Case Study

ADVANCING MULTICULTURAL WOMEN

CLIENT PROFILE

A large, multi-national consumer goods company that sells household and personal care goods is perceived as a leading force on matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. With more than 50B in revenue and over 25,000 employees across the world, the impact of its leadership is profound.

CHALLENGE AND ASK

In 2020, our client recognized a growing gap in advancement for multicultural women in the Americas. She was interested in a breakthrough experience that would build upon company values and increase leadership accountability in supporting, advancing, and developing multicultural women across the division.

APPROACH

Leveraging key components from a 2.5-day immersive workshop TWCHG had built for a mutual partner, we collaborated with the client to customize a 1-day session that brought together executives from each operating unit with high-potential multicultural women in their respective groups to engage in an open, honest, and action-oriented experience that would result in a series of choices the leaders would own and implement.

SOLUTION

The solution was an innovative learning program for high-performing multicultural women and their allies designed to support, develop, and advance multicultural women at work by providing socio-cultural insight, targeted leadership training and tools, and an environment that fosters trust and mutual commitment.

Innovative learning program: First of its kind purposed to support multicultural women that engages diverse leaders to target company-specific systemic barriers and unlock opportunities.
Multicultural women and their allies: Includes multicultural women, white women, men, and emerging leaders.
Support, develop, advance multicultural women: Three-legged stool:
1. Surface and address isolation,
2. Fill in leadership gaps and increase cultural competence, and
3. Deliberately interrupt processes and norms to drive culture change.

This 1-day experience, which was also translated to a virtual experience after the emergence of the pandemic, included a half-day of empathy building through storytelling, existing societal and workplace data, the results of a beta version of our Waymakers Talent Experience Survey (WTES), and structured discussion to enable nuanced understanding of how difficult experiences were continuing to impact careers. The second half was focused on solutions and included small group exploration of barriers to progress at various points along the talent journey, insight-based idea generation, and prioritization. We ended the day with individual leader commitments on behalf of their operating units, but also a revised talent representation goal that was announced to the entire organization the next day in a global forum.

OUTCOMES

The company went on to cascade this learning experience to the next two levels of leaders—touching more than 1500 people leaders over the next three years. Outcomes improved significantly, with both retention and promotions of multicultural women seeing double digit increases, and an overall improvement in sentiment. The program we designed was perceived as one of the most innovative and effective leadership development initiatives in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, with credit given to the cross-difference engagement (both backgrounds and levels), the quality of insight, the emotional resonance, and the outcome orientation.

The Waymakers Change Group has been a trusted partner as the organization continues to embed new norms and reinforce its leadership commitments.