AN EYE ON D&I
A CEO’s Take on the ROI of DEI The Wills Group’s Blackie Wills shares his company’s experience By Linda Lisanti AT THE WILLS GROUP, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are seen as key enablers to its business strategy and operating priorities, and considered core to achieving its mission of being the preferred choice for employees, customers and business partners in its chosen markets.
A family-owned company since 1926, The Wills Group operates a number of businesses across the Mid-Atlantic region, including Dash In convenience stores, Splash In ECO Car Wash locations and SMO Motor Fuels. At the helm of the organization is President and CEO Blackie Wills, who recently spoke with Convenience Store News about the company’s DEI efforts. CSN: Can you tell me about The Wills
Group’s DEI journey so far?
Wills: We’ve had a DEI journey that’s
been organic for many years. But [after] the advent of the pandemic and some
Wills Group employees came together with community members to revitalize Tanglewood Park in Clinton, Md.
of the social injustices that happened, the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, we became a lot more intentional about DEI and I would say more formally established our journey, as well as some objectives.
Blackie Wills
We started off really with our employees. We wanted to try to figure out how do we reduce this anxiety and acknowledge it being a problem. And so, we conducted listening sessions with employees just to hear them out. You know, what’s going on? What are you thinking about? What are you concerned about? We also hired one of the leading DEI consultants, Korn Ferry, to help us formally establish more structure into our DEI journey. [They] conducted a number of interviews with not just executives, but across the organization, and completed a talent flow analysis. Out of that initial endeavor, we spent time developing this diagnostic to figure out how do we advance our culture, how do we look at our talent and how do we think about this work in connection with our communities. So, that really kicked things off for our DEI journey and then, in the years since, we’ve focused on how we gauge whether or not we’re making progress. We know this is ongoing. There’s no end to this and it’s all about continuous improvement. CSN: We often hear that DEI efforts are most successful
when they have the support of upper management. Why did you decide to support DEI at The Wills Group? Wills: Well, for one, we’ve always been a values-based organization. We have seven corporate core values, one
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