Sustainability in the Spotlight: The Balancing Act of ESG

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Diligent Institute/ Spencer Stuart, June 2024





This year, sustainability in the corporate world has been defined by flux. The debate in the U.S. around ESG (environmental, social and governance) remains fierce. The global issues that ESG aims to address — climate change, human rights and equity, among others — are enormous and only becoming more complex. This is because, in its broadest definition, ESG reflects a set of objectives common to all companies — from managing risk to playing a role in addressing societal issues to identifying opportunities for growth and value creation. The corporate will and effort to address these opportunities and challenges seems to be growing, not shrinking.

The third annual global Sustainability in the Spotlight survey, conducted by Spencer Stuart and the Diligent Institute, asked public and private company directors across industries and geographies about their companies’ sustainability strategies and oversight. We also asked respondents to provide their perspectives on and involvement in defining their organization’s ESG vision and strategy, as well as their role in overseeing results. Download the report here.

Diversity Nudges

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 21, 2023

by Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio

Roy Scott/Ikon Images

Despite their commitments to diversifying their workforces, many companies continue to struggle with attracting, hiring, and retaining employees from underrepresented groups.

Achieving workplace diversity is not easy, but leaders can target, address, and nudge specific data points and thoughtfully incentivize behaviors that support it. These interventions are often small, easy to implement, and inexpensive, but when they are applied to choices, processes, and organizational levers in the attraction, recruitment, onboarding of people and along the employee path cycle, they can help make a workplace more diverse and inclusive.

Nudges That Attract Diverse Talent

The conversion rates (CRs) at one e-commerce giant were below target within certain segments of shoppers, including lower-income people of color and middle-income LGBTQIA+ people. Meanwhile, the company’s primary competitor had successfully hired more women, Black and Latine people, Pacific Islanders, and LGBTQIA+ persons in marketing, behavioral analysis, and other roles, and their diverse perspectives were translating into higher CRs.

The company launched a major campaign to attract diverse talent. It engaged a search firm that cast a national net and ran print and digital ads that highlighted the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Then leadership sat back and waited for those diverse candidates to appear. Views of the online job posting peaked around three and a half weeks after the advertising blitz but flatlined by the seventh week. Fewer than 11% of site visitors applied for a position. Only three applicants were interviewed; two received offers, one of which was declined. In other words, if you build it — with impressive resources and at great expense — they still might not come.

As this company discovered, it is not enough to simply gain the attention of the potential candidates you seek to attract. Converting appropriate talent to applicants and candidates requires additional outreach and cultivation. Individuals from underrepresented demographics — including people of color, those who identify as LGBTQIA+, and people with disabilities — often have fewer contacts at competitive employers and know fewer people who can help them navigate the application process. Organizations that want to increase diversity can attract more candidates from underrepresented groups by using nudges — modifications in the language and content presented in the talent acquisition process — in ways that help generate a diverse candidate pool, maintain the pool throughout the process, encourage top candidates to accept job offers, and help keep them onboard.

Nudges can help build trust and reduce information asymmetries early on. In one such intervention, a company displayed the numbers of women and underrepresented individuals among its leadership, as well as its diversity and inclusion goals and a timeline, beside an online job posting. A video at the bottom right of the screen featured the CEO speaking about his commitment to inclusion and diversity. This intervention increased the percentage of women and underrepresented groups that applied by 22% in the short term and 18% over the long term. Candidates from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds rose by 17% overall. And, importantly, the conversion rate from applying for a job to accepting a position rose by 8 percentage points. Read the rest here.

How to Productively Disagree on Tough Topics

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, November 13, 2023

by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow

Neil Webb/theispot.com


Conversations about identity, diversity, and justice are some of the thorniest human interactions of our time. Consider Uber’s head of diversity, who hosted a workplace event titled “Don’t Call Me Karen” to highlight the “spectrum of the American White woman’s experience” and foster an “open and honest conversation about race.” Following backlash from employees of color, she was placed on a leave of absence.

Or consider Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, who tried to “de-escalate” student protests during a speech by conservative judge Kyle Duncan. The dean tried to placate the students, who were angered by the judge’s anti-LGBTQ+ views, while giving the judge the space to finish his talk. But her intervention led to a public furor due to a perception that she had prioritized students’ feelings over the judge’s right to free speech. She, too, was placed on leave.

If these conversations stymie senior diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals, what hope do ordinary leaders have? More than you might think.

We lead a research center at the New York University School of Law dedicated to issues of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Together and separately, we’ve taught tens of thousands of individuals from all walks of life to have more meaningful and effective conversations across their differences. We focus our efforts on coaching people in positions of power because they have the greatest opportunity to transform the dynamics of these interactions — to foster empathy instead of provoking fear and division.

While the people we coach struggle with many types of identity conversations, disagreements are often the most agonizing. It’s relatively easy to participate in identity conversations when you and the other person are aligned. When you disagree, you’re likely to be flooded with angst and self-doubt. You might wonder: Am I as enlightened as I thought I was? Will people feel hurt or betrayed by me?

You might be tempted to respond to such angst by capitulating to whatever your conversation partner says. Yet that approach is often not desirable, because it compromises your dignity and authenticity. We believe it’s still possible to disagree on identity issues, even in today’s polarized and overheated political climate. The key is to do it respectfully. Here’s how. (Read the rest here.)

Three Ways Companies Are Getting Ethics Wrong

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MIT Sloan Management Review, November 29, 2022

by David Weitzner



Making business decisions that are both ethically and strategically sound has always been incredibly tricky. Leaders are called upon to act in a manner that is consistent with their personal values, builds solidarity and trust among diverse stakeholders, enhances their company’s reputation, and prevents scandals, while also being mindful of the bottom line.

This leadership challenge is getting ever more complex. Investors are measuring companies against environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) indexes. Employees are demanding extensive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments. And customers want to buy brands that are tied to strong corporate social performance (CSP).

As counterintuitive as it might seem in the burgeoning ethical complexity of ESG, DEI, and CSP, a few companies have found that when it comes to ethics, simpler is better. They meet the demands listed above by rejecting the notion that ethics are necessarily complex. They refuse to abdicate their ethical responsibilities; they craft value propositions that do not lean on social value initiatives to obscure or distract from how the company creates financial value; and they are transparent about how they do business with all stakeholders. Read the rest here.

Getting real about DEI means getting personal

strategy+business, November 18, 2021

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Timsa

In her 2019 book, Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, New York University journalism professor Pamela Newkirk reported that, despite billions of dollars spent annually by companies, over decades, to diversify their workforces, little progress had been made. Although racial and ethnic minorities made up 38.8% of the US population in 2019, they accounted for only 4.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 9% of US law firm partners, 16% of Fortune 500 board members, 16.6% of US newsroom journalists, and 17% of full-time university professors in the US. Similar inequities—with respect to not just race and ethnicity, but also gender, age, disability, and other factors—have been documented around the world. For instance, the International Labour Organization reports that women participate in the workforce at a rate 26% lower than that of men (and in some places, 50% lower).

The COVID-19 pandemic hit a few months after Newkirk’s book was published, and a few months after that, protests and racial unrest, set off by the murder of George Floyd and lingering outrage over the killing of Breonna Taylor, broke out in cities across the US and around the world. As heated arguments spread into the workplace, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) rose high on corporate leaders’ agendas. They made aspirational promises and set ambitious targets. But will the DEI initiatives launched over the past year produce anything more than slow, small, and easily lost gains?

Experience suggests that it’s necessary to lower the structural barriers to DEI and set quantitative targets for creating more open and equitable organizations. But it’s becoming clear that leaders must undertake personal initiatives in addition to organizational ones before large-scale, enduring change can take hold in the workplace.

This idea serves as the foundation for Melinda Briana Epler’s How To Be An Ally: Actions You Can Take for a Stronger, Happier Workplace, a new book that guides leaders at all levels (and the rest of us, too) toward personal transformation in service of more diverse, equitable, and inclusive companies. Allyship, a concept that dates back at least 30 years, is the mechanism behind the transformation.

“Allyship is empathy and action,” Epler, who is CEO of Change Catalyst, a DEI consulting, training, and coaching firm, said in an interview with me. “It’s seeing and understanding the person in front of you, taking the time to listen to their unique experiences, and then taking action to support them in whatever way they need.” This is a prescription for good leadership no matter who is standing in front of you, but particularly for people whose gender, race, ethnicity, age, disabilities, or sexual orientation can leave them isolated in companies. Read the rest here.

The Insights-to-Action journey

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Deloitte, May 2021

by Marc Solow, Christina Brodzik, and Dan Roddy

Analytics promise to help companies make better, more data-driven decisions about work, workplaces, and the workforce. But, so far, this promise is unfulfilled: In our 2021 Global Human Capital Trends survey, a mere 3% of the 6,300+ executive respondents said they have the information needed to make sound people decisions. This is a prescription for frustration—and failure—in today’s disruptive environment. 

Leaders need analytics, but only to the extent that analytics provide insights that enable their organizations to act successfully in a reliable, adaptable, and human-centric manner. We call this “Insights-to-Action.” Organizations need to be able to use analytics to sense, analyze, and act—the three legs of the Insights-to-Action journey—in response to the myriad of disruptions affecting work, workplaces, and the workforce.

We know this firsthand because Deloitte uses analytics to fuel its own Insights-to-Action journeys. One example, which illustrates how analytics support our workforce efforts, is Deloitte’s ongoing quest to bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the organization. Read the rest here.