How to Build Diverse Leadership Teams by Enlisting Stakeholders

When decision makers include individuals from varied economic backgrounds, generations, genders, races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, physical abilities, and religions, everyone is better off — employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and the people in the communities where businesses operate. I have worked with global companies for over two decades to advance opportunities for people who are underrepresented in leadership. The diverse teams we built became stronger, more trusted, more resilient, and more innovative and were therefore better prepared to create more value for their stakeholders.

We know that to change anything, you need influence, support, and action from people who are invested in the outcome. That’s why building partnerships with stakeholders both inside and outside the organization is a critical component of meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

From 2006 to 2009, I served as the global chief diversity and inclusion officer at Rockwell Collins (which later became part of Raytheon Technologies). When I started, the company was planning to hire 7,000 engineers in five years. It was easy to see that we could not meet our hiring goals without recruiting from a more diverse talent pool outside of the Midwest. Executives did not need convincing. However, our industry — aerospace — was male dominated, and the population in our location — Cedar Rapids, Iowa — was overwhelmingly White. Recruiting and retaining women and non-White employees had always been challenging, and I knew we would need help from inside and outside the company. I almost didn’t take the job myself.

Here are some stakeholders I engaged with besides the executive team: community relations, recruiting, university relations, leadership development, marketing, communications, government relations, Rockwell Collins’s Chief Engineering Council, and, of course, the middle managers who had an urgent need for talent. Together, we created partnerships with universities and professional associations where our leaders and managers could meet faculty members, students, and professionals with a wider range of backgrounds and experiences. They could communicate our growing need for talent; our efforts to build a team that encompassed women, racial and ethnic minorities, and people with physical disabilities and other differences; and our work to create an inclusive professional environment.

These partnerships helped to achieve another purpose as well: to develop future leaders. Rockwell Collins’s senior executives cared deeply about developing leaders internally. Masterful communication skills and an ability to build powerful networks were critical to advancing in the leadership ranks. I worked with our leadership development teams to get speaking engagements for these rising leaders and managers and to place them in advisory roles with organizations that served a broad array of populations. These opportunities helped them gain visibility and hone their communication skills. We also paved the way for recruitment by raising the profile of the company and its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion while interacting with the diverse set of people whose talent we needed.

My role enabled me to negotiate a spot for the company’s only female executive on an advisory board at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a public university with one of the strongest undergraduate engineering programs in the United States and a racially and ethnically diverse student body. As the senior vice president for engineering and technology, she had essential knowledge about the industry and the company culture to share with the university. She could also influence the curriculum in ways that benefited the industry. This executive became a champion for the university, facilitating intimate meetings among faculty members, students, and key company stakeholders, including our CEO, on a range of topics.

Because of this strategic partnership with Georgia Tech, we hired more engineers from there than we had previously. We also created internships for students and fellowships for faculty members. When they returned to campus, they became ambassadors for the company. Meanwhile, the insights we gained from these relationships — and from academia overall — enabled us to create a more inclusive workplace. And the exposure that the senior vice president received helped her extend her network and grow as a leader.

Supporting New Hires to Boost Retention

I also provided tangible support for middle managers in their day-to-day work. All our efforts to recruit new hires would have come to nothing if we did not deliver the people they needed or if those people did not stay. Some issues managers faced were systemic; alleviating their frustrations would make their jobs as team leaders easier. One step was to make it easier to bring new hires on board, beginning with the offer process. We knew that most of our recruits would relocate from another part of the country and that their partners, if they had them, would be part of the decision. So we helped the partners find jobs (within or outside the company), if possible, or volunteer opportunities. We also worked with our HR partners, facilities, and IT to make it easier for managers to get space and equipment for new hires once they agreed to work for us — a process that had long frustrated both parties.

I mentioned that the company had difficulty retaining female and non-White engineers. We needed to work harder at that, too. So we gave managers more ways to learn how employees felt about their jobs and the work environment. For example, my team partnered with HR to survey new hires after 30, 60, and 100 days to learn about their interviewing and onboarding experiences, how they were becoming integrated with their teams, how they were connecting with managers, and how they viewed the community. We fed that information back to managers with advice about how to address concerns that employees identified.

The changes we set in motion cascaded through the Cedar Rapids and nearby Iowa City communities. Many of our young, ethnically diverse new employees provided valuable advice about how to make these cities more welcoming and inclusive (which we understood was important to keeping them). They influenced one local bank to change its advertising and messaging, which had targeted White people over 50, to feature people who were ethnically diverse and younger. The bank understood that these residents had disposable income, and it wanted them as customers — another example of a business objective that benefited from attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Consider all the stakeholders in this story and their relationships. First, our executive team, which was staking the company on its ability to attract engineering talent. Next, the leaders who were in charge of the corporate image, as well as creating and maintaining good relationships with our many external communities — where we operated, where we recruited talent, where we exchanged ideas and shaped the future of our technology-driven industry. Also, middle managers who could not meet their business and performance objectives without recruiting and retaining more talent, and who gained opportunities to develop their skills. The diverse employees we hired, meanwhile, had a stake in making Cedar Rapids and Iowa City places that would welcome them. In every organization, including yours, people have the same interests.

As this story also shows, every organization has many external stakeholders. For Rockwell Collins, these included universities across the country, which were motivated to expand employment opportunities for their graduates and to collaborate on innovation, as well as local businesses, which benefited from the influx of young people with money to spend. It helped that Rockwell Collins’s leadership, including the board of directors, and the larger business community were open-minded and welcoming.

Combine a progressive attitude with a business need for talent, and it isn’t so hard to change people’s thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion or get them to act. Community leaders, including the mayor, along with local retailers, home builders, health care providers, real estate professionals, and arts and culture leaders, all joined our efforts.

Identify Your Stakeholders

A good list can help you understand which stakeholders are most important to your efforts and the level of attention and assistance each of them needs. It can also help you see connections among your stakeholders that can amplify their influence.

I think about four categories of stakeholders:

1. People with high power and influence. These are top executives, such as board members, the CEO, and other C-level leaders who set the agenda for the entire organization. Big investors may also fall into this category. It’s important to manage relationships with these stakeholders closely. By that I mean having regular, clear, and frank communication about diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, plans, and progress that is tailored to their roles and their individual needs. Each stakeholder in this category will have different requirements for how, when, and how often to communicate. If they are your stakeholders, they will expect you to be consistent and thorough and to deliver what you promise.

2. People with high power but low direct influence. These may include department heads and other middle managers who execute the decisions made by senior leaders. They make money for the business, cut its costs, achieve its mission, and control the resources for doing so. They want to be satisfied. Most importantly to any diversity, equity, and inclusion effort, middle managers decide the work that people do and manage the people who do it. Even when they support a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace, they need to see that the steps toward this goal consider their business needs, their people challenges, and how they will be held accountable for results.

3. People with lots of influence but little direct power. Stakeholders in this category can prompt action, but they do not have the power to make change directly. Many external stakeholders, including investors and important customers or suppliers, are likely to fall into this category. They want to be informed about the organization’s efforts so that they feel connected when you call on them for help.

4. People with little power or influence. These stakeholders have an interest in the outcome of your efforts, even though they play a minor role in whether they succeed or fail. Employees often fall into this category, whether they are from a dominant group or an underrepresented one. However, many employees, especially from younger generations, are not afraid to act on their interests. Knowing what they think about the work environment and their career prospects is important because their morale matters. They will want you to check in with them regularly.

A list of stakeholders can be especially useful in helping you identify and track the people or groups whose influence you need but who are not yet convinced that working toward leadership and management diversity is in their interest. They may not feel confident that they know how to make a difference, they may be afraid to have uncomfortable conversations, or they may not believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are priorities. They will need the most support while they learn what their stake is.

As you develop your list, practice getting input by asking others to point out who is missing from it. If your coalition does not include people from groups that are underrepresented in leadership, your progress will be limited. For example, if you are a leader on a team whose members are all of one race or one gender, or both, your ability to understand what needs to be done to enable people who are a different race or gender is limited by your experience. You won’t find the answers without acknowledging their stake in the organization and in their careers and building partnerships with them.

The same goes for the critics. People who push back against your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts can show you the weak points that you need to address to be successful. It is possible that your approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the logic of your arguments, or both, are shaky. Or you may not be communicating effectively.

You may have to dig to understand why certain stakeholders think and behave the way they do — to see their humanity — before you know whether and how you can influence them. If you can get them to join you, their positions as influencers will be powerful. The more stakeholders that diversity, equity, and inclusion advocates have in many positions of influence within and outside their organizations, the more levers they can pull and the more action they will generate.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”

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