As diversity becomes more and more important to corporate America, business publications and organizations have begun tracking those companies that are the most successful in creating an environment where women and minorities can thrive. Surveys such as Fortune magazine's "50 Best Companies for Minorities" and DiversityInc's "Top 50 Companies for Diversity" are often referred to by potential employees who value a diverse workplace. These would-be employees often notice that some of the same companies appear on every list-year after year.
What can corporate law departments who want to step up their diversity efforts learn from these leaders? What traits do these companies, and especially their law departments, have in common? What are the benefits of a diverse employee base to the lawyers, their corporations, and their customers?
Diversity & the Bar® analyzed 10 national surveys that named a total of 188 companies. Of the 10 lists we reviewed (see sidebar), JPMorgan Chase & Co. appeared nine times, which was the most of all companies reviewed. JPMorgan Chase & Co. was featured on the cover and in the cover story of the September/ October 2004 issue of Diversity & the Bar.
IBM and Xerox appeared eight times on the lists. Appearing a total of seven times were American Express, Fannie Mae, General Motors Corporation, and Prudential Financial. Appearing six times on the lists were Allstate Insurance, American Airlines, Citigroup NY, Eastman Kodak, General Mills, Marriott International, Merck & Co., PepsiCo, and Verizon. For a listing of those who appeared five times or more, please review the sidebar in this article.
Additionally, many of the companies appearing on the lists are previous MCCA® award winners.
General counsel and representatives of several of the top-rated companies shared their insights into their diversity commitment, and how their law departments view diversity in terms of recruitment, retention, development enhancement, and the daily quality of life at work.
Why is Diversity Important to These Law Departments?
"Diversity improves the quality of our legal advice by bringing to bear diverse views of the facts," says Michael McCabe, senior vice president and chief legal officer with Allstate Insurance. He is general counsel of both the corporation and the insurance company. "This is part of a larger Allstate diversity effort to make sure that every employee who serves employees who relate to our customers, such as the lawyers, match the diversity of our marketplace. We have a highly diverse customer base and we need to make sure that we understand them and meet their needs. This is one way of achieving that objective."
"We find that cultural diversity as a byproduct of ethnic diversity is very healthy for improving the quality of thought," says McCabe, who has been with Allstate for 33 years. "Allstate has a major commitment to diversity that's rooted in a belief that markets respond to improvements in our own performance."
Allstate has approximately 850 lawyers, 700 of whom are in the staff counsel operation and report to McCabe. "Our numbers are impressive in terms of diversity and more than half of the lawyers in our law department are women," says McCabe.
Pharmaceutical giant Merck regularly appears on "best places for diversity" lists. Working Mother magazine has selected the company for 18 consecutive years. "Diversity within Merck is integrated in all of our HR and business processes," says Niki Archambeau, human resources director and human resources business partner for the general counsel's office. "We don't do talent management and then do diversity management; it's integrated. We're trying to ensure that we have a mix of individuals with broad experience and perspectives on our different teams, to give individuals the same opportunity to develop, grow, learn, and contribute to the organization."
The legal department has approximately 300 employees and, while they don't disclose exact diversity numbers, Archambeau maintains that accountability is a priority. "We meet or exceed our diversity representation based on availability," says Archambeau. "We have a very rigorous program, consistent with the Office of Contractor Compliance Program, that determines what the external workforce looks like, and we set our target there, ensuring that we have the same representation available internally as we do externally."
Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs Siri Marshall is general counsel for General Mills, where she leads a team of 35 lawyers in a department, 17 percent of whom are women and minorities. Marshall's organization recognizes that diversity encompasses many factors. "By way of definition, we operate with an inclusive view of diversity at General Mills that encompasses all the ways people may differ, including gender, race, nationality, education, religious or political viewpoint, and anything else that makes an individual unique," says Marshall. "The challenge for an organization like ours is more than just to accept and be comfortable with individual difference—it is to capitalize on the uniqueness of individuals in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."
"Having a diverse workforce and building on this diversity is critical to our business. It's very important to us to achieve a broad, diverse mix of backgrounds and viewpoints at all levels of management and across our 27,000 employees worldwide. It's important for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that diverse viewpoints produce innovation and lead to better discussions. Innovation is the force that drives our business. In the law department, we believe that a team of people encompassing different life experiences and different points of view will consistently out-innovate a very homogenous team and make better decisions," explains Marshall.
Cathy Burton, director of human resources for Marriott International, Inc.'s law department, concurs. "We recognize that the differences in people give our company its strength and competitive edge, and because of that, diversity has to be a vital part of our everyday operation," says Burton.
| DIVERSE COMPANIES SORTED BY NUMBER OF SURVEYS UPON WHICH THEY APPEAR | |||
| Company Name | No. of Times on Lists | Company Name | No. of Times on Lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| JPMorgan Chase & Co. | 9 | Marriott International, Inc. | 6 |
| IBM | 8 | Merck & Co., Inc. | 6 |
| Xerox | 8 | PepsiCo Inc. | 6 |
| American Express | 7 | Verizon | 6 |
| Fannie Mae | 7 | Aetna | 5 |
| General Motors Corporation | 7 | Coca-Cola | 5 |
| Prudential Financial | 7 | Colgate-Palmolive Company | 5 |
| Allstate Insurance | 6 | Ford Motor Company | 5 |
| American Airlines, Inc. | 6 | Pacific Gas & Electric | 5 |
| Citigroup NY | 6 | Pitney Bowes Inc. | 5 |
| Eastman Kodak | 6 | SBC Communications Inc. | 5 |
| General Mills | 6 | Washington Mutual, Inc. | 5 |
"Diversity in the law department is a necessary element for our success. Under the leadership of our Executive Vice President and General Counsel Joseph Ryan, we make efforts to ensure that we have a culturally diverse and highly skilled pool of legal talent in order to support our global business operations," notes Burton. "We also want to ensure that we have a richly diverse pipeline of future leaders. We maintain an inventory of external stars, particularly women and minorities who might be suitable candidates for positions as they open in the future."
"Whether we are looking at recruiting for open positions, looking at development and long-term succession planning, or creating work groups or committees, we always look with an eye toward diversity. It's how we do business," says Burton.
Marriott's legal department consists of approximately 75 attorneys. "We monitor our workforce representation, which is very good, with an eye to increase the representation of women and minorities."
Increasing and Maintaining Diversity
Recruitment is essential in building diversity; employee satisfaction keeps the diversity figures stable. How do these companies attract talented, diverse attorneys and retain them?
At Allstate, diversity objectives play a major role in recruitment. "We operate a minority intern program," says McCabe. "We do most of our hiring in the experienced attorney ranks, but this is a big exception, and we have been successful in hiring individuals who have been interns for us."
Allstate has a diversity committee for continued employee input. "We use it for a wide range of activities, from finding ways and means of improving our own internal interactions, so we get to know and appreciate each other better, to minority recruitment," says McCabe, chair of the Law and Regulation Diversity Committee, which has 14 department representatives.
"We have goals and objectives that are corporate in nature," McCabe continues. "We meet regularly with the chairman to talk about a number of attorney and professional development programs, including a review of our diversity efforts. It's a key part of my performance evaluation."
Merck recruits in venues that attract women and minority professionals, including targeted web sites and magazines. Archambeau says the primary urban markets for recruitment are Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC. "When we do use recruitment sources, we also impress upon them that we have diverse hiring pools in the employment process," stresses Archambeau.
Archambeau believes Merck's company policy about diversity improves the working environment. "Merck looks at leadership throughout the organization, which is the foundation for many of our diversity initiatives and our diversity committee," notes Archambeau. "In our leadership model, we focus on business performance and employee satisfaction. Merck has recognized that the two must go hand-in-hand in order to achieve. Underneath that is not only having the individual competencies and the talent that you need to drive the business, but you have to have a productive work environment where that talent can realize its true potential and be innovative and deliver the best result."
Merck Assistant General Counsel George Shiebler elaborates, "The strategic rationale for diversity is the same for the law department as it is for the company. Diversity is a fundamental element of Merck's strategy, so that Merck can attract the best possible talent and so that we have a work environment that gets the best out of people," says Shiebler, who has been with Merck for 12 years. "To bring in the best people, we draw from the largest possible pool, and because we have a work environment where people's diverse backgrounds and perspectives are valued, we get the absolute best performance from them. That is a great benefit to the company of diversity. The company also benefits from the varied perspectives of its people in the creative process and in understanding our competitive environment."
As far as retaining attorneys, Shiebler gives part of the credit to their law department's busy diversity committee. "Our Diversity and Work Environment Committee serves a number of functions," Shiebler says. "It is a 'grass roots' forum for surfacing issues from the ranks and bringing them up to senior management as well as a place where issues and initiatives can be discussed by people at every level and function in the department. The diversity committee is drawn from every geographical and functional area of the department, including administrative assistants, other non-lawyer professionals, and lawyers from the various sites. It is very active in developing recommendations to foster diversity and improve our work environment."
Recent initiatives have included sponsoring a mentoring program within the legal department, a program to increase the diversity of outside counsel, and diversity "awareness programs" such as bringing speakers and an interactive theatre program to the legal department to explore workplace issues.
Marshall at General Mills contends that increasing diversity is not only a recruitment issue. "What we have learned at General Mills is that workforce diversity is more a development issue," says Marshall. "Diversity in recruiting is a starting point, but retaining and developing diversity in leadership roles is critical. We once thought that the key to developing people equally was to treat them all the same. We even talked about being a color-blind, gender-blind organization. The assumption was that fairness required sameness. We learned that that assumption was wrong-and it has led us to fundamentally alter our development process. This process includes annual development plans that link the employee's priorities with development opportunities and support. We believe it is important to develop lawyers broadly, so that in a very disciplined way we broaden their skill base and perspective."
"The [Marriott] law department has a diversity staffing plan that is based on three key strategies," Burton explains. "First is to ensure continued recruitment and retention of highly talented women and minorities in the department. The second key strategy is to enhance development of these women and minorities in order to cultivate an internal pipeline for leadership positions in the department as well as in the company. We've had quite a few attorneys who've decided to move over to the business side. The third strategy is to proactively identify on an ongoing basis external stars, particularly women and minorities, with appropriate expertise to ensure we have diverse candidate slates for future leadership positions."
How do they achieve such an ambitious plan? "The plan is managed through a number of different efforts, both within the company and the department, as well as externally," says Burton. "For example, we actively recruit female and minority candidates from a number of targeted sources, including the Minority Corporate Counsel Association and women and minority-owned law firms, to ensure that we do have diverse candidate slates. We also offer a summer internship program to minority law students. We offer a mentoring program to our attorney staff to promote their assimilation, expand their network, and broaden their business knowledge."
| Best Law Departments for Women and Minorities as Rated by Other Sources
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"We make an active effort to foster an atmosphere of inclusion within the department by supporting cross-utilization and ensuring that women and minorities are included and represented in various task forces, working groups, and special project teams," Burton continues. "We have a lot of cross-discipline, cross-practice group teams and committees that work together. We also utilize development plans to leverage individual strengths, build leadership competencies and business acumen, and also increase exposure."
Diversity as a Criterion for Outside Counsel
All of the firms interviewed expect their diversity requirements to be met when hiring outside counsel. "We hold the firms we hire to a very high standard in the context of their diversity and performance," explains McCabe of Allstate. "We expect others who serve us to share our commitment, and we expect both their performance and their behaviors to reflect that."
Merck also applies diversity awareness to external attorneys. "We stress to our outside counsel the importance to Merck of having a diverse group of lawyers represent us," Shiebler states. "In the last year, we've made that process even more robust. Each of our most senior lawyers has included in their formal objectives an objective to retain outside counsel that staff Merck matters with diverse lawyers. This serves two functions—first, to increase the effectiveness of Merck's representation by outside counsel, and second, to increase our pool of potential diverse recruits, since outside counsel is a traditional source of new hires for us."
Marriott takes an extra step in meeting diversity goals with their outside counsel. "We send a letter to our partnering firms every year, not only stating our commitment to diversity and equal opportunity in the legal profession, but also asking them to state the work that was performed for us by women and minority lawyers in those firms," Burton explains. "[We want] to identify additional qualified women and minority lawyers who may wish to represent Marriott so we can ensure that we have our work handled by diverse legal talent, both internally as well as externally."
The Final Word on Law Department Diversity
All of the law department representatives stated that diversity is a core value to their companies. They feel diversity helps them in relating to their customer base and improving their problem-solving capabilities.
"In the law department, it's a way of life that everybody appreciates," sums up Allstate's McCabe. "It creates no internecine stress in the organization and it adds to the enjoyment and the quality of our life at work."
The companies look to diversity for enhancing career development and identifying leaders. "In all of the decisions and all of the initiatives that we take in respect to managing our people, diversity is an integral part of them—when we're trying to determine hiring decisions, promotional decisions, or training decisions," says Merck's Shiebler.
Marriott's Burton concludes the overlying sentiment for all the law departments: "Diversity is something that we are very mindful of and value very highly. We consistently—and on an ongoing basis—monitor our efforts and our success in not only recruiting and retaining, but also developing minority talent."
Kathleen Dreessen is a freelance writer based in Napa, California.
From the November/December 2004 issue of Diversity & The Bar®