Introduction
Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, CHRO graciously offered her valuable time for an interview. She is Chief Human Resource Officer for Symantec, an American software company. Diversity Officer Magazine was very fortunate to have interviewed her shortly after her presentation at the Tech Inclusion Conference in San Francisco on October 16, 2018.
The media has covered a lot about how technology companies are falling short of recruiting a workforce that mirrors the society at large. What we hear too little about is what these organizations are doing to meet the challenges. Many companies in the sector have taken on the challenge with the same trailblazing, disruptive, and out of the box approaches that define high technology culture. Symantec is a good example.
I sat down with Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, CHRO at Symantec to learn more about the promising work the organization is doing in the diversity and inclusion (D&I) space.
Grab a cup of java (or tea) and a pastry to join our conversation.
Dr. Billy:
How Do You Currently Measure the Success of D&I Initiatives Within Your Organization?
Amy:
We currently have a couple of different ways by which we measure. One is the outcomes we’re driving towards which would be representation. Do we have the right pipeline of underrepresented minorities or gender available for us to be able to put enough into management and senior-level positions? How strong is my pipeline and where do I have choke points? I also look at our hiring to see if we are having the throughput of diverse candidates in our pipeline.
[We are also interested in] how many of them do we actually convert. Actually, hire. So, I look at not only what I have available in my current organization but I’m looking to outreach.
The last thing we do is we have a belonging index assessment at Symantec which allows us to evaluate on 6-week bases a pulse survey across the company. That assesses between 1500 to 2000 employees about how they feel about being included, having a voice and being part of a greater community.
Dr. Billy:
What are You Most Proud of about Your Company’s D&I Initiative?
Amy:
It’s now at the board level. It’s not just a group of people who are doing a grassroots campaign, which very often is the case and the people who most need to help are the ones that have to do the work. It’s at the executive and board levels. They care enough that they want to be part of the solution.
We include them in a lot of speaker series and a lot of intern relationships. They also ask me and our CEO Greg to speak with them on a quarterly basis about the progress we’re making. They are interested in how we are doing according to the metrics and how we are bringing senior leaders through this. How we are opening up the pipeline? What steps we taking to remove bias out of the system.
So, I’m so proud of the fact that it’s not just an HR initiative but it’s a business initiative that’s got the support at the highest levels at the company.
Dr. Billy:
How did it come about that the board got more actively involved?
Amy:
Well, I think first of all we’ve got some terrific CEOs on our board, like Dan Schulman who comes from PayPal. These are folks who understand the importance of diversity inclusion. Secondly, I would say we are a 35 plus-year-old company that has grown a lot through acquisition and most recently a high-velocity of acquisition. What we are finding is as you either divest, which we’ve done a lot of, or you acquire your metrics begin to change dramatically with no effects of anything you’ve done. It’s just what you acquire. Something that we became really aware of is that our numbers were dwindling and why was that. That’s because of all the acquisition and the way we were integrating wasn’t in any systemic way.
We had lots of different cultures that were not adding up to what is the Symantec culture we care about. And why do people want to be at Symantec and how is that related how behaviors are supported every day. So, it started off with questions such as “What’s happening with our numbers?”, “What’s happening with our culture?”, and a marriage between the two because for me inclusion, if done well, equals diversity in terms of metrics and representation. And so, it was a perfect storm that came together, and suddenly everyone said let’s do right because now is the time.
Dr. Billy:
Oh, here’s one of my favorites. You mentioned the servant leadership style during the panel discussion as a catalyst for creating inclusion in the organization. Can you say more about that?
Amy:
Everyone around the globe these days is looking at their performance management systems. Do I do ratings, or do I not do ratings? How do I encourage my employees to get development and how do I manage their performance and how their focus on their jobs? It stems out of recognizing that a yearly review doesn’t make sense because people’s goals change on a regular basis and they need constant coaching. So, you started to marry the need for a better system by which to look at development and performance along with how we build leaders who can do that work. I think the best way to get that sort of mission orientation around the leadership is to think about my team in terms of I’m here to serve them. And if I’m serving them, I’m giving them constant feedback and coaching.
I’m directing and redirecting. it’s not just because the company tells me to do this. It’s because I know that’s the right thing as a leader who is really there to create a safe and productive environment for the employees. So those two just went really well together and that’s what we’re driving as we think about our next performance strategy and how those go together with the kind of leadership and management capabilities to do that well.
Dr. Billy:
So, I can imagine that you offer some type of training in that area for your managers and supervisors so that they are in alignment about what that means.
Amy:
We don’t do the traditional classroom training. Practically no one does that. Who has the time? We do a lot of things. We offer a lot of short webinars that allow you go deeper in case you want to do facilitated cohort discussions within your organization. We’re all about just in time. What do you need right now? And then we encourage our managers to go deeper so you’re bringing your team into the conversation around your Learning Journey. We have a lot of speaker series that help people bring it to life in lab sessions to bring their needs into a discussion like a practicum.
Then we have a lot of employee resource groups that we are leveraging. So, I’m the executive sponsor of the early in career ERG so I leverage them. Teach them how to have conversations with their managers around their performance. We do that with other ERGs to teach them how to bring that conversation to life about their performance, around development, and how do I grow.
So, we are attacking it through webinars, through speaker series, through how we do employee resource groups and how we think about inclusion in general. An interesting thing we do in our company is to conduct a survey every six weeks, and the company consensus [from those data] is that the employees really feel like their managers are like a huge asset for them. And typically, people leave managers, not companies, so that helps us with our attrition rate. But I think there is even more we can do to arm our managers with how to think about that constant coaching and get out of the task orientation all the time and get more into the managing and coaching.
Dr. Billy:
What is your business case for D&I? Describe the nutshell how you use it and how it is used to encourage your workforce to get on board.
Amy:
We use it around Innovation. Because we are a global company. As you may have heard on stage, there are three-year cycles of innovation that happen pretty rapidly, and we are also global. So, if you’re not constantly bringing in different perspectives whether it’s innovation off-campus or innovation from someone who’s actually invented it or curated it, you’re going to die in the marketplace. And because we are so multi-dimensional in terms of the layers we have in the in the company around the different organizations, you have got to bring that diversity to bear. We have a consumer business, and we need to reflect our consumer business, and we have an enterprise business.
So, the business case is about you’re going to get much better solutions for your customers if you reflect them, and also you are bringing that innovation into the conversation. It’s part of our business fabric and people don’t argue that point, which is like the first part.
Dr. Billy:
I guess if you add to that the mission-critical part about making certain that you’re on top of the security of everyone’s information and how employees need to be on top of all the things that the Symantec does to make that happen it could really be effective.
It reminds me of the military in some ways. Much of my work with the military is about how to keep them mission ready. What you’re doing in the private sector is a really nice complement to that work.
Amy:
One thing I might say is that I always find that my weaknesses show up when I am by myself, and my strengths show up when I’m with other folks. And so, if you’ve got it a group of people who all think and act, and have the same values and behaviors together, sometimes you’re going to get a very vanilla outcome. And so, you need to have different perspectives in the room.
Dr. Billy:
One of your team members mentioned during the panel presentation that one of the things that is important is that in creating a belonging organization to make certain that when people sort of step out of the boundaries is that they’re called on it. I think the statement was “We call them out”. I want to find out at least a little bit more about that because be a sensitive and difficult challenge if you are not proficient at it. But, it’s necessary.
Amy:
It is necessary. I think we are on a learning curve on that point. The more sophisticated leaders are better at it because they know how to give that feedback and make that person want to be better versus alienating them.
So, it’s an art and a science. But, with this notion of this new performance strategy that around constant conversations that count, I feel like the more of a relationship I build with you, the more we’re in it together. And the more apt you are to give me feedback, the more apt I am to give you feedback when I know that it is coming from a place of good intent. What we’re trying to do is build that muscles so that when those situations come up, in the rare times they do, you have that trusted relationship where people know you’re trying to help that person advance or their topic advance, and you’re not just putting them down because they did something outside the zone.
I’m more of a carrot versus a stick person unless someone’s way out. It’s intentional. It’s egregious. Because we are on a learning journey. I’ve had some fierce conversations about this with some senior leaders. They haven’t always gone to point. I’ve always said to them, “You know, if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be invested in this discussion. I could just pass it off and say, “You don’t get it”. But, that doesn’t do me, that person, or the company any good.
So, this is hard stuff. If anything, I can tell people in this space, whether you are a manager or in diversity, is this isn’t easy. Some days you’re going to have fantastic days and other days you’re going to be hitting your head against the wall, but that comes with C-Level change and human behavior.
Dr. Billy:
I really appreciate your time.
Amy:
Thank you so much. My pleasure, Billy. Let me know if you have any other questions.
About the Author
Billy Vaughn, PhD CDP CDE is an award winning cultural diversity practitioner with expertise in inclusion and belonging strategy, instructional design, training facilitation, organizational assessment, and organizational change. He has numerous articles, several book publications, and instrument designs.