San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Frost’s diversity officer on a mission: ‘Making sure that everyone belongs’
For the first time in its 153year history, Frost Bank has hired an executive whose sole responsibility is to diversify the bank’s workforce and make its offices more welcoming to employees of all races.
Karen White, 61, a native of New Orleans, is the bank’s new chief diversity and inclusion officer, reporting directly to Chairman and CEO Phillip Green.
Green told employees about plans to recruit a diversity and inclusion officer in a Jan. 15 letter commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
In another letter to employees — this one dated June 15, 2020, soon after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the CEO opened by saying: “Just like you, I have been deeply troubled by the tragic events of the last several days and I feel compelled to reach out to you about it.”
“Our culture at Frost leaves no room for racism, injustice or hatred,” he said. “At Frost I assure you we are committed to the success of all who follow our core values of integrity, caring and excellence regardless of race or ethnicity.”
White, a veteran of credit union and nonprofit management and an eight-year Frost Bank employee, began her new role June 1.
How much work does she have
ahead of her?
When it comes to the bank’s leadership, a lot.
Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc., Frost Bank’s publicly traded holding company, has more than 4,500 employees in Texas and total assets of $42.5 billion. It does business in Texas’ increasingly diverse major metros — San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Corpus Christi — as well as in the Permian Basin in West Texas.
A bank spokesman declined to provide a demographic breakdown of the company’s workforce but said that a majority of Frost Bank employees are people
of color and more than half are women.
By comparison, at insurance and financial services company USAA, San Antonio’s secondlargest private-sector employer, minority employees make up 47 percent of the workforce and women 53 percent. The company has had an officer overseeing diversity and inclusion efforts since 2009.
So Frost Bank may be late in adding a diversity chief — most major American corporations have had diversity officers for years. But the bank’s employees do reflect Texas’ fast-breaking shift toward a younger, more
racially diverse population.
Unlike its directors and top executives.
Only three people of color sit on Frost Bank’s 12-member board of directors — San Antonio’s Carlos Alvarez, chairman and CEO of beer distributor Gambrinus Inc.; Anthony R. Chase, owner of ChaseSource, a Houston-based recruitment and consulting firm; and Cynthia Comparin, founder of Animato Technologies Corp. of Dallas. There are only three women on the board.
The bank’s 10 senior officers are only marginally more diverse, with three people of color and three women.
That makes Frost Bank no different from most other financial institutions.
A 2020 report by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation highlighted the lack of diversity among top executives in the financial services industry. They found that white men fill 33 percent of the entry level positions but sit in 70 percent of the C-suite offices.
Promoting and hiring more Blacks, Hispanics and Asians into the executive ranks would be good for banks’ business, according to the study.
“Having a diverse executive team, board, or both correlates with higher profitability,” the researchers said. “For every 10 percent more racially or ethnically diverse a company’s senior team is, earnings before interest and taxes is nearly 1 percent higher.”
One big reason: “The demographic makeup of America is changing; an increasing percentage of the talent pool are people of color. The most common age of white people in the United States is 58, whereas it is 27 for people of color.”
This is where Karen White, who is Black, comes in.
Beginnings
She’s based in Houston but was visiting headquarters at Frost Bank Tower when I interviewed her Monday by Zoom. The downtown skyline was her backdrop.
We spent the better part of an hour talking about her formative years in New Orleans, a city famously shot through with racial tensions and inequities.
White was part of the second
freshman class at St. Mary’s Dominican High School — a private, all-girls Catholic school — to include Blacks.
“In my freshman year, when I went to meet with my counselor, she told me I shouldn’t worry about ever going to college — I was just going to be a C student, and so I didn’t need to worry about it,” she recalled. “And I hadn’t even started. We hadn’t even had our first grading periods.”
She thrived in the classroom. A tap and jazz dancer, she joined the school’s dance troupe, excelled on stage and had to contend with the jealousies of her white counterparts.
White got her start in banking by happenstance.
At 26, with a degree in music education from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., she worked at her mother’s New Orleans day care center for a few years.
“I decided it was time to stop working for my mom — that wasn’t going very well,” White said. “So a girlfriend said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come work for the credit union that I belong to?’ And that’s what I did.”
Her first job in financial services — at the Louisiana Restaurant Association’s credit union — was reminiscent of that first meeting with her high school guidance counselor.
White will pick up the thread from here. I’ve edited the following transcript for brevity and clarity.
Q: What kind of workplace did you land in?
A: At this credit union, I was the only Black female. And I was the only female with a degree. So the executive director thought it would be nice to put me in a backroom and just have me look at loan documents. I didn’t do anything of significance. I didn’t meet with the members. But what I was doing was understanding the loan documentation process and what that meant — how to fill it out, what documentation was needed for folks to make
loans.
Q:
So she was trying to keep you out of the public eye?
A: It was not explicit, but the executive director — that was her unconscious bias.
I was just getting busy, looking at documents, understanding what was happening and how it happened. And at the same time, I was in the process of enrolling at Loyola University to start my
MBA program.
Q:
Did you ever broach it with her or anybody on the credit union’s board?
A: The way I chose to approach it was to learn as much as I could about what was going on — to get a better understanding.
(The executive director left to run a different credit union, and White succeeded her. Then the woman recruited White to work at her new organization.)
I accepted the job because it was a way to join a larger credit union, a way for me to grow and get more experience.
That’s where the conflict started between us. And that’s where we started to address the issues.
I don’t know if you know anything about New Orleans, but it is really an unconscious-bias kind of city. So this particular lady was from a part of town that was just known for folks not being diverse. And she only had a high school education. And here I am with my four-year degree. The two other ladies at the credit union, the president and CEO and her sister, were both white women with four-year degrees, but they came from another state. So we started to bond, the three of us.
And (the executive director) was starting to feel left out. So she caused issues. But I knew how to take care of myself. I did my job. I staffed my committees. We started a new credit card program, and I opened more credit card accounts than she did. I just outperformed her in every aspect. She wasn’t happy with that, but that was her issue.
Q: What problems did she create for you?
A: She just made it very uncomfortable for me. I had the skills to work with the finance committee, to give them what they needed. They were very impressed with the work that I was doing. So one of the things she did was she stopped me from presenting at the finance committee.
Q:
A: I met the Louisiana representative for the National Credit Union Administration (the industry’s regulator), and we worked so well together that each time he had to come to New Orleans to clean up a credit union, he asked me if I’d like to join him. So the last credit union I worked for before moving to Houston — that’s how I got the job. I helped clean up things that they had done. We eventually had to merge with a local bank. But (the NACU representative) trusted me. He needed someone in that credit union who was going to be honest about what was going on and not protecting the board of directors.
(In the early 1990s, White moved to Houston, where she held posts at
What came next for you?
the United Way of Greater Houston and NationsBank, the forerunner of Bank of America. Frost Bank hired her eight years ago.)
Q:
How did you come to be Frost Bank’s first diversity and inclusion officer?
A: I’d built a reputation as a person who’s inclusive and respectful of everyone. I treat everyone with dignity. And so when this position came up, I felt like this was something that I wanted to do, that I could help fulfill the vision that (Phillip Green) has. So I applied and went through an extensive interview process.
Q: Describe your discussions with Green before you accepted the job.
A: The first thing I wanted to know was where this position lies — if it was an executive position reporting directly to the CEO or if was it an HR or staff development position. I wanted to know because if that wasn’t where this position would be — reporting to Phillip Green — it wasn’t going be successful, in my humble opinion. Once that was answered, I felt comfortable applying for the position. I want to contribute to the success of an organization, and the only way I can do that is with accountability and authority.
Q:
What is your mandate? What specifically are you in that position to do?
A: To help make sure that we make people’s lives better every single day. It’s right in line with our core values, our mission to make people’s lives better. And it’s about making sure that everyone belongs.
Q:
Demographically, do you think Frost Bank reflects the markets in which it operates?
A: Yes, I think it does. We do have some work to do, and that’s part of what Phil and I will be working on. But for the most part we do.
Q: Will you be directly involved in the hiring process?
A: Yes, I will be involved there, and I’ll be involved with all of our lines of businesses, helping to create that new lens to understand where we are — what executives are looking for, what the staff ’s looking for. So diversity, equity and inclusion are going to follow all the lines of our businesses. It’s not like a piece over here that we just pulled into the picture.
I’ll look at recruitment. Where are we recruiting? Who are we recruiting? I will talk with Phil and our other executive leaders about what kind of interview process can we bring. You’re looking at maybe having a blind interview process where you’re looking at just qualifications — you don’t know if it’s a male, you don’t know if it’s a female. You don’t know if they’re Black, white or a Martian. And what do they have in addition to their qualifications? Will they fit within our culture? Can they help us make people’s lives better?
I will be working very closely with HR.
Q:
A year from now, would you expect to have hiring targets in place?
A: I don’t know if we’ll call it targets, but the goal will be to have a more diverse and inclusive organization. We’ll be working toward that.
Q:
Looking at the makeup of Frost Bank’s board of directors and its senior executives — it definitely lacks diversity.
A: We’re going to work on that. That’s one of the things that’s very, very important to us.
Q:
How much authority do you have to force that kind of change? You’re talking about senior executives and the board of directors.
A: Well, the fact that I’m reporting to Phil Green says a lot to me — that I will have the authority that I need, and I will have his backing. And that’s why I’m extremely proud to have been offered this position. When it comes from executive leadership, that says to everyone that this is important.