Leading With Purpose
The ELC’s goal—its North Star— is to increase the number of blacks on the top 500 corporate boards and in their CEO offices and to keep the pipeline behind them full of the next generation of leaders. That North Star also speaks to a deeper purpose, calling members to flex our powerful collective voice for our black community as a whole, to make sure we as a people are represented in the right way.” SKIP SPRIGGS, CEO, THE EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
The ELC’s North Star—more black board directors and CEOs—is the bold but attainable goal for ELC members, described by CEO Skip Spriggs without exaggeration as “850 of the most powerful black corporate executives in the world.” ELC members are all either CEOs or within one or two reports of their CEOs, so they are within reach of these CEO and director roles. The ELC put its reputation on the line several years ago when it added numbers to the general statement: increasing blacks in the C-suites of major corporations by 500 and black directors by 200. This overarching goal at the same time illuminates a broader purpose for The ELC, turning its powerful collective voice beyond what it does to demonstrate why it does it. “The ELC is guided by a newly formed purpose statement: to open channels of opportunity for the development of black executives to positively impact business and our communities,” says Libi Rice, ELC vice president and chief communications officer. “We will continue to advance the professional needs of our members so they in turn will be in the best position to help build the next generation of black corporate leaders—but also the increasing number of future black entrepreneurs and our communities overall.” “Business is evolving, corporate America is evolving,” says Tonie Leatherberry, The ELC Board’s chair, a principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP and president of the Deloitte Foundation. “We’re evolving too, focusing more on our mission,” adds Spriggs. “It’s the right time for The ELC to focus on addressing the longerterm challenges of our community.” “Pivoting to the new” is how Chloe Barzey, a member of The ELC Board’s Membership Committee and a managing director at Accenture North America, labels this organizational evolution, introduced publicly last week at The ELC’s Annual Recognition Gala in Washington, D.C., to a sold-out audience of 2,300 members, business and policy leaders and elected officials.
CEO GAMECHANGER CONFERENCE
Signaling The ELC’s already powerful and influential draw, more than 40 CEOs gathered immediately before the Gala for The ELC’s inaugural CEO GameChanger Conference. Behind closed doors, CEOs and their ELC members began hammering out specific
action steps to move corporations along with The ELC on its North Star journey. Robert F. Smith, recipient of The ELC’s 2019 Achievement Award and founder, chair and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, gave the keynote address. The discussion that followed was based on what CEO Spriggs calls “groundbreaking research from Korn Ferry, identifying the skills and competencies of black leaders and the value they bring to corporations.” Michael Hyter, a former ELC Board member and Korn Ferry managing partner, walked participants through the data. “We were able to quantify the drivers and traits of a sizable pool of current black P&L executives at major corporations, each of them already responsible for budgets of tens of billions of dollars,” says Hyter. “It’s not about finding a unicorn. This level of talent already exists.” The research, says Hyter, identifies the behaviors that powered their success: “willingness to go all in, not easily shaken, need to overperform and outperform, beating the odds and—always crucial— leading others. Why wouldn’t you want more of those star players on your team?” asks Hyter. These candidates don’t need or want special treatment. “They stack up very well against their best-in-class white peers,” says Satonya Fair, The ELC’s new vice president and chief philanthropy officer. “Expand your thinking,” Fair suggests, or “you are leaving both money and talent on the table.” “All these CEOs, with their awesome responsibilities, spending significant time with us to come up with game plans is really a testament to what they think of The ELC,” says Leatherberry. “This event was quite literally a game changer, going deep on actionable items, not just another discussion.”
THE ELC’S NORTH STAR: BLACKS AT THE TOP
“Since 2012, the number of [leading 500 companies] with greater than 40% diversity [on their boards] has doubled…. At the current rate of progress, we predict that we would see the number of women and minorities increase to 40% [across all the leading 500 companies] by 2024.” This is the promising declaration of Missing Pieces: The 2018 Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards (January 2019), prepared by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity (ABD), a collaboration between The ELC and three other organizations: Catalyst, the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR) and Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP). Diversified Search is also a strategic ABD partner. Percentages, however, can gloss over a more complicated reality. The ABD Census demonstrates in numerous charts, figures and the appendix that the increase is heavily skewed toward one category: white women. “The total number of minority board members is moving,” says Spriggs, “and I applaud the progress of women. But when you disaggregate the data, there’s one underrepresented group that’s barely moving at all, and that’s blacks—men and women.” With regard to CEOs, no detailed census—no charts, no figures, no appendix—is needed to demonstrate the reality. “We’ve got only four black CEOs in the top 500 companies—less than 1%—and there is no guarantee there will be black successors,” says Spriggs. “There were more just a couple of years ago. Unless we are really proactive, we may find more backsliding. That’s unacceptable.”
CORPORATE BOARD INITIATIVE
It is not a lack of candidates that keeps the needle from moving. For almost a decade The ELC has heavily invested in filling the supply side of the equation. “We’ve
created an amazing pipeline of potential black board talent, and we are approaching 300 members with nonprofit and for-profit directorships,” says Billy Dexter, an ELC member, principal at the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles and the co-chair and inspirational leader of the Corporate Board Initiative (CBI). “The availability of black board talent is stronger than it has ever been.” CBI, sponsored by EY and Heidrick & Struggles, readies select ELC members for service on corporate boards. In spring 2019, the fourth CBI cohort, 27 carefully chosen ELC members, began a restructured and refocused readiness experience. First, they completed the certification process offered by the National Association of Corporate Directors. They continued with assigned individual mentors and coaching sessions with a member of Heidrick & Struggles’ CEO and Board Practice. With the supply side of the equation expanding, CBI now places an equal programmatic emphasis on the demand side. “We want to be the go-to source for black board talent,” says Dexter, “so we’re going directly to chairs of board nominating committees and CEOs. Our CEO GameChanger Conference, for example, is an important forum.” Fast-forward to November, when The ELC will partner with the African American Directors Forum (AADF) to bring highly qualified, board-proven and board-ready African-American executives together with the CEOs, board chairs and nominating and
“The total number of minority board members is moving...But when you disaggregate the data, there’s one underrepresented group that’s barely moving at all, and that’s blacks.”
governance chairs of corporations in Atlanta for the express objective of increasing the representation of African Americans on the boards of publicly traded companies. The ELC/ AADF-Atlanta aims to replicate the success of the inaugural AADF held in 2017 in Pittsburgh, which directly influenced an impressive eight board appointments. The next step, Dexter says, will be The ELC’s “inside game” strategy: “We are purposefully connecting our members already on boards with our board cohort member talent, so they feel comfortable referring them when openings occur.” This pool is ready for any slate of candidates.
NEXT-GENERATION PIPELINE
The ELC knows that achieving those few top positions is not reaching the North Star. It merely signals the vigilance necessary for black corporate leaders not only to continue developing but also to grow in numbers. The ELC’s programs, created by The ELC’s Institute for Leadership Development and Research, institutionalize that vigilance. “Our pipeline development programs prepare younger leaders for more senior roles and even greater opportunities to contribute to our broader community,” says Spriggs. The benefits that accrue to those who attend accrue equally to their corporations; when a company’s talent pool is many layers deep, retention rates improve. In collaboration with McKinsey & Company, the Institute holds an annual C-Suite Academy, gathering black senior executives who aspire to C-suite roles, reporting directly to the CEO, or who simply want to improve their influence and effectiveness in their interactions with C-suite executives. The most recent Academy was
Our pipeline development programs prepare younger leaders for more senior roles and even greater opportunities to contribute to our broader community.”
held in Philadelphia in June. Participants learn from the best coaches, leadership facilitators and current and former ELC C-suite executives the strategic and tactical challenges of the C-suite and receive deeper professional and personal guidance and insights through individual feedback, assignments and coaching. More than 300 executive and highpotential women gathered at the 16th Women’s Leadership Forum (WLF) in Atlanta in July to hear ELC, political and media luminaries encourage them to be “Bold Yet Balanced.” In addition to strategies for corporate advancement—especially leveraging the “power of being the only one” in the room—speakers discussed trailblazing as directors and in the C-Suite, embracing the promise and challenge of technology now and in the future, negotiating compensation packages and winning support from male colleagues. Inspiration from the explosion
of black women millennial leaders and the sage advice of seasoned leaders was a powerful backdrop. Money raised was donated—to enthusiastic audience cheers and applause—to Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College and The ELC’s Ann Fudge Scholarship. Two separate Leadership Development Weeks (LDW) of sold-out courses meet annually to build the black executive pipeline, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. They took place this year in Miami and Las Vegas. The corporate sponsors are Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bank of America, Citi (East) and Prudential (West). Each course focuses on different levels of experience and different aspects of leadership. A five-day course for black vice presidents, directors, senior managers and entrepreneurs, Strengthening the Pipeline: Critical Factors for Successful Leaders, covers advanced concepts in leadership such as enhancing self-awareness, navigating
Programs. Linde’s scholarship was established to provide opportunities for minority college students pursuing careers in engineering, and Nationwide’s scholarship was established to support students pursuing degrees in business, insurance and risk management or a related field. Scholarship recipients are invited to attend the Honors Symposium,a four-day professional development bootcamp focused on introducing the recipients to a wide range of business-related careers and industries to encourage their continued interest in business careers.
LEADING WITH PURPOSE: PIVOTING TO THE NEW
While never turning from its North Star, The ELC also embraces broader leadership responsibilities that accompany its unique and prestigious membership. “We’ve always been a corporate-centric company,”
The common characteristic of all these leaders, regardless of their professional backgrounds, is they want to have an impact.”
explains Spriggs, “but our purpose is to leverage the depth and breadth of our members’ expertise. Our leadership initiatives and programs speak to the depth. Now we are speaking to the potential breadth.” “The ELC lives in and comes from the corporate world, so we’re in the right position to intersect and integrate all the different levers—the insights and capabilities of executives, educators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, government officials, thought leaders—for sustainable, enduring common good,” says Orlando Ashford, a former chair of The ELC Board and president of Holland America Line. “The ELC is evolving with the business community,” says Leatherberry, “so we can continue serving it.” Including entrepreneurs and thought leaders as ELC members is an immediate response. “We’re going directly to them to learn their needs,” she continues, “and we’re creating custom programming for them.” Ready resources are ELC legacy members, the 25% of members who have left corporate careers, many of them with entrepreneurial experience as well. At the same time, The ELC is continuing to leverage its collective voice for its community to inspire others toward more business success, financial growth and stability and community wealth. “We know where we started, what we did to arrive where we are,” says Crystal E. Ashby, The ELC Board’s vice chair. “We still go home at night, we go to church, our kids play on sports teams, we see our neighbors at the grocery store. We may not live where we grew up, but we still have family there. We want to reach beyond the places where we play large to others in our community.”