Council Post: Leadership Mobility: Why Succession Without Development Equity Will Never Diversify Leadership

Founder & CEO of ExecOnline, an enterprise platform partnered with top business schools to deliver online leadership development programs. 

It’s 2020, and only 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black, and less than 8% are women. Hispanic and Asian representation has also been low in executive positions (registrations required). In the wake of Black Lives Matter, companies worldwide are forced to take a hard look at these numbers and diversity within their own ranks. 

Reexamination is good, but what happens next is key because if your employees aren’t diverse, you might not have systems in place to recruit and retain diverse talent, no matter who your leaders are. If your employees are representative of the world at large, you should be preparing them to move up and take charge.

An Informal Exclusion Pattern

We all have biases. Some we know and work against, while others are unconscious and can sabotage honest efforts at change. If people are unequipped to explore how unconscious biases impact their actions, they might become complacent and never move forward.

Think about the people you go to for advice: It’s likely someone who makes you feel comfortable, which could mean your inner circle isn’t as diverse as it could be, and you may be making decisions that are not reflective of the people affected. 

Even when you seek input from others “on the front line,” your biases could steer you toward your comfort zone. This means you might end up hearing what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. This also sets up those unofficial advisors for future advancement, not because someone from an underrepresented group didn’t prove themselves capable but because they were never asked.

This lack of exposure to an organization’s leaders reduces mentoring and sponsorship chances for women and minorities. Even if “the numbers” look good for diversity, optics don’t always represent what’s happening behind the scenes.

As a law associate, I was part of a fairly diverse group due to the diligence legal firms take in campus recruitment efforts. But it soon became evident that unless your projects came directly from partners instead of the central work system, you were not part of the informal network that led to senior status in the firm.

In that situation — and similar ones throughout corporate America — opportunity narrows like a funnel as you advance. If you haven’t been empowered, even informally, to keep rising through the ranks, you end up squeezed out and left behind.

Lacking A Leadership Pipeline

Business models are changing. The capabilities tomorrow’s leaders need are changing. That means your talent pool needs to be even larger to ensure you have the right person with the right skills at the right time at the right level of your organization. 

It’s not that most organizations have a leadership track they’re preventing underrepresented populations from joining. It’s that, in my experience, many organizations don’t even have adequate formal processes for developing in-house talent into future leaders. So, they look to talent acquisition. 

But overreliance on talent acquisition for diversity objectives doesn’t increase total representation; I believe it just shifts a limited number of people from one organization to another. It also reinforces the disheartening realization in your employees that there’s no leadership career path available unless they leave.

Even organizations with established programs for grooming new leaders have barriers to diversity. According to a Coqual study, 71% of leadership sponsors are the same gender or race as their primary proteges, creating a Catch-22 for fostering change. 

This lack of “development equity” — or offering equal access to career-enhancing opportunities — is what organizations need to recognize, address and overcome if they want to make sustainable progress.

As an entrepreneur, one of my biases is that I feel individuals have a responsibility for proactively seizing control of their careers and opportunities. But I also recognize that different personality types aren’t going to be comfortable aggressively raising their hands to be noticed. As we talk about inclusion, we can’t overlook the importance of providing multiple avenues to accommodate different personality types and avoid creating another selection bias for leadership. 

Struggling To Overcome Inertia

Before this spring, many people might have accepted that big change is hard and returned to business as usual. But Covid-19 has shown us what “hard” really is and how we’re perfectly capable of pivoting our entire way of living for things we prioritize.

If we want diverse leaders, we have to prioritize diversity. Diversity isn’t sustainable without a culture of inclusion. Inclusion isn’t possible without a commitment from all parts of an organization to make real changes to the way it thinks and operates. 

Many organizations seem to be getting it. I’ve observed substantive leadership development around issues of inclusion and diversity is increasing exponentially. But there’s still the issue of who rises into an organization’s leadership levels. If the same peer group operates without other voices clarifying needed changes, nothing truly changes.

To create substantive, lasting improvements in diversity at the leadership level, organizations should focus on three key components of development equity: 

1. Transparently benchmarking current diversity by leadership level to hold themselves accountable for progress against those benchmarks over time.

2. Evaluating development selection processes to minimize subjectivity and bias.

3. Structuring development experiences with real advancement opportunities by integrating high-visibility stretch assignments and projects. A survey of 823 executives published in Harvard Business Review found that 71% of respondents credited stretch assignments as key to unlocking their career potential.

I believe the time to act is now — before the scarcity of diverse, future-ready leadership talent becomes a crisis. Be honest about past failures in making diverse employees and candidates feel welcomed, supported and valued, and then make changes.

Not every employee wants to become a manager or executive, but opportunities should be equitable for those who do. Investing in diversifying your talent pool and formalizing internal pathways to leadership will be a competitive advantage, giving you immediate access to the very leaders you’ll need to take your organization into tomorrow and beyond.

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