Governor’s council looks to bigger picture
Quietly on the first Tuesday in August, a couple of dozen executives from the biggest companies in Connecticut met at the governor’s mansion in Hartford.
They gathered not to solve the riddle of how to fix the state; not exactly, anyway. Rather, they met to help Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Gov. Ned Lamont and the rest of the Capitol apparatus advance the goals of the Governor’s Council on Women and Girls.
Recall, this is one of the groups Lamont formed early in the year as he took office. The idea is for the council — headed by Bysiewicz and Melissa McCaw, Lamont’s policy and budget chief — to come up with actual, real ways to advance gender equity.
As of this week, 21 executives, mostly highlevel but not the CEO’s, comprise the “Corporate Leadership Circle” to help the council on women and girls do its thing.
This could easily devolve into just another panel that meets until it stops meeting, and does stuff until it stops doing stuff, and everyone gets to claim a piece of civic glory. I don’t have to list them here.
Or, a group like this can not only work on what it’s charged with working on — in this case, gender equity through leadership, training and the like — but also the really big picture.
Lest we forget, when it comes to big companies in Connecticut, the big picture is, simply, are they staying here and adding jobs? Men, women, Martians, whatever. Are they okay with the way the state is digging itself out of a hole?
We’re talking about United Technologies, Aetna/ CVS, LEGO, Cigna, Electric Boat, Synchrony Financial, Stanley Black & Decker, Boehringer Ingelheim. You know, the biggies. Not on the list are Travelers and Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky, both of which have their corporate headquarters elsewhere, but the 21 signed on so fare are indeed impressive.
Right, Indeed isn’t on the list either, let’s hope it joins after it passes 1,000 employees in Stamford, which might have already happened.
Bysiewicz, to her credit, sees that big picture even as she touts the leadership circle for its gender workforce role.
“The governor and I strongly believe that if corporate leaders collaborate with government leaders that you will have a positive result, that we don’t have enough of that,” Bysiewicz said. “The governor and I have been doing this since we got inaugurated.”
We certainly don’t need another episode like General Electric in 2016, in which the CEO appeared to have no rela connection to the state. The black eye from that was far worse than the economic loss of a few hundred jobs. So, getting these folks into the governor’s mansion matters.
Yeah, I know, it’s the Executive Residence. I guess with Lamont, we do need to specify.
The 21 folks on this group include 17 women and four men, and of course the makeup will change often, which is fine. They include several heads of human resources and some with the title “chief diversity and inclusion officer.” United Rentals, with its corporate HQ in Stamford, sent Jessica Graziano, its executive vice president and chief financial officer, and UnitedHealthcare offered up its Northeast region CEO.
So they have the ears of pretty much the highest levels at the company and that can help Lamont and Bysiewicz, who also created a corporate council for the express purpose of Job 1, the big economic picture.
As Bysiewicz sees it, the gender question is core.
“Women’s issues are economic issues,” she said. “Research has shown that the companies that have the most diverse senior leadership and the most diverse corporate board membership deliver the best shareholder returns.”
Is that because they’re generally openminded or because of the presence of more women and nonwhite top people? Maybe the difference doesn’t matter.
The early gathering showed a lot of interest, naturally, in workforce issues since that’s what all these companies have in common. They need to attract people to Connecticut. That of course is the chief problem dragging the state down, with high costs a close second.
Some of the biggest companies, including UTC and Synchrony, are also involved in a national effort called Paradigm for Parity, in which they vow to dramatically boost the number of women on their board of directors.
All of this raises three concerns. First, I’ve always worried that efforts aimed at boosting and celebrating diversity may have the opposite effect in the long run, by ghettoizing the issue. That’s something to watch out for.
Second, any Republican might say Connecticut’s real problem is cost and the structural deficit; take care of that and plenty of women — and men, and Martians — will want to be here, and companies will be able to hire more of them.
“We’re in the middle of doing that, we passed a budget on time that didn’t raise the sales or income tax and we are actively working with the business community to get their ideas,” Bysiewicz said.
Finally, Lamont and Bysiewicz are both Democrats, I couldn’t help noticing, and two of the three leading Democrats running for president are trashing big corporations at every turn. Can that hurt the efforts? Too soon to worry about it, Bysiewicz said.
Concerns aside, you’d rather have this group meeting than not meeting. Now, if they can post their gatherings and do it all in public, we’d have an opengovernment triumph. But let’s solve one thing at a time.