Rethinking the Path to Diverse, High-Performance Leadership

Rewarding and promoting based on effort or categories is tantamount to having a strategic plan based on hope. No CEO of a publicly traded company that I know of has ever been rewarded based on effort or hope. Furthermore, shareholders don’t reward a company with an increasing stock price based on effort or hope. Nor do competitors have mercy on any company that takes its eye off results. Yet any endeavor, formal or informal, to hire, reward, or promote people based on anything other than merit completely ignores this reality.

A recent article in Fortune magazine on Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser suggests that DEI and other programs that don’t have performance and results as the key metric for success, are dead. Ms. Fraser rightfully points out that she and her team are not graded on effort. In fact, any board of a publicly traded company that rewards its CEO and the senior team on effort will soon find themselves replaced by shareholders.

Does this mean that companies must abandon their commitment to diversity? No, it doesn’t. It means that they need to rethink how diversity is achieved and sustained in light of the need to build high performance organizations in today’s competitive environment. The secret is not to manage “equity” – an egalitarian effort to have equal outcomes. Rather, the secret lies in managing equal access to development by a senior executive for all who desire to be considered for future opportunities. Not everyone will make the grade – that’s on them, and mostly due to the inability or unwillingness to listen to feedback – but everyone should have an equal opportunity for mentoring. When this mentoring is done in a consistent, programmatic way, so that all participants get the same curriculum and process to build productive and effective leadership behaviors, companies will find that they build a diverse leadership “bench”: a bench of diverse and high performing leaders who can be deployed to any number of opportunities and who can apply their leadership behaviors to take the organization’s performance to the next level.

If you’re interested in establishing this kind of learning and development program, reach out to mike@mikefelixphd.com. This is more than just funding a well-curated library of books and material for self-development. Research shows that we are highly inaccurate at seeing ourselves as other people see us. The gift of mentoring closes this gap, as the mentor provides feedback and assignments. A good program to start with is outlined in The Diversity Dilemma – Equipping Your Organization to Turn Potential into Performance.