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The Power of Many: Diversity's Competitive Advantage
March 06, 2008
Diversity and inclusion are giving IBM, UPS and Boehringer Ingelheim a competitive advantage
By Anne Marie D. Lee
You just can't discuss the topic of diversity in the workplace without addressing the sea change taking place in American politics. It hasn't anything to do with radical policies, but a radical shift in how leadership is perceived in this country. Leadership, and the candidacy to be the top leader, is no longer limited to one gender and race. But politics is not alone in this shift in thinking. In the business world as well, recruiters and managers are looking beyond old prototypes in search of top qualified candidates of all genders, ethnicities and diverse cultural backgrounds. Leading corporations like IBM, UPS and pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim have long embraced diversity through their company policies and initiatives, and are continuously broadening their efforts to attract new talent and connect with the global marketplace. In doing so, they are among a growing list of big companies garnering attention as some of the top workplaces for women and minorities. Call it a race for talent, call it a competitive business strategy, call it history in the making, but the times they are a changin' and one-sized leadership no longer fits all.
When Kathryn "Kathy" Homeyer started working at UPS in its accounting department in 1980, people in the workforce were not talking about diversity, much less having job titles that included the word. But by 1992, UPS formally launched the UPS Supplier Diversity Program, in 2002 Homeyer was appointed to the UPS Corporate Supplier Diversity team and in 2006 she was named as one of Women's Enterprise magazine's "100 Women Impacting Supplier Diversity."
"Since 2001, I have been involved in supplier diversity. It all started with the opportunity to work with the certification committee for the Women's Business Council–Southwest. After working with those talented, remarkable women from the Southwest Business Council, I knew this would be the new career choice I wished to pursue at UPS. In 2002, I joined the Corporate Supplier Diversity team in Atlanta, Georgia," she says.
Homeyer, director for the UPS Supplier Diversity Program, manages internal and external programs designed to increase representation of small, minority- and women-owned businesses in UPS's supplier network. In addition to these responsibilities, Homeyer is also involved with corporate procurement commodities purchasing opportunities.
Homeyer works with UPS managers nationwide to implement initiatives that identify potential suppliers and provide them with critical information and access to UPS's purchasing process. She also is responsible for the establishment of new and the development of existing UPS relationships with small businesses, women-owned businesses and minority business organizations.
Ask Eddie Smith, owner of E. Smith Box Inc., based in Atlanta, how being a supplier for UPS has helped grow his packing materials business. In 1996, he happened to meet someone from UPS who had had a bad experience with an African-American-owned company and was reluctant to move the business, says Smith. "He didn't understand diversity, but I kept working on the relationship. I said, 'Yes, I am a black man; I know what the heck I am doing.' We've grown from $97,000 at the beginning to doing over $16 million last year."
"If you look at the future, ethnic groups are where the new groups are. Hispanics have a lot of buying power, as well as African Americans. And we support companies who support us. We also work with General Mills. So all of us only buy cereal from General Mills. We do the same with UPS. It's a great company and the upper echelon knows how important diversity is." (For more on UPS, see Q&A on page 19.)
Diversity in the workplace may have come a long way since the first office potluck, but it still has a way to go. Even today, large and small inequities throughout an organization may favor the promotion of one particular group over another, overlooking talent and ability. For the individual, working for a company that excludes him or her from feeling like an equal part of a team, with an equal chance of moving up in the ranks, is a painful and demoralizing experience. For the company, exclusionary treatment of certain employees based on race, gender or any other personal traits unrelated to performance leads to high turnover, loss of talent and a disconnection from an increasingly diverse marketplace, not to mention potential legal trouble.
"I think everyone is catching on to the idea that diversity and inclusion have to be a core, central philosophy and practice for every great company," says Carol Evans, CEO and founder of Working Mother Media, based in New York. Evans started her career back in the 1970s when discrimination, she says, was rampant. It wasn't until decades later that top-level positions were open to women, enabling them to become CEOs. Her personal experience as a woman struggling to ascend the corporate ranks led her to become very involved in the Multicultural Women's Initiative. Launched in 2002, the Multicultural Women's Initiative is a spin-off of Working Mother magazine's list of 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers, created to address a set of issues pertaining to women of color in the workplace. The goal of the initiative is to celebrate companies with cutting-edge policies that support women of color.
IBM, Diverse from Day One
 At IBM, managing diversity is nothing new. Now with 350,000 employees in 170 countries, IBM has been global its entire history. Asked how the topic of diversity has changed over the years, Anita Rice, manager, multicultural and women's initiatives at IBM and an IBMer for 29 years, says, "Where we originally defined diversity more as 'equal opportunity' and 'affirmative action,' it's now very broad. It's work/life balance and it's the bridge to our marketplace. And so each and every one of our employees is embraced as being a diverse individual, everybody at IBM is considered to be a diverse individual and therefore everything we do, we do to make sure that we're inclusive and that we're addressing any needs or requirements of any single employee."
Rice, based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is not kidding when she says that inclusiveness and respect for diversity are entrenched in everything they do at IBM. Listed in the top 10 of Working Mother's 100 Best Companies 2007, IBM has been on the list for 22 years, starting with the first in 1986. According to Rice, what makes IBM attractive for women, particularly mothers, is that there is a lot of flexibility and opportunity for working mothers to find balance in their home life and career. Says Rice, "There is also the opportunity to collaborate with other working mothers. Anything a working mother wants to do in terms of her career and advancing it is not limited by virtue of her being a mother. We take very seriously any opportunity to make sure that there are no barriers to women's advancement."
When it comes to conducting employee polls and surveys for programs, Evans describes IBM as brilliant. Asked to expand upon the use of internal polls at IBM, Rice refers to a work/life survey that was conducted just recently and provided the company with valuable confirmation that the right initiatives are in place. New information gleaned from the survey revealed a dramatic increase in the belief among IBM employees that flexibility is encouraged. "We can see that people are feeling a lot better about that balance—I call it juggling, actually. But we've definitely made strides in that direction," says Rice. Surveys are administered every three years across 75 countries, 10 languages, and with several thousands of people participating. Surveys are anonymous and taken by choice.
Along with providing flexibility, IBM is very committed to developing each and every one of its employees. Rice describes how all IBM employees have the opportunity to have what is referred to as an individual, or development, plan. For the creation of this assessment plan, employees set short-term, mid-term and long-term goals. Then the management team, in conjunction with the organization, works with them to help them reach individual goals. Another key initiative at IBM is mentoring—something that experts point out as key to a successful commitment to diversity and inclusion. IBM employees interested in mentoring, or being mentored, can go to a Web site that has a list of mentors based on their interests, their background, who they are and what they've done. The site serves as a kind of networking platform for employees to seek out others at the company who share some commonality and can provide some guidance. One example, says Rice, is new mothers, who can sometimes be found on the site looking for a mentor who's a working mom. "Our mentoring is very broad-based and very career-development-related," says Rice, who herself is a mentor for 13 diverse employees, searching for help with their career development to find out what opportunities there are for moving into management or moving into software development when they're now in HR.
In addition to mentoring, maintaining diversity at all levels and departments throughout the organization is assisted through recruitment. Says Rice, "We do work very hard when we're recruiting to make sure that our workforce is diverse." That practice is spurred by the belief that people who work together gain knowledge as a team, and teams that are diverse are more creative.
Asked what the biggest challenge for IBM is regarding a successful commitment to diversity and inclusion, Rice does not hesitate to say, "Communication. Making sure that every employee knows that they have a lot of opportunity. So just continuous communication, to me, is the biggest challenge, and that's a positive thing. We have Webcasts, our managers hold meetings and discussions with employees; we're just constantly wanting to communicate the fact that our diversity imperatives are a part of any relationship we have with our employees, clients and customers."
 Boehringer Ingelheim, A Collaborative Culture
"The more diverse the workforce, the more creative and innovative our solutions for our patients become, the better outcomes we yield in terms of teams," says Nancy Di Dia, director, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., in Ridgefield, Conn.
At Boehringer Ingelheim, ranked as one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, diversity and inclusion is looked at from a multidimensional perspective. In addition to building diverse teams of people, the company strives to create an inclusive environment for all. BI is the recipient of several top employer rewards, most recently, the 2008 Best Places to Work Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. "The award from the Human Rights Campaign really just reinforced and emphasized our commitment to equality," says Di Dia. The prestigious national award measures how large U.S. companies treat gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) employees. She adds that like most companies, Boehringer Ingelheim is challenged overall by the need for diverse talent and has "tremendous practices in place in terms of relationships that we're building with various affinity organizations such as the National Black MBA and the National Organization [for the Professional Advancement] of Black Chemists and [Chemical] Engineers." By deepening its relationships with affinity groups, BI is striving to have more access to diverse talent and to get people to want to learn more about the company.
Yael Sivi, based in Brooklyn, is a consultant and coach with the FutureWork Institute Inc., www.futureworkinstitute.com, a consulting team with over 15 years' experience working with clients on inclusion and increasing talent contribution. For the past seven years, the FutureWork Institute has worked with Boehringer Ingelheim to propel it diversity and inclusion initiative by providing best practices information and acting as a consultative partner that Di Dia and others can turn to and bounce off new ideas for advancing their initiative.
Over the years, Boehringer Ingelheim has also given best practices ideas to The FutureWork Institute they could share with other clients. Sivi says that the one thing that companies like Boehringer Ingelheim—employers that really take the diversity topic and initiative seriously—have in common is a lot of championship and support from the top.
Echoing this statement, Di Dia says, "From CEO down to our senior leadership team, they reinforce us, they encourage." The CEO, Marty Carroll, is also the chair of the BI DIAC, BI's National Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council. Several senior leaders sit on his management committee and are sponsors of employee resource groups—affinity groups representing the Latino, black, Asian, GLBT, people with disabilities and women populations. Says Sivi, "I think because leadership was so supportive, [the company] had a series of really great training sessions that took place last year."
One of those training sessions included a group activity created by FutureWork Institute called interactive theater. In this activity, designed to increase a company's self-awareness of its own diversity issues, interviews are conducted with people in the company ahead of time and then, "the very issues that come up in the workplace at that company" are acted out on stage, says Sivi.
"Interactive theater is a very exciting way to get a point across to a large group of people using actor/trainers," says Di Dia. She collaborated with FutureWork Institute to design the script, based on typical challenges that BI leaders and sales reps were facing in the field. Says Di Dia, "We brought the sales folks and their managing team together, and the actors played out the scene, and we paused and had an opportunity for the audience to interact with the actors while they were still in character."
Interactive theater is a safe way to get at the items that are harder to discuss, a valuable vehicle, considering the discomfort level that conversations on diversity and inclusion can bring. Says Di Dia, "It's a way to put it very safely out in the forefront and allow people, in a safe environment, to challenge the status quo and to walk away with skills on delivering feedback and skills on coaching. So, it's a great skill-building experience and very interactive and entertaining, but more importantly, it gets at the crux of some of the issues and encourages people to coach and immediately address situations head-on."
Beyond diversity and inclusion, the culture at Boehringer Ingelheim is described by Di Dia as collaborative, a culture where innovation is achieved by working in diverse teams. Says Di Dia, "In everything that we do, we're always working together, challenging each other, taking the initiative, cross-collaborating different functions, those types of things. In doing that, we really find that we get innovation through this collaboration."
Editor's note: Continue on to read "Q&A with UPS's Kathryn Homeyer" for an up-close-and-personal interview on diversity at UPS.
 Sidebar: Reasons to Make Diversity and Inclusion a Part of Your Company
By Carol Evans, CEO and founder of Working Mother Media
• The talent pool needs to be tapped as broadly as possible, to get the best people.
•The marketplace demands a kind of comprehensive understanding through diverse thinking inside our companies. We can't understand the marketplace unless we have our diverse talent inside our companies.
• The global aspect. Companies are going global more and more, even small companies, because of the Internet. And so to understand how to be culturally knowledgeable outside our company we need to be culturally knowledgeable inside our company.
• To have a really productive workforce, utilizing the best talent, a company has to stand for diversity and inclusion in order to have happy employees.
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