18 minute read
Intentional Action is Key for DE&I
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) has become an important conversation for financial institutions to have with
employees. At the recent ABA Convention, a panel of experts conducted a discussion on DEI which provided insight and direction for how banks can lead the conversation in their organizations.
ABA Chairman Jim Cargill, Arvest, moderated the panel which also included Darrin Williams, Southern Bancorp CEO; Bill Oliva, First Community Bank AVP/ Loan Officer; and LaTricia Hill-Chandler, Arvest Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer. The following is a slightly edited transcript of a portion of the conversation. JIM CARGILL: What are some of the best practices you would recommend in taking to eliminate bias in the hiring process? LATRICIA HILL-CHANDLER: For us, eliminating biases in hiring processes. First, of course, you have to do effective education, not just training. Training is where you give a handbook and people follow the steps. And usually, I mean, let’s be honest, how many trainings have we gone to that we practice it for a week and then we’re done training. I think it’s important that we have to educate everybody, especially our hiring managers, on how to identify their own biases first, and then we can make sure we mitigate those with things like diversifying the pool of hiring managers …you make an intentional effort.
Keyword here, ‘intentional,’ you’re going to hear me say that a lot today. An intentional effort is ‘How do we make this room look different? Do we make it look different by adding someone that’s from a different team? If we’re hiring somebody from HR, let’s go see about the banking side. Let’s find someone from the banks who could actually be on the team. If it happens to be all white males, let’s see if we can get a woman on and a woman of color, perhaps.’ You want different perspectives being brought to the table.
I’m different than everybody in the room, but I guarantee you, if we took the time to be curious, you would find out that we have a lot of things in common. But even though I’m different and you said, ‘You know, I don’t know this young lady and she’s on the panel and she’s talking about DE&I, if we got to talking, and you get to know each other, you’ll find that we also have some things in common.’ That’s all about what diversity and inclusion is.
Diversity is about representation. Inclusion is about belonging, and equity is about fairness. So representation, belonging, and fairness. So that’s how you can make sure intentional efforts that people are different from you when they hire. DARRIN WILLIAMS: Those are great examples. I guess I might add just some practical approaches. One thing that a best practice is really to look at, for example, your job descriptions, how you talk about the job, and eliminating gender-biased words. So for example, when you have words like ‘competitive’ that leans toward male, and you have words like ‘collaborative’ that leans towards female. Try to balance those words. That’s just one example.
Also, many industries, but banking in particular, we’re guilty of hiring through word of mouth. And unfortunately, you actually probably often hang out with, go to church with, go to school with folks who are like you. And so the word of mouth, the people that you talk to, are more likely to look like you. In fact, in my previous job, as a trial lawyer, there was a very successful case, the only race-based case I ever had in my life was one about a large company that we sued, and it was successful, on word of mouth hiring.
They claimed to have objective criteria, but it was really word of mouth, how people were hired, and
JIM CARGILL ABA Chairman Arvest
LATRICIA HILL-CHANDLER Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer
Arvest
DARRIN WILLIAMS CEO
Southern Bancorp
BILL OLIVA AVP Loan Officer First Community Bank
guess what? The workforce, and even the pool of candidates were not diverse at all. Removing that word of mouth hiring is important.
Identify blind types of review of resumes. And so you can put these into various programs that remove things that can identify the person’s sex, their race and different things like that. And then also, I think it’s important to set smart diversity goals for your organization, and track those goals, and monitor your progress toward those goals. These are just a few things that we think about.
BILL OLIVA: For me, what I do a lot is I help our recruiting team find bilingual employees, and to add to what LaTricia said, I think that you don’t need to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. When I say that, somebody may have a quality that best serves a department, a quality that best serves your need as the employer, however, that employee may not want to be in that role. That employee may not want to be a translator. That employee will get their foot in the door some way, somehow, and find out what their passion is. And then that employee will better serve you by them coming to that conclusion, and them not being forced into a department, just because of the talent or a skill that they possess.
JIM CARGILL: What advice would you give to someone who is leading discussions about potentially difficult topics, such as race, religion, politics, or sexual orientation? Sometimes, I still hear a lot of my managers and supervisors talk about just being a little awkward, being a little uncomfortable, and I think we have people that want to talk about things and get the topic out there, but it’s a little awkward sometimes. What are your thoughts about that?
BILL OLIVA: I think John Kennedy said it best when he said, ‘So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests, and to that means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at the least, we can help make the world safe for diversity, for the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we all are mortal.’ What that says to me is, ‘Celebrate our differences. We can all find common ground.’ Like I’ve said before, sometimes focusing on things that make you a little uncomfortable aren’t the best thing to do when we can find things that bring us together instead of divide us.”
DARRIN WILLIAMS: I think you’ve got to embrace the discomfort. It is an uncomfortable conversation. We’ve got to embrace that discomfort. You will not have those difficult conversations if you’re not willing to embrace it. Understand that no one knows everything, and accept that, but don’t stay in that complacent position. Educate yourselves. If we’re going to resolve these difficult issues or really find common ground, you’re going to have to commit to educating yourselves on things you don’t know. That’s true in when you’re creating a banking product. It’s also true when you’re having these difficult conversations. So, being open and approaching the conversation honestly, without an agenda, recognizing that you don’t have all the answers, and being willing to at least explore different perspectives. Diversity is powerful. Sameness is not that powerful.
If you look at a number of different studies, they talk about just really diversity, and the power of diversity in business. And so for Southern, we really start with the business case for diversity. That’s how we think about our work. And what is the business reason for doing that? In fact, McKinsey & Company have a study with SHRM that basically they looked at a number of different corporations and businesses, and compared those that were diverse with those that were less diverse, those that had more gender diversity performed 15% higher. Those that had more ethnic diversity performed 35% higher. They had higher revenues. They had higher job satisfaction. So diversity is important. And if you want to have success in business, particularly as America becomes more diverse, you’ve got to embrace that, to get to know your customers, get to know your employees and their perspectives, because you will not reach those customers without embracing that diversity and educating yourselves and doing that.
LATRICIA HILL-CHANDLER: All of that and all of that. I think to have these conversations, which are so uncomfortable, start with a lot of things. I’ve been doing this work for about 28 years now, in multiple industries, all around diversity and inclusion. And I have to tell you, 2020 was one of the hardest years to be in this industry, both personally and professionally. Last year was just tough, from COVID to the social unrest, to the political climate that was happening in an election year. It was just really tough. So, to have these uncomfortable conversations with my peers, with my colleagues, and with the leaders of the bank, there were a few things that I had to do, and that I had to also share with my colleagues and leaders on what to do.
The first one was be authentically you, and being authentically you means it’s okay to be vulnerable. I was one of those people that said, ‘I would stop crying and I would not cry in front of my leaders. You will not see me be a weak leader at Arvest.’ It was so much bottled up last year in one of our leadership team meetings that my manager said to me, ‘LaTricia, what’s wrong?’ And I couldn’t answer her. All I could do was cry. That vulnerability allowed people to see that I’m a real person talking about real topics. So I would advise to just be authentic and it’s okay to be vulnerable.
Go use Google and ask Google questions and watch videos, and hear other perspectives, and talk to colleagues and things like that, so that you can do your own research so that when you do have an intentional conversation, you can already know a little bit of what you’re expecting or what you can talk about.
Next, ask questions. It’s okay to ask questions. It’s okay to be completely candid and open, to receive honest feedback and ask questions. ‘I don’t know about this LaTricia, but what’s been your experience? How can I approach this? What can I say? Tell me more. How do you feel?’ Things like that. I’ve said another conversation is, last year, I used a lot of silence is violence. There were so many times where these particular topics specifically around race relations are so uncomfortable that people tend to shy away from it and say, ‘It’s invisible. I ain’t going to talk about it. That means it ain’t happening.’ That is a lie.
My last thing is remain open-minded and be curious. Ask questions again, but stay open-minded that diversity is multifaceted. So I told you I’ve done this 28 years. 28 years ago, we defined diversity as, Black and white, Black people, white people. You got one Black person in the room, you got diversity. Now diversity is so multifaceted, it’s not just Black and white. It’s age. It’s gender. It’s sexual orientation. It’s veteran. It’s single moms. It’s education, socioeconomic... There’s so many ways to define diversity, now. Just make sure that you’re open-minded to find the common ground and say, ‘Let’s talk about that.’
Understand that there are multiple perspectives. Just what Darrin said, oftentimes, just as he said, just because you ask one Black person, and that’s considering you do have the one Black person to ask and feel comfortable asking, does not speak for the entire culture. Just because you ask one veteran, their experiences does not mean that you have the answer for all veterans. Just because you have one LGBTQIA+ person to ask about sexual orientation does not mean that you have it all. DARRIN WILLIAMS: LaTricia brought something up that really kind of struck me because she’s exactly right. Last year was a tough year. And as an African American male, father of two 20-year old kids, every Black parent has the discussion about what happens if you get stopped by the police. Like, that just happens. That’s the talk that we have in Black families, but the murder of George Floyd was particularly impactful to me as a leader of Southern Bancorp. For me, being authentic was important. And I knew our team members were talking about it, and it was important that I spoke about it. And so I drafted an internal message, but I’ll tell you that was, and I do this all the time, I draft a CEO blog quite often, but that was the hardest message that I’ve drafted since I’ve been at the bank.
I went through about 13 different drafts before there was one that I felt comfortable sending out, because that murder impacted me, not only as the CEO, as a Black man, as a parent of Black children, as reliving all of the racial injustices that I felt like I had been through, that my family had been through. It was important not to ignore the elephant in the room. And so, your team members, your teammates, your colleagues, they were talking about and are still talking about it. Where you stand in times of controversy really is important. And it was important to me as an organization that I spoke about this, but not just from any perspective, I spoke about it from a perspective of the role of financial institutions in tearing down barriers of structural inequality and racism.
Because in many ways, the financial industry, we didn’t have our knees on the neck of George Floyd, but a lot of things we perpetuated allowed for that to happen. So you can go back to redlining. I mean, there are reasons why certain communities don’t have investment. The reason why certain communities continue to suffer from a lack of opportunity is because government drew red lines around certain neighborhoods, and banks decided that’s not where we’re going to lend money. We know that oftentimes women couldn’t get loans unless their husband cosigned or signed on the loan. Those are things that we as an industry did. And so we must speak up and
speak out. And if you’re going to solve race or gender specific issues and challenges, you can’t do it with race neutral outcomes and solutions.
They have to be race specific. And that’s why I think it’s important to have smart goals around diversity, equity and inclusion that actually embrace the differences in the challenges that you’re trying to address. So it’s not enough just to be race neutral. It’s not enough not to be a racist. You’ve got to be an anti-racist. You got to work against that.
JIM CARGILL: Bill, what about challenges in implementing DE&I?
BILL OLIVA: I think there’s many challenges. I think the worst phrase that anybody could use is, ‘This is the way that we have always done it.’ If you don’t change that, you will always get the same result that you’ve always had. When we talk about diversity, when we talk about it being more than just black and white, when we talk about it being from a single mother, I come from a single parent household, and I was lucky enough to start working at First Community Bank at a very young age, and my mom was still around at that point. It was just me and mom for a very, very long time, so I know the struggles. I literally saw the struggles of a single parent, not only a single parent, but a female parent.
When we went to purchase our first home, we didn’t qualify for a secondary market. We qualified for an in-house loan. Thankfully, at First Community Bank, since I was an employee, they opened up their arms and they took us in. And at that point, we were the first Hispanic homeowners in our family. That spiraled into the growth within me and seeing that things were obtainable.
Going forward now, me being able to return that favor into the mostly Hispanic community, most of my portfolio is Hispanic. It just happened naturally. I am able to create generational wealth for those families. I am able to help them get out of what they thought. This is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life. No, there’s more to life, and there’s more that you can do when you’re changing lives every day, but policy can be an issue, not regulation, but policy. Policies can change. And the moment that you realize that, is the moment that you can move forward with diversity and including people that didn’t think they could be included.
JIM CARGILL: All of us have people in the bank that are really busy. They have a lot of responsibilities. I’m kind of wondering if we should stop for a few weeks and assess all the extra jobs that we’ve been given over these last few months, and make sure we’ve got it lined up.
You want to engage some of the busy professionals in your communities to create interest there for joining your board. We’ve talked about that a lot in our company and making our boards reflective of BILL OLIVA: I believe that choosing something that you’re passionate about is number one, something that makes you happy, something that fulfills you, but number two is picking something that needs you. And that can be the harder part, picking something that needs you may be something that isn’t your priority, but something where you can make a difference. That’s how I think we should go about it in order to be able to truly make a difference.
LATRICIA HILL-CHANDLER: So you’ve heard me say it, and I’m going to say it one more time. It begins with ‘I’ – ‘intentional.’ You have to put some intentional efforts around how you recruit people that are different than you in your organizations. You have to make sure. And as Jim said, we are doing a lot of talk around how to make sure our boards are reflective of our communities. In doing that, you have to make sure that your outward mission reflects that, that your mission for your organization is very candid and clear about being inclusive. When you do that, I think people sometimes will gravitate to things that include them.
It’s about the optics of what it looks like. If your organization looks a certain way, and then you have an underrepresented person that’s interested and your mission doesn’t say anything about being inclusive and neither does your board or your leadership, then it’s kind of hard to attract people who are naturally attracted to your organization.
One time I saw a cartoon that said, ‘We want to be more inclusive. We support diversity inclusion,’ and everybody in the entire organization was white males who had the same tie, who had the same shirt, who had the same haircut. So make sure that your optics reflect that by way of a clear mission statement that supports inclusion, and then do some intentional efforts to go and get that.
My last thought around making sure your boards are more inclusive, because we’re all busy, y’all. We’re all are busy, but as Bill said, you find passion for those things that you’re passionate about. I would also say, use your networks within your organization. A lot of us have strong networks that are outreach networks that you could reach into. Tap into somebody that may know somebody that may know somebody, right? That can help you diversify what your board looks like. Again, don’t forget, diversity goes deeper than race. It covers gender, veteran status, people with disabilities.
DARRIN WILLIAMS: I’m really going to echo what LaTricia said. I think being intentional is very, very important. Folks that you want to serve on your bank board are probably people who are busy. You don’t want people who have nothing to do to be on your bank boards.
A British author once said, ‘Most businesses know what they do. They make widgets. Some even know how they do it, their competitive advantage, but those that are truly successful, know why they do what they do.’ For Southern our ‘why’ is we are wealth builders for everyone. When I go and I sell people who I want to be on the board, I tell them we’re not just a community bank, we’re not just a bank, we’re doing this because we want to build wealth for everyone.
From the poorest persons to the richest of persons, we make no discrimination between the two. You have to get people to embrace ‘why’ you do. People will connect with your why. And if you can sell them on the why, then I think you get them.
I’m pretty proud of the diversity of Southern’s board. We have actually three boards at CFI, a holding company board, a bank board, and a nonprofit loan fund board. All three boards are chaired by a person of color, one by female. Of our bank board of 12 members, 50% are black and three are women. We are probably one of the most diverse bank boards in America. That’s because we were intentional in trying to make sure that our board had that type of representation, not just in race and gender, but also in geography because we’re in Mississippi as well. So if you’re not intentional about this, then you won’t get it done.
