How to Improve Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace
Peggy Daley
Today more than ever, companies are looking for solutions. BRG’s Peggy Daley has some (proven) ideas.
Events of 2020 have driven an increased focus on improving diversity and inclusion in the workplace. As corporate leaders rethink and regroup, BRG Managing Director Peggy Daley discussed how she has built a diverse team, how pertinent issues have evolved and how organizations and their leaders can do better.
Q: The team you lead at BRG is quite diverse, especially considering its focus on technology, a traditionally white and male field. What has your approach been when it comes to diversity and inclusion in the workplace?
When I first started working in technology practices, it was hard to find any women in the space—many women were discouraged as children from pursuing careers in the hard sciences, and those who pursued it were often chased out by toxic environments. That is improving, but even today, when I see resumes of women in tech, they jump out at me as outliers. But I’m a big fan of outliers. I’ve been an outlier, and I want my team to be filled with outliers. My team members have substantially different backgrounds and have arrived at BRG—and on my team—in completely different ways. Each unique background brings a different perspective to, and enhances, our work.
A good example is Thanushka Sathyanarayana. Thanushka did her undergraduate degree in India, and she messaged me on LinkedIn as she was finishing her master’s graduate degree in forensic science and technology at Syracuse University. She reached out in part because I was a woman running a technology practice at a prominent consulting firm, and she wanted to discuss my career. I make time to talk to students like her because I respect the effort to break into a difficult field. It was clear to me after talking to her that she was knowledgeable and passionate about the work.
Hiring Thanushka was a no-brainer. My team is not filled with wallflowers, and I try to instill in my employees, especially for the women on my team, that they have a right to their seat at the table and should be fearless in building their networks and calculating in achieving their career goals.
Maintaining a diverse team requires that BRG and I make an investment in the careers of employees so they can realize their professional ambitions. Every year, I spend time going through resumes and performance evaluations to make sure they remove “handmaiden” language and are clear and decisive about their accomplishments. Women tend to be generous in distributing credit, which makes for great leaders, but that trait can hurt them in the early stages of their careers when they need to be seen and receive credit for their contributions. I try to help them thread that needle and make sure they aren’t elbowed out of the way.
Q: Large corporations increasingly are requiring that consultants they work with be made up of diverse voices. Have you seen that in your work for BRG—and has the diversity of your team helped land business?
At a previous employer, I was asked to participate in a pitch for work that was outside of my field of expertise. I was told by management to show up because they heard the client cared about diversity and “We need a skirt in the room.” The others from my company at the pitch were 10 white men in their 50s. The prospective client was represented by a male African American general counsel and female African American deputy general counsel.
We gave them our company’s annual report, and the leadership photos covered the entire back page. It looked like the pictures in the hall of past presidents at Augusta National. Not a single person of color. Not a single woman. The associate general counsel pointed to the pictures and noted with concern the lack of diversity. She told us that her company’s customers were almost exclusively women and she felt a responsibility to hire diverse contractors. She asked, “What are you doing to advance women and people of color?”
The men on the pitch shifted uncomfortably in their seats, and one eventually spoke up and answered “Nothing,” which was close to true, but not entirely. I chimed in with my experience in leadership and the efforts we were making on my team to diversify. I also pointed out that the leadership of the firm was a legacy of the hiring practices of 25 years in the past and that current efforts in recruitment would result in a substantially different looking group of leadership pictures on future annual reports. We were able to move on, and the company did win the work, but I called my CEO and explained what happened. He was horrified and called an immediate leadership meeting, and diversity goals gained more traction in the organization.
I am thrilled when clients pressure their service providers to bring a diverse team to their work. You can try to explain the need to do so to your colleagues until you’re blue in the face, and it can fall on deaf ears. All it takes for management to “get it” is pressure from the client. If they face losing business, then they get on board quickly.
On the way out of that meeting, I walked over to the deputy general counsel and thanked her for asking the question. I later explained to her the positive change that came out of that meeting. On the flip side, when I bring my team into pitches or kickoff meetings, my clients’ eyes light up. Often, my team is substantially composed of women or people of color. That’s not the rarity it would have been 20 years ago, but it still gets notice.
Q: Have you seen, from a project perspective, how having a diversity of voices leads to more creative solutions?
My team analyzes data and conducts large-scale investigations: asset searches, background investigations, internal corporate investigations. We’re investigating a constantly changing and diverse cast of characters, industries and situations. Having a team with diverse life experiences brings a lot to the table, especially when you must try to understand the actions of people up and down the food chain of an organization and across the globe.
Elaine Smith started her career as a math teacher, so she has an academic approach and is invested in breaking down an issue and being able to explain it. David Kalat was a film major who ran a DVD company who moved into technology and forensic investigation mid-career. He’s considered the foremost authority on Godzilla movies and has written books on the topic. He tends to drill deeply into every aspect of a case, and his writing is superb. Rachel Robinson was involved in theater before she shifted to investigative research. I was a trial lawyer for 10 years before moving into consulting. Will Poirier, in addition to being a talented technologist, is an outstanding photographer. He has leveraged that skillset to bring in matters where he acts as a neutral documentarian producing Bates-stamped photographs of disputed items. Jesin Wan is a degreed data analyst who has learned a wide variety of programming languages. She understands big data down to the zeros and ones.
So in addition to the hard science background, which allows my team to analyze and manage impossibly large sets of data, we also bring a lot of creativity and strategy to the table.
Q: What is the biggest reason diversity and inclusion efforts have had mixed results over the past 10 to 20 years?
When I started as a law firm associate at a big national firm, my class was the first that had more women than men. But over the course of 20 years, the majority of those women dropped off the partnership track, either by going to corporate America, where jobs were seen as less demanding, or quitting entirely because they were financially able to do so and highly demanding careers took too much of a toll on family life. Many talented, hard-working women left because they lacked mentors and were unable to get plum assignments that went to their male peers. Dancing backward and in heels is a good metaphor for what women needed to do to keep up with their male counterparts, but eventually your feet are killing you and the unfairness of it is gutting.
If companies had made the effort to keep those women, they would have an army of loyal, longstanding, profitable professionals. Many organizations have recognized this in the last 10 or so years and are making progress in developing policies and programs to assist in times when women need to ramp down hours for family reasons and to help when they are ready to ramp up again. These policies are helping all employees, not just the women. Two-career families are the norm now, and men are carrying more of the load at home. Making accommodations for all employees is imperative to keeping your workforce, and the biggest profit killer in consulting is lousy retention of employees.
And of course, solving the diversity issue means expanding your recruiting efforts. If the head of HR is only hiring from his college fraternity, your diversity goals will fail. And the lack of diversity from the fraternity house can give the false impression that no qualified diverse candidates exist. Companies need to be looking where the diverse candidates are, such as historically black colleges and campus groups for women in technology.
Q: How do things compare to when you started your career? Do you think they’ve gotten better on the diversity front?
We’re talking about glacial improvements. We still have a long way to go—particularly when it comes to racial diversity in corporate America. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Studies show that the more diverse a team is, the more diverse a team gets. That means these efforts are self-fulfilling, but they also need to be purposeful. Sometimes that means promoting qualified people into leadership who are not elbowing their way in and gunning for those jobs. And women and minorities need to understand the value of relationships and networking and making that a priority. It is far more important to have a network when you are outnumbered.
Around the time of the global financial crisis, my then-employer was one of many consultancies working on a massive Wall Street bankruptcy. There was an all-day kickoff meeting in New York with 40 people in the room and on screens. I got up to go to the restroom, and the only other woman in the room—a partner at a major law firm—got up at the same time and followed me in. She said, “It’s just you and me. We need to be best friends.” And so, we were. We had each other’s back while we worked on that matter, and we have been friends ever since. She has been a professional reference and referral source for 10 years.
Q: A term that gets used a lot these days about diversity, equity and inclusion is “performative,” in that diversity advocates want organizations to go beyond performative actions. How can organizations make sure they’re making real strides?
Despite the slow overall progress, many organizations care about doing the right thing. The ones that are putting their money where their mouths are focus on salaries and conduct pay equity reviews. If you want to keep women and diverse employees, pay them right. If you’re underpaying diverse employees, fix it.
But another important step is to empower the people leading corporate diversity initiatives. They should be on firm management committees and be encouraged to present internal metrics and peer analysis. Too often, firm leadership believes it is doing well on diversity based on anecdotal evidence, but metrics show sorry progress. It’s all just a lot of a happy talk unless the people leading diversity initiatives have legitimate power within an organization.