Anne Chow knows one or two things about issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Before the Trump administration called for the “end of DEI” in November and many top companies cancelled their efforts, Chau gave her reputation as a strong and highly successful leader in AT&T business, one of the largest organizations in the country where she was the first female CEO.
Today, Chau is the lead director for Franklin Coby, teaching at Kellogg's School of Management on the boards of 3M and CSX, and appeared in her first solo book in September. It guides greater and transformative power of inclusion. She will give a keynote speech at our next women's leadership online discussion, breaking the barriers in the conference room on March 13th (come to us!). There, we share the vision of diversity between C-Suite and Board, discussing how women can enter the conference room in many numbers and why it is important.
Cho spoke with us before the event, claiming that those who abandon their inclusive efforts are likely to damage their business in the long run. “The ability to lead inclusion and inclusive leads is the core leadership capabilities of the modern world,” she says. “If we can't lead comprehensively, we'll end up losing to someone who can.”
You have a lot of experience being the first woman in the corporate world to reach a certain height. You talk about it, write about it, and teach it about it. From your perspective, what does an inclusive team and diverse board do to the company? Why is it important? Is that important?
This is how I think about it. A diverse team, including the board, and a diverse leadership team, has proven to be correct. There is a lot of data out there that shows that they are more innovative. They will deliver better results. They take better risks. They are more supportive. And diverse teams, especially diverse leadership teams, tend to build a more inclusive culture.
Inclusion is action. Inclusive culture, inclusive environment, inclusive leadership is an environment in which people feel connected, they belong and they feel more enthusiastic. They are not only physically safe, but also psychologically safe environments. An inclusive culture is where people can manifest themselves as who they are and therefore they can do their best.
An inclusive culture embraces new and different ideas that appear in different people, but also accepts a variety of data and sources. There is data showing that an inclusive culture generates more new product revenue. They can acquire new markets more effectively. And my very strong point of view, and this is actually why I wrote the book Make the lead biggerits inclusion and ability to lead comprehensive leads is the core leadership capabilities of the modern world. If you can't lead comprehensively, you'll end up losing to someone who can.
How do you define inclusive leadership?
I use that term synonymously with Leading Bigger. To increase your lead is to expand your perspective to increase your performance and impact. How do you broaden your perspective? Surround yourself with different people, different perspectives, different data sources, and different sources of information.
In a world leadership today, more dynamic than ever, more dynamic than ever, more polarized and divided than ever, we demand comprehensive leadership to ensure that we have not missed anything for our history, for our history, for our blind spots. The saying of what we have led here is that we don't take us there, whether it is related to technology, the environment, social change or the economy. That is, all of the above.
It is a whole new world in every movement, and every step forward. We are faced with something we have never faced before. Therefore, inclusion is a strategic obligation. I have always thought that culture is not separate from strategy. Culture is an integral part of strategy.
Look at all the data out there for the biggest reasons why M&as As fails. It is always culture-related, whether it is a failure to integrate leadership, a lack of cultural integration, or a lack of clarity in roles. These are all aspects and markers of a neutral, good or bad culture.
Isn't cultural health a “soft” concern?
Culture is authentic and needs to be incorporated into every strategy you have. Consciously build a culture that enables you to perform against your strategy, and build a set of performance goals that are the priorities of your stakeholders, including your shareholders or investors, customers, your people, your suppliers and your community. Diverse teams and inclusive culture are just great business markers.
It's an interesting moment to see this with all the pushbacks to Day from the Trump administration and many big companies, right? How did anti-DEI emotions affect your perspective?
I was not a fan of the acronym for DEI. I consider them to be separate. The diversity of my views is what the world is becoming and is becoming more diverse. All generations in the United States will be more diverse. The fastest growing racial groups are multicultural people. Women of Color will become the majority of all women in the country in the next 20-30 years, and women of Color represent one in five today.
Change the idea of ”minority.”
The whole minority idea is pointless. Even identical twins that share the same DNA are not the same. Because they don't have the same experience or skill set. They don't share the same minds, they don't share the same minds, they don't share the same set of hands.
Diversity needs to be considered differently. Consider the pandemic that has become a component of diversity, whether you wear a mask or not. Whether you got the vaccine or not has become a factor of diversity. Whether you work in a place or from home was a factor of diversity.
Gender, physical disability, political diversity, veteran status, neurodiversity, generational diversity – there are endless dimensions that describe each of us as individuals in terms of how diverse we are from one another.
Are some differences more important in the corporate environment?
In the leadership context, you need to decide which aspects of diversity are important to you. You may have been involved in a variety of executive searches, but the key element of diversity for you in a particular job is bringing someone from outside.
why? Because the entire leadership team may be made up of people who grew up in the industry, and because they grew up in business, there is a lack of external tech-related perspectives. The industry may be on the rise. It cuts off several generations of talent, whether they have real-world experience with AI or not.
What about the rest of Day?
Fairness is about fairness. Fairness to me is the outcome. And every leadership team must decide what fair outcomes are important for them in order for all leadership teams, including all boards, to operate at the highest level and achieve the most shareholder returns.
We are looking for new salespeople, so we are looking for new engineers, so are we in the place we need to not only be the best talent of today, but also the best talent of tomorrow? The same goes for promotional opportunities. We want to make sure that the best talent has fair and fair access to promotional opportunities within our team. That means you have to look at the process behind how to promote and advance people.
Use AT&T as an example. Because that's where I have a large portion of my corporate career. One of AT&T's business obligations was to close the digital disparity, ensuring that Americans have fair and fair access to broadband services. That equity flavor was important to us in our strategy and our mission. Every leadership team must think differently about it. Is it related to their workforce? Is it related to their customer base? Is it related to their investor base?
So, what do you say to those who are pulling back their dei efforts?
Denyers of Day say it gives people an unfair advantage and give them the job of simply not qualifying because of their race or gender. Dei done correctly is not about it. I'm not saying that there's no organization that's what they did, that's what they did, that's a very enforceable organization. That's where you get into trouble.
And you don't get any profit.
right. You don't make any profit at all. When you're calling someone a day rental or accusing them of being a day rental, the irony is that you're not actually scorning them. You are scorning the person who made staffing decisions. You can't launch yourself into a specific job. Unless you are an entrepreneur or you run a family business, someone has to choose you for the job. But as we think about them, someone decides to put that person in the job for most of their work. And I ask the audience there for this, how many of you would like to hire someone who is not the best person to do the job?
Looking at my career, I saw 26 different bosses. The majority of people who promoted me at those inflection points in my career were white. I'm a woman, so do you think they chose me, or am I Asian or both? no. I think they chose me because I was the perfect person to do the job. If they think I'm achieving some quotas for them, it's not only will I fail, they'll fail too. Great leaders don't want that.
So I tend not to get caught up in acronyms. In fact, I don't like acronyms. I didn't like it. The inclusion itself is too small and stuck at the end of the acronym for DEI.
However, this is not a debate. Some companies are simply giving up their efforts.
These companies have made the decision that they feel they need to do to make their business successful. They are making these decisions because they mitigate the risk they feel they have in front of them. And they communicate in such a way that they feel appropriate to serve any priorities they have at this point, whatever priorities they have.
Do you have any advice to offer?
My advice to them is that you think and manage not only the intended consequences of your statement and your actions, but also the unintended consequences for other stakeholders.
I've been in business for so long, so I know that not everything is a priority. If everything is a priority, then there is no prioritization. The most demanding job of leadership is making choices. Sometimes, yeah, you have to sacrifice in the short term and long term. Sometimes we have to sacrifice the short term in the long term. In some cases, you may need to prioritize a set of stakeholders over another stakeholder. And your job in the leadership role is to tally it, whether it's a C-suite or the executive office.
I'm not inside those companies, so it's unfair to me to judge them by the merits of what they said and what they did. I know some of these CEOs who have “pull back” or have made statements with some of these companies, but in my view on how important Anne's inclusion and culture and inclusive leadership is, how do you think they're doing a great job returning to their purpose and values? I don't.
I think some of them are definitely performance. This is very easy to do as some of them weren't serious in the first place. Some of them, I'm purely making up this, but I'm suspicious, but I don't think about the unintended consequences of their actions. Will they lose market share? Will they lose access to a portion of the talented population that is part of the worker pool because of what they have done to their brand? Only time can be seen.
