By Shane Nelson
At an event early last year, I had a conversation with a D&I leader at a company in the beginning stages of D&I management. The leader expressed frustration over the lack of engagement by senior leaders with the company’s resource groups. I asked if the company had an executive diversity council. It did not. It was clear to me why that D&I leader wasn’t making progress with the resource groups.
Through 17 years of running the Top 50 competition and 14 years of operating the benchmarking practice, we’ve identified three best practices critical to making consistent and/or rapid progress in hiring, developing and retaining diverse talent — executive diversity councils, mentoring and employee-resource groups (ERGs). Although these three best practices are intertwined, the executive diversity council is the most critical by far.
