matter of racism as much as it is of people getting work done quickly."
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/POM/ Pepco Holdings Inc.
, one of the region's largest public utilities, is required by state public service commissions to do a portion of its business with minorities.
Last year the company spent $54.6 million -- 14 percent of its total budget -- on goods and services from minority-owned businesses, and has set a 14 percent goal for this year.
When Rhonda J. Lynch, Pepco's manager of minority business development, launched the company's supplier-diversity program 19 years ago, few minority-owned businesses were large enough to provide the services or manufacture the products it needed.
Today, several such companies make transformers, for example. That tracks with recent census data that show significant increases in the number of black- and Hispanic-owned businesses in the
Washington
area.
Pepco's large and complex system of departments and purchasing processes can be formidable. Lynch and an assistant help hundreds of minority business owners understand it and Pepco's requirements for business insurance and corporate structure. "When you've got a business of our size, it's hard for a small business to navigate through," she said.
P.W. "Dee" Carroll, president of Computer Temporaries Inc. in
Largo
, is one beneficiary. Carroll, who started her temporary staffing company in 1989, has worked with Pepco since she met Lynch 13 years ago at a conference of minority suppliers. Later Lynch steered a tiny contract toward CTI, to fill one open security position.
Other small contracts with Pepco followed, and last year CTI had revenue of more than $13 million. The two companies solidified their relationship recently through a state of
Maryland
mentor-protégé program. Though the program does not guarantee CTI future contracts, it offers access to Pepco's resources. Pepco paid Carroll's expenses for a training workshop at the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern
University
, and helped reestablish CTI's board of directors, and design a new logo and Web site.
CTI does 70 percent of its business with the private sector, Carroll said, and she hopes that Pepco's help in polishing its structure and image will open still more doors.
"We are dependent on the commitment of majority corporations to do business with small minority-owned businesses," she said.
Marriott has worked to expand its relationships with minority suppliers as part of a plan to achieve company-wide diversity goals.
Going beyond buying products from a variety of suppliers, it has also contracted with minority businesses in areas such as financial services. For example, Marriott hired a minority investment advisory firm to do some stock repurchasing, and made deposits in minority banks, said George Muñoz, chairman of a Marriott board of directors subcommittee that promotes diversity.
"Normally the financial services side tends not to have as many minorities, Muñoz said. "But it's extremely important for the creation of wealth in the minority community and great talent exists out there, we just have to pursue it. The financial services area is kind of the last bastion of the inner circle."
Last year, Marriott spent $347 million -- or 11.7 percent of its
U.S.
budget -- directly with minority and other suppliers that satisfy its diversity goals. For this year, it raised its goal to 12.2 percent. Marriott also requires its prime vendors to contract with small, diverse suppliers. For example, a large information technology company that wins a bid to service Marriott's computers agrees to subcontract about 12 percent of its business to minority-owned companies.
David M. Sampson, senior vice president for diversity initiatives, said his eventual goal is to make supplier diversity a part of Marriott's contract business review process, which determines whether a prime contractor will get more business with the company. That would help address a complaint of minority business owners who say that prime contractors sometimes promise to work closely with minority businesses and renege with no consequence.
"Every time we sit down with a supplier we state that [supplier diversity] is important to Marriott, and many contracts have language that asserts the importance of diversity," Sampson said.
For Marriott, the equation has become clear.
"Our relationship to the minority community has to be a two-way street," Muñoz said. "If we want business from the minority community -- and we do -- then we must also reciprocate with business with that community. So having owners come from minorities, having us buy talents and products from the minority community is good for us."
Staff writer Sandra Sugawara contributed to this report.
Workplace Diversity
Jill Dutt
Assistant Managing Editor, Financial
Monday, May 1, 2006; 12:00 PM
Jill Dutt
, assistant managing editor for financial news at The Washington Post, was online to discuss workplace diversity. An http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901732.html article
she wrote examining Lockheed Martin's efforts to create a more diverse company is part of the http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/business/special/10/index.html Post 200
, the annual report on the
Washington
area's top companies.
A transcript follows.
____________________
Jill Dutt:
Hi, everyone! Thanks for participating in this chat. I am in *sunny*, actually rainy,
Minneapolis
today attending a convention of business editors and writers. My Internet connection is a little funky, so please bear with me if I drop out for a couple of minutes if my connection goes down. But I'll keep my fingers crossed that won't happen. So, onto your questions
_______________________
USA
:
I am a patent examiner - I've been one for almost a decade. When I started out, everything seemed good - however, as I got promoted up the ranks and entered law school, I noticed that I started being treated differently and unfairly. I notice that the Patent Office does not seem to value a diverse workforce, and mistreats especially it's African-Am
eric
an patent examiners with law degrees. There are almost no African-Am
eric
an employees in top level management positions. I don't believe that all African-Am
eric
ans are unqualified and that this is the reason why they have not emerged into these ranks. What advice could you give to me and other African-Am
eric
an employees at the USPTO in terms of braving the environment there? What advice could you give to US Patent & Trademark Officials themselves in terms of how to handle workforce diversity?
Jill Dutt:
First, let me say that I'm a reporter and editor who just published a story today about how one company, Lockheed Martin, approaches the challenge of managing a diverse workforce. I am NOT a diversity expert, so I can't really give advice about what companies and agencies should be doing, but I can tell you what experts and managers told me.
So, first to the specifics of your question: you see few role models, people of color in authority at your agency. Second, you don't feel your ideas are valued.
Smart companies today recognize that they have to do more than just hire people of different race and ethnicity. They have to make sure their management chain of command inspires and acts on the diverse ideas and approaches that come up from a diverse workforce. So, one thing some companies do is conduct 360-degree evaluations of their managers to see if they are inspiring and acting on good ideas, or are stuck in their old ways. Companies are also requiring managers to come up with more specific succession plans, so if a mid-level manager is leaving his or her post, the more senior manager has assessed all available candidates and has a good pipeline of diverse people to choose from. This is an attempt to get away from just the "old-boy network" and going to the go-to person.
Tying a manager's bonus to these metrics seems to focus the mind.
_______________________
Baltimore
,
MD
:
How does an organization/business get past the lip-service concept of internal diversity? Moving from saying it's important to actually instituting policies that make a difference? Lessons learned?
Thanks.
Jill Dutt:
Take a look at three stories we published in the Business section today. Lockheed, for example, took a system engineer's approach to your question. It broke down all the management steps needed to create a more inclusive environment and now ranks each business unit on how "mature" its diversity programs are. These include not only recruiting strategies, but also management succession plans, leadership training opportunities, etc. I spent four days at Lockheed watching two very skilled executives doing their things and it was instructive to watch how they integrated their business decisions with their personnel management issues.
One specific thing is thinking about diversity as diversity of ideas and experience, not race and gender. The manager's role is to apply that wealth of diverse experience to current business opportunities and find more creative ways to get that business.
_______________________
washingtonpost.com:
Here are the three articles Jill mentioned: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901732.html Taking an Engineer's Approach at Lockheed Martin
; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901724.html Big Companies Widen Their Networks
; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901722.html Multicultural Marketplace Shows Need For Diversity
_______________________
Washington
,
D.C.
:
More of a comment than a question. Lockheed Martin, and many other companies, offer domestic partner health benefits to their employees as part of their diversity efforts to recruit and retain the best talent. The federal government is really behind the ball on this and other issues important to the gay and lesbian community. Obviously, there are political reasons for that, but I imagine that as the government's policies ignore this facet of diversity, Agencies will have a hard time competing for talent with companies like Lockheed Martin.
Jill Dutt:
As skilled employees look for places to work, the policies and benefits being offered by possible employers are becoming increasingly important. People are looking for places where their ideas will be valued and that they will be comfortable.
_______________________
Bethesda
,
Maryland
:
Do you think Lockheed Martin will be able to change the definition of "diversity" outside their company?
Washington Post writers, like most people outside Lockheed Martin, are almost always referring to race and gender representation when talking about a political "diversity appointment" or a business making a "diversity hire".
Lockheed Martin seems to be fighting an uphill battle to redefine the word diversity to mean "an inclusive culture" rather than "diverse representation of races and genders".
Jill Dutt:
Bob Stevens, Lockheed's chief executive, has focused on changing the notion of "diversity" within his company. As more people learn about Lockheed's approach, I'll bet he will be asked to share his perspective with other Fortune 500 companies.
A key insight, I think, is that hiring "diverse" employees is not enough. Corporate cultures need to find a way to allow those diverse ideas filter through and reshape a company's approach to its core business.
_______________________
Burke, VA:
Do you know of any plans (at Lockheed or anywhere else) to ensure that the so-called "corporate culture" does not discriminate against those of us who come in from different cultures and may exhibit behaviors that are culturally-rather than performance-based? One example could be sustaining eye contact during interviews, another showing an inordinate level of respect for figures of authority, or even frequently touching others.
Jill Dutt:
I talked to managers about these cultural differences and what I heard back is that these are things people need to be talking about within their workplaces. When people notice these little things, sustaining eye contact or, the inverse of never making direct eye contact, there should be a way of bringing up these different styles, to understand the cultural influence behind them. Too often, people make assumptions about what these small differences mean, seen only through the prism of their own personal experiences.
_______________________
Washington
,
DC
:
Dear Ms. Dutt:
I have a question about the definition of "workplace diversity." It appears that the term has come to mean diversity only in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
I happen to believe that "workplace diversity" should also refer to employees having myriad opinions and perspectives. For example, on the surface, my agency is very diverse. However, my officemates are ALL Democrats. As a moderate Republican, they'll often dismiss my perspective by saying "I don't know anyone else that thinks like you." Since when is hearing different opinions a bad thing?
My point is that diversity has to go beyond the surface to include our thoughts and minds. Groupthink is never healthy for any organization and I fear that, in our politically correct world, in seeking out diversity, we are missing the forest for the trees.
Jill Dutt:
You make a key point about "groupthink." Over and over again, when I talked to senior executives, they say they fear this. Smart companies recognize that they will lose their edge if everyone approaches topics from the same experience and cultural base. This is a key reason that "diversity" is taking on a meaning much broader than just race and sex.
_______________________
Washington
,
DC
:
Hi Jill. I am an interior architect who worked in
Alexandria
VA
until last August and now works in DC. Is this diversity thing inclusive of gay & lesbian employees? Is the diversity drive also inclusive of us? I worked for a nation-wide firm until last August in
Alexandria
since May of 2003. Until December of 2004, I'd worked in a tightly-knit group who worked on a major government project. Everyone on that project was aware that I was gay and seemed to not care. AI&E firms are notoriously gossipy and my status leaked into the rest of the office. When I went to work on projects that were part of the rest of the office, I found that, although my previous project managers had praised my work, none of the non-government project managers wanted to use me, even though there was a need on their projects. After about 7 months of forcing my way into projects, getting told I wasn't working up to speed and even being accused of making a pass at a client (which was a complete fabrication) I put in my notice. When I asked to project managers whom I'd worked on the governmental projects with advice on what was my downfall, they quietly confided that the male project managers (architects) were uncomfortable with me because I was gay.
Jill Dutt:
It sounds like that
Alexandria
firm lost a valued employee because it was not an inclusive environment. I did sense that top executives at big companies recognize the business imperative in bringing out the best in everyone, but I am not so naive as to think that every company, every manager is going to change overnight. I wish you the best as you look for the right place to succeed.
_______________________
Burke
,
VA
:
I'm glad to hear that! However--is any of these employers being proactive and ensuring that these discussions actually take place--i.e., the effect of cultural differences on the day-to-day workplace. As you so well describe it, my concern is that people do notice the little things (such as sustaining eye contact or never making direct eye contact), and that an organization's leaders need to take it upon themselves to bring up these different styles, to help their employees understand the assumptions we make. Do you know whether anyone is doing anything about this aspect of managing a diverse workforce? Thanks!
Jill Dutt:
Some companies, like Lockheed and Marriott, do extensive employee surveys. Issues like this should be captured in questions about how comfortable employees feel with their work environment. If a manager comes out of a survey appearing to be tone-deaf about such matters, that could be part of their annual evaluation, in which they receive encouragement to have more open conversation about such things. As our moms said, it's the little things that count.
_______________________
Annandale
,
VA
:
Yeah, groupthink, that's a good term. Like when a corporate boss told me he couldn't hire me for a position in 1975 because he "had to hire Black." When I told a Black co-worker that story year's later she said, "he shouldn't have told you." I guess that's an example of groupthink, if you are a white male take it on the chin because you don't matter.
Jill Dutt:
That sounds like short-sighted thinking from someone who doesn't get what diversity really means. White men, I know plenty of them, and they are incredibly diverse.
_______________________
Washington
,
D.C.
:
Do you foresee any changes for the positive in the field of Diversity Management within the Federal Government, despite the poor track record shown by most agencies so far?
Jill Dutt:
I didn't talk with anyone from the federal government in preparation for this story. I know that Steve Barr, our fabulous Post columnist who writes the Federal Diary, delves into this topic a lot. Perhaps you could direct your question to his next chat? I'll be very interested in his answer.
_______________________
washingtonpost.com:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032400643.html Federal Diary Column Archive
_______________________
Washington
,
DC
:
I'd just like to make a plug for including people with disabilities in corporate (all) "diversity" programs. It's amazing how often race = diversity. With a staggering 70% unemployment rate among people with disabilities, companies, needing to address workforce shortages in the coming years, should be looking, now, at this under employed, yet extremely talented group of Am
eric
ans. People with disabilities have so much to offer and with just a little foresight from companies in terms of accommodations, which often benefit their entire workforce, they can be reaching out to a group ready and willing to work. They obviously need to be paid a living wage (as do all workforce groups, including immigrants), but employing people with disabilities could offer a double benefit by removing their dependency on social security and thus potentially helping decrease the coming crisis in that public program (in 2030 only 2.2 workers per beneficiary will be contributing compared to 42 workers per beneficiary in 1945!!)
Jill Dutt:
Good point.
_______________________
DC:
Jill,
Is there any concern in the diversity field that evolutionary psychology will show real difference in average intelligence and/or professional inclinations of people of different genders and ethnic groups/races, and that the cause may be partially genetic?
Jill Dutt:
I didn't hear anything about that. But, you know, what does average intelligence really have to do with business success. You can have a company full of people with outstanding IQs and the company can fail spectacularly. There is book smart, social smart, strategic smart, tactical smart, and lots of other smarts. Top companies are looking for ways to capture all those different intelligences to improve their bottom lines.
_______________________
Woodlawn,
Maryland
:
In your article of Workplace diversity, you state that there is confusion with the term "diversity". Some people believed that workplace diversity means your race, culture, and sex.
Are you making the point that diversity is really the learning styles of individuals in the workplace?
Jill Dutt:
Different learning styles is certainly part of it. Age is also part of it, especially at big companies like Lockheed, where top jobs are dominated by people over 50. It's great to have so much experience and wisdom, people there say, but they need to encourage the younger generation to come forward with meaningful ideas. Especially folks who have graduated in the past few years, the kids who grew up with the Internet, cell phones, instant messaging and, yes, Nintendo. They have lived an "always-on," "total information" environment and could have very good ideas about how to tie together our communication networks and what privacy and personal issues arise.
Diversity in perspective seems to be increasingly important to managers.
_______________________
Arlington
,
Va.
:
So at all these companies that are strategically pursuing diversity, aren't a lot of the middle- to upper-level managers -- the ones who have to carry these policies out -- likely to be people who have political misgivings about any kind of diversity imperative? Doesn't that create a disconnect that undermines the end result?
Jill Dutt:
Middle-management jobs are TOUGH. Managers do need to make their numbers, to fulfill the company's commitment to shareholders. How managers make those numbers is the key: good managers can inspire their team, can bring out creative ideas that make people say, "wow" and win new business. Global competition is constantly bringing new ideas to the fore and companies need to stay ahead of that change with their own new ideas. Tapping a rich pool of diverse employees is an increasingly important way to stay ahead, experts say.
Also, if managers have a portion of their bonus tied to their success at managing an inclusive environment, they will be incentivized to push on this.
_______________________
Annandale
,
VA
:
You might not print this, but it's one story. I graduated a poor white male with a BA college degree in 79 and have found myself the low guy in the workforce hierarchy with affirmative action since then. I worked hard and all I saw is how diversity is more important than promoting a hard-working white male with medium intelligence. I got out of the Federal work force in the 80s because of it and worked for many minority-owned 8A firms (which I couldn't create). I did well in those small firms but didn't realize the capital gains that they created for themselves. There are many like me who see diversity as being "anybody but you." I gave up a long time ago trying to climb a management ladder. Good luck to the next generation--maybe it will be less discriminating.
Jill Dutt:
There are plenty of workplaces out there that are clueless about good management. If someone is hard-working and has good ideas, there ought to be ways for their ideas to be valued, their talents to be recognized. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. I wish you luck as you pursue your career.
_______________________
Bowie
,
MD
:
As much as companies try to diversify their workforce, an old boy network still exists. I used to work for Northrop Grumman, and it was that way. People set in their ways and thoughts. As much as companies try and market themselves as being diversified, most of the company doesn't care because the bottom line is there's still work to be done regardless, and work is what pays the bills, not diversity.
Jill Dutt:
I hear what you're saying. Diversity consultants and corporate executives say the best corporations now get that the bottom line is directly connected to increasing diversity of the workforce. Tom Watson of Strategichire notes that in the
Washington
region, we're going to be a majority minority area within the next 5-10 years. If customers are increasingly diverse, a company would be foolish and its CEO derelict (Tom says) if they don't change their approach and really embrace diversity. In my story today, I noted how Lockheed was able to shape a contract to track "deadbeat dads" for the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, by relying on a female manager who could see the big picture of how to help single-mother households. Linda Gooden, president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology, said she believed a man could have done a good job directing that contract, but the woman did bring a certain level of passion and creativity that made the work Lockheed did special.
_______________________
Orange
,
CT
:
What have you seen are characteristics of companies that are good at promoting an inclusive work environment?
Jill Dutt:
Good question. First, the mandate comes from the top, from the chief executive, and even the corporation's board of directors. Second, there are clear policies and even written instructions for managers to follow. The more managers know, specifically, about what is expected of them, the better they perform. Third, there is a robust feedback loop, in which employees either by name or anonymously, feel comfortable telling managers whether their tactics are working or not. Fourth, add measurement tools. Benchmark where a company is today vs. best practices, and then set goals for improvement that are measured regularly.
_______________________
Jill Dutt:
Looks like time is up. Many thanks for all your good questions.
Women, Minorities Make Up New Generation of Lobbyists
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Monday, May 1, 2006; D01
When Anne Wexler was fresh out of Jimmy Carter's White House, the Old Boys Network on
K Street
was not always kind to her. During one particularly brutal meeting in the 1980s, Wexler and her partner Nancy C. Reynolds were laughed at by a roomful of male lobbyists when the women predicted the White House would embrace the telecommunications position they were all working to advance.
But the men were not laughing at them for long. Soon afterward, President Ronald Reagan did exactly what Wexler and Reynolds said he would, and the newcomers were granted the respect they deserved. As a token of esteem, one of the men in the room gave each of the women a day at an Elizabeth Arden spa as a reward.
Wexler is a
Washington
pioneer. In 1981, she became the first woman to own a lobbying firm and was among the first to make a business out of combining disparate interests into coalitions as a basic advocacy tool. "When I started, there were very few women in lobbying," Wexler recalled. "It was completely male-dominated."
Now women are a significant part of the lobbying scene. In fact, lobbying, which for years was almost entirely a white man's game, has become increasingly diverse as women and people of color have attained more positions of power and influence.
Women-owned firms are proliferating, and a few are, at least for now, all female. Women also hold important positions in both lobbying and law firms. They direct the
Washington
offices of major corporations for such industries as oil and communications.
There are many reasons for the change. The biggest is the rising number of women who have entered government at the highest levels. The number of women in Congress has exploded in the last generation. In addition, presidents have placed special emphasis on hiring women in senior White House and cabinet positions since Richard Nixon's day.
Those freshly minted, high-ranking women hired lots of other women to help them. And when they all started to look for post-government jobs, lobbying became as natural a place for them to turn as it was for the men who came before them.
Lobbying trends have also benefited the cause of women in lobbying. The Old Boys Network, when it was in full swing in the 1960s and earlier, made it easy for the long-established men in power to rely on personal ties to win official favors. But those insular days are long gone.
Today lobbying is less about back scratching than it is about case making. A lot of lobbying involves researching and presenting facts and, at those things, men and women are on equal footing.
"This town has shifted business models from the Old Boys Network to a focus on substance, competence and credibility," said Stephanie E. Silverman, a principal of Venn Strategies LLC, a woman-owned lobbying firm. "In the old model it was difficult if you were a woman. In the new model you can be a man or a woman and it doesn't matter."
Women are particularly prominent in lobbying firms that trade more on their expertise than on their access. Linda E. Tarplin, for example, is considered one of
Washington
's top health-care lobbyists and is part of an all-woman, all-Republican, all-health-care lobbying company called Tarplin, Downs & Young LLC. Silverman's firm specializes in tax matters. Women are also pervasive in lobbying on international trade.
"You do have different industry segments that are more dominated by women than others," Tarplin said. "In the health-care world, there are a lot of strong female lobbyists."
Women have also banded together in their own lobbying firms to foster work environments that better fit their family lives. Nueva Vista Group is owned by three Democratic women with young children (the oldest is 7), and they set their schedules based on their personal needs.
"That's why a lot of women get into this," Nueva Vista partner Andrea LaRue said. "It's carving out a niche that you feel comfortable in and being able to define the space completely on your own."
Women have had such positive experiences as lobbyists that a few are into their second generation on the job. Silverman's mother, Anita K. Epstein, has been a lobbyist since 1978 and, like her daughter, loves the profession. "This is an important job that we do," she said. "It's a shame that some people don't hold it in high regard."
Patricia Griffin of Nueva Vista is also the daughter of a lobbyist -- Patrick J. Griffin, the former top lobbyist for President Bill Clinton on the Hill. Like her dad, the younger
Griffin
is adept at her work. But she also notes that women lobbyists still have a long way to go. "You're often still the only woman in the room, or only one of two or three," she said. "The culture is still very aggressive and white-male-oriented."
Lobbying is more diverse than ever, but the evolution to equality is not yet finished.
We Told You So
The Food Products Association and the Grocery Manufacturers Association are, in fact, going to merge, as this column predicted last November. And in what might be a sign of the times, the president of the merged entity will be a Democrat -- former congressman Calvin M. Dooley of
California
, who has been head of the food products group. The Republican who directs the grocery manufacturers, C. Manly Molpus, will be retiring.
Eventually the name of the combined organization will be, simply, Grocery Manufacturers Association, according to a news release. It will represent nearly 300 companies from the food, beverage and consumer products industries.
But maybe more is happening here that is in clear sight. Is it possible that the goodies are telling us something about the future control of Congress by choosing a Democratic chief executive? Who knows, maybe
K Street
is a leading political indicator. Stranger things have happened.
MARRIOTT'S DIVERSITY PROGRAM
Monday,
May 1, 2006; D10
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT:
The Human Capital Review program, headed by William J. Shaw, Marriott's president and chief operating officer, identifies leadership talent throughout Marriott, with an emphasis on women and minorities.
Results:
Of Marriott's 407 senior executives, 86 are women and 32 are minorities.
Of Marriott's 41 top executive vice presidents, four are minorities and 11 are women.
SUPPLIER DIVERSITY PROGRAM
: Marriott has a Web site where small businesses can register for work. Marriott assesses each registrant's sales, capabilities and products, and tries to respond to the registrant within eight weeks. It then works with the business, explaining what kinds of products and services Marriott is trying to buy, and how to navigate Marriott's procurement system. Marriott keeps a database of minority and women-owned companies for hotel managers to use. In February, Marriott set up a system to track what is being bought from minority and women-owned businesses by each hotel.
Results:
In 2004, $210 million, or 10 percent, of its total procurement budget went to suppliers owned by minorities and women.
In 2005, $347 million, or 11.7 percent, went to 11,000 minority and women-owned suppliers.
Marriott has a goal of 12 percent by 2008.
Prime suppliers also are expected to buy 12 percent of their goods and services from firms owned by minorities and women. Marriott asks them to report their diversity spending semi-annually.
DIVERSITY OWNERSHIP INITIATIVE:
Last year, Marriott set up a program to increase the number of its hotels owned by minority- and women-owned franchisees. It holds seminars on the economics of the hotel business, where wealthy minority investors can hear experts talk about underwriting criteria for securing loans, as well as details on hotel construction, refurbishing and operations.
Results:
When Marriott began the initiative, about 250 of its 2,700 lodging properties were owned or under development by minorities.
At the end of 2005, about 300 of its 2,800 lodging properties were owned, operated or under development by minorities, including a Residence Inn in
Columbia
. that was bought by Integrated Capital Inc., a real estate equity group that specializes in the hospitality business.
At Marriott, a Matter of Numbers
Monday,
May 1, 2006; D10
The huge challenge that lay ahead for corporations hit George Muñoz, a director at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/post200/2006/MAR/ Marriott International Inc.
, when he realized that minority students were in the majority at public high schools in the nation's 25 largest cities.
"This is our workforce of tomorrow," Muñoz told himself.
At the time, in the mid-1980s, Muñoz was president of the Chicago Board of Education, but the understanding eventually informed his leadership of an unusual board of directors subcommittee at Bethesda-based Marriott, which promotes diversity throughout the company's operations.
The two-year-old subcommittee spent its first year building a business case for diversity. Muñoz said that if businessmen are not convinced there is a bottom-line reason for programs, diversity efforts usually fail.
The subcommittee analyzed the impact that diversity programs could have on morale at Marriott, where the workforce is 59 percent minority, as well as the correlation between employee satisfaction, customer service and profits. It also collected information on black, Asian and Hispanic consumers, and on governments and companies that give preference to hotels with strong diversity programs.
"A lot of our key corporate customers are asking us about what we're doing in this space, what are we doing in diversity. What does our workforce look like? They ask about the ownership make up of our hotels," said David M. Sampson, senior vice president of diversity initiatives. "Our ability to mirror the communities where we do business has helped us get additional lodging deals, particularly in top urban markets."
Then, the subcommittee shifted its focus to Marriott programs to promote women and minority executives, minority suppliers and minority hotel ownership.
William J. Shaw, president of Marriott International Inc., established the subcommittee and gave the chairmanship to Muñoz, a former president of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and assistant U.S. Treasury secretary and now head of Arlington-based Muñoz Group Investment Banking Group LLC.
The subcommittee includes two other directors, Debra L. Lee, chairman of BET Holdings Inc., and Harry J. Pearce, chairman of http://financial.washingtonpost.com/custom/wpost/html-qcn.asp?dispnav=business&mwpage=qcn&symb=NT&nav=el Nortel Networks Corp.
and former chairman of Hughes Electronics Corp., as well as Shaw and six senior Marriott executives.
Its efforts included setting up a group that reviews Marriott's 400 highest-ranking managers and picks those who will be groomed for the top jobs. "We look at who our highest potential people are, and as part of that, look at how we are progressing against our goals on the diversity front," Shaw said. "We make sure we have not just identified people, but we have development plans for everybody."
-- Sandra Sugawara
Yasmin Reyazuddin
Information & Referral unit
Department of Health & human services
401 Hungerford Drive (1st floor)
Rockville MD 20850
Phone 240-777-1245 (info line)
240-777-1556 (personal line)
Fax: 240-777-4636
TTY: 240-777-1295
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