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Making Intel More Diverse
Danielle Brown, Intel Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, talks about the corporation’s $300 million initiative to increase diversity, the largest such investment yet by...
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Danielle Brown, Intel Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, talks about the corporation’s $300 million initiative to increase diversity, the largest such investment yet by a technology company. The goal is to make Intel’s U.S. workforce mirror the talent available in the country by 2020. Brown breaks down what exactly Intel is doing, why the corporation is doing it, where it’s going well (recruiting), where it’s not going as well (retention), and what other companies can learn from Intel’s experience.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. The future is on display here at the Consumer Electronics Show. Tech companies travel to Las Vegas from around the world to show off their products and present their vision of how we will all live, work, and play some day.
BRIAN KRZANICH: I’d like to take this moment to show you just what I mean.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: In 2015, Intel Corporation’s CEO Brian Krzanich stood on stage to make a few big predictions. First, he showed off some drones playing table tennis.
BRIAN KRZANICH: I can tell you we played this in a conference room one day, and it was pretty exciting. So let’s drop the final drone.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: His other pledge to change future was the one that really caught our attention. He said that Intel would spend $300 million to increase diversity in its workforce. That’s the largest such investment yet by a technology company, and he pledged that by the year 2020, Intel’s US workforce would mirror the talent available in the country.
BRIAN KRZANICH: What that means is significantly increase our hiring, progression, retention of women and minorities in the workplace. We will, as good engineers, measure and report our progress on a regular basis with full transparency.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Joining us now to give us that report is Intel’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Danielle Brown. Danielle, thank you so much for talking with the HBR IdeaCast.
DANIELLE BROWN: Thanks, Sarah. I’m really excited to be here.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I just want to start by asking, why has Intel made this such a priority?
DANIELLE BROWN: We’re evolving, and I think everybody knows Intel. You know, it’s the company that makes the chips that power your PC, right? Well, that was the old Intel, and I think Intel is evolving to be a company that powers the cloud and the billions of smart connected computing devices that connect to it. And now that everything is becoming smart and connected and the world is driven by data, we see this tremendous opportunity for growth and for evolution.
And we really and truly believe that if we don’t have a diverse range of perspectives and views, we limit our availability to actually understand and design for our customers. And all of that will undermine the growth that we see ahead of us, and it will undermine our continued relevance in the industry. So at Intel, we truly believe that more inclusion leads to more growth, more innovation, and in turn better business results. So yes, diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do, but it is also good for business.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So one of the questions that often comes up when people make the business case for diversity is how diversity efforts should be run in the organization. And often when people make that business case for diversity, what they end up saying is instead of having a diversity and inclusion officer or department, what you need to do is really push it out to the business units themselves. As someone who is a chief diversity officer, what’s your take on that?
DANIELLE BROWN: Well, I think it’s both/and. And what I’ll tell you is for diversity and inclusion work to really be successful and really breakthrough, it absolutely can’t be an initiative that is buried in HR. Diversity and inclusion absolutely has to be an integral part of culture and part of everything that we do.
And for us, what I think makes Intel really unique is Brian Krzanich, our CEO, set this tone from the top. You know, he stood up on stage and made this bold commitment to reach full representation in our US workforce by the year 2020. By the way, a lot of his senior team didn’t even know he had planned to do that.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Really?
DANIELLE BROWN: He sort of said, look, I’m going to stand up and make this huge bold commitment because it is that important, and then engage his leadership team in helping to achieve the results. And this is something, again, that he takes very seriously, his management takes very seriously. And my job as chief diversity and inclusion officer does have a direct reporting line to the CEO, which again, I think helps drive sort of the seriousness of this work and make sure it’s not just an HR initiative. But it’s something integral to everything we do at Intel.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So what are some of the things you’ve tried so far to make this work?
DANIELLE BROWN: Sure, so I would say that our diversity initiative has really four pillars that drive it. And what I would say is it’s centered around accountability, transparency, a data driven approach, and a holistic approach. The first thing is accountability, right? Brian set this goal of 2020, and he told the world– which makes you, by definition, very accountable.
In addition to that, every year we set diversity goals for our workforce, and we communicate those externally twice a year to the world in the form of a diversity and inclusion report. And we communicate those goals to employees. We tie a portion of their pay to achieving our diversity goals, so that’s the accountability part.
The transparency part I talked a little bit about. It’s holding us accountable by publishing our numbers. And it’s definitely been a trend I think that you’ve probably seen in Silicon Valley over the past few years, where tech companies have been reporting their numbers. And what we are really big on is publishing all of our numbers– hiring rates, exit rates, promotion rates, pay. We report our results when they’re good. We report results when we’re not so good because we think without being transparent, we can’t really solve the problem.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When you’re trying to move those numbers and actually change them, what are some of the specific initiatives or steps you’ve taken to really change those numbers for the better?
DANIELLE BROWN: Part of reaching full representation– or as you said earlier, sort of reflecting the market of talent available to hire– is certainly hiring. This year we set a goal that 45% of our new hires to Intel would be diverse, meaning in our case, women or underrepresented minorities. And we exceeded that goal and achieved 45.1% diverse hiring.
The first thing we did is we broadened the set of schools that we went to for our recent college graduates. So we’re now going to 60% more schools than we used to, so casting a wider net. We’re also really tapping our employees’ networks and using our employee referral bonus programs to source and find great diverse talent from our employees that are already here.
We’ve also started really what I call high touch hiring events. So we have a program that we call our red carpet hiring program, and what we do is we bring a cohort of prospective employees together for a full evening and then full day at Intel.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What’s that like?
DANIELLE BROWN: Oh, my gosh. It’s so much fun. And we start the night before with the networking event. Everybody’s nervous at a job interview, right? It’s always one of those things that’s fairly tense. And we try and make it a little bit less tense and a little bit more fun by bringing Intel executives and a lot of our diverse employee leaders, and we have cocktails. And we share stories. We have it at our Intel headquarters where our museum is and walk people through and show them our technology.
Then the next day, I think, these prospective employees have spent a great deal of time sort of in our environment seeing what it’s like to work at Intel, having lunch in our cafeteria, meeting with real leaders and real hiring managers. And what we try and do is offer each prospective employee several different opportunities to interview for with several different people. So they’re getting a good sense of what the people and the jobs are like at Intel.
And they’re just a lot of fun. Think about the rush of going to a company and seeing if you like it and walking out that day with a job offer. I’ll tell you, I have a great deal of fun at these programs, and I think it’s been a good experience for our prospective employees to go through the process and know where they stand, sometimes the same day.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Do you have a goal you want to hit in terms of this percentage of the pool has to be from our diversity goals, or is it like, well as long as we have one, that’s progress? Or how do you track that?
DANIELLE BROWN: You know, we haven’t gotten that strict yet about exactly what that diversity is. We do know when you at least have two people that comprise a diverse slate of candidates that are diverse– in our case, women and people of color– that you have a better result generally, and that hire generally results in higher diversity.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s what the academic research shows, is that if you have only one woman or person of color in your finalist pool, they’re just not going to get hired.
DANIELLE BROWN: Exactly right. Something that we’re doing as well is making a more diverse and inclusive hiring process. So we require that every open job at Intel, for example, has a job req that’s written and posted online. So people know about it. It’s not just managers tapping their own networks.
So we open up those requisitions to employees internally, and then we require that hiring managers interview a diverse slate of candidates. And if they don’t find a diverse slate of candidates, we help them find one to get more women and people of color in contension and in consideration for the jobs. Then we ask the hiring managers to not just rely on their own judgment when choosing the right candidate but to put together a diverse panel of interviewers. So they’re not just relying on their own perspective but the perspectives of a diverse panel to make the judgment on who is the best candidate for the job.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: As you’ve been working on the hiring and recruiting process, I’m wondering if you have heard any concerns or fears from stakeholders, investors, anyone who’s worried that you might be diluting the quality of the pool. Because one of those coming pieces of skepticism that diversity skeptics will throw out, saying, you want the best people. Don’t push on diversity because you might somehow not end up with the best people.
DANIELLE BROWN: You know, Sarah, it’s so funny that you should ask that. I just got asked that very same question yesterday by some of our employees, right? The fact of it is people get comfortable with people like them, and we have a saying at Intel, you know, like likes like. It’s sort of a neuroscience phenomenon. It’s the way your brain works that you tend to naturally hire people like you or promote people like you or offer opportunities to people like you.
And all we’re doing is we’re saying, let’s take a moment to engineer the bias out of those hiring processes. Let’s cast a wider net and bring in a diverse set of skills. Let’s take the time to interview people that might not be in our networks and might not be like us. And a hiring manager– at the end of the day, we always want you to choose the best candidate, but don’t always assume that best candidate maybe is somebody that went to the same school as you or has the same background as you or has the same life experiences as you do.
And so sure, is there doubt sometimes? Absolutely. It’s something I take good care internally to really spend time debunking because it is quite harmful to the talent that we’re hiring. Certainly nobody wants to come to Intel and be told they were hired because they were a diverse candidate.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: To your point, no one wants to feel like they were just hired to fill out some quota. Yeah. I wanted to ask you also about efforts you’ve been undertaking in other sort of retention and promotion activities.
DANIELLE BROWN: Sure. Our diversity efforts not only span hiring but also progression, retention, and culture. So we’ve invested a lot of effort in getting to promotions at parity. One of the big things we’ve done– again, we’re an engineering company at Intel. And so we take a really data driven approach to everything we do.
And what we find when we don’t sort of bring hiring managers data and show them the data and help them make database-based decisions is, again, those biases creep in. And sort of saying, all right managers, like here is your employee group’s data, and here are the candidates that we think would be good for promotion. Take a look and understand if these candidates are good for promotion. But all things being equal, these employees look like good candidates to us.
And our work is really paying off. We’ve seen changes in diverse representation at the mid-grade, senior grade, leadership grade, and executive grades of our workforce for both women and employees of color.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Are you making the kind of progress that you will have to make to meet the 2020 goals?
DANIELLE BROWN: To reach our 2020 goals, we’re also going to have to make much more progress than we have to date in retention. For about the past decade, women and employees of color were leaving Intel at a higher rate than the counterpart population. And we really understood pretty early on in this work that we absolutely had to get to the bottom of that and change that course, change that trend.
But retention is a really personal thing, right? So what might drive your decision, Sarah, is much different than what might drive my decision. And part of retention is, how does it feel to come to work every day?
You know, what conversations am I involved in? What scope is being offered to me? Do I have a development path? Do I have a supportive manager? Do I have a supportive team, right?
And it was interesting, because I think most companies are always looking at exit rates to sort of figure out what’s going on. And the problem, of course, with looking at exit rates is the people are already gone. So it’s a lagging indicator.
So what we decided to do is start a process that we call the WarmLine, an online hotline, if you will. It’s open to every US employee at Intel, and the goal of the WarmLine– or how we market it to our employees– is hey, if you’re having a situation at work that’s preventing you from doing your best, if you’re feeling challenged, if you’re thinking about leaving, reach out to the WarmLine first. Within 48 hours, one of our WarmLine case managers connects with the employee and between the two of them, we listen to the employee’s concern, and we understand how they’re feeling and what’s going on. And the WarmLine case advisor will work with the employee to address and solve the issue.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And is there a story of a particular employee who has stayed who maybe wouldn’t have stayed a couple of years ago that comes to mind?
DANIELLE BROWN: Sure. So this was a particular employee we had actually hired at one of our red carpet events that I referenced earlier. And so the employee had left a really great job at another tech company to come to Intel. I remember she called us after she had been at Intel about three weeks, and she’s like hey, I’m thinking about leaving. Like, I don’t feel like I’ve been well integrated. I don’t have a great ramp plan. Everybody’s too busy for me, and I’m sort of feeling like I made the wrong decision.
And I remember we sat with her and with permission her management chain and we said, hey, here’s a new employee that we highly value, and we really need here. So let’s work on creating a ramp plan. Let’s assign her a career coach. Let’s assign her a buddy from the team who can show her around and show her the way and bring her in to meetings and talk about how we get things done.
And I remember talking to her about three months after we had done this work, and I remember checking in and saying, hey, how’s it going? Has your experience turned around? And she’s like, it seems so simple, but it really was somebody to come in and take the time to make sure I had integrated properly into Intel. And I do feel better now, and I am going to stay.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This sounds like to me the kind of thing that a lot of companies, HR would roll out and spend a lot of maybe time and money investing in, and then people wouldn’t really use it. So do you think that there is some reason why employees actually seem to be using this at your company?
DANIELLE BROWN: Yeah, it’s interesting. People will always ask like, how is it that employees feel comfortable sharing these things with the WarmLine and not just maybe going to their HR partner? And I think the way we’ve tried to at least work on these WarmLine cases– it really is with the best interest of the employee in mind and really working with them very individually. I mean, HR departments don’t always have the resources to work with an employee individually on a specific case. And I think we’ve proven that we’re able to really listen and provide solutions in a really time effective manner.
Originally when we launched it, I thought, OK, this is going to be the way that I’ll keep people that are thinking about leaving, right? I’m going to do that sort of individualized, one-on-one saves, like person by person. And that’s definitely true. And we’ve definitely been able to address a number of issues upstream before an employee decided to leave.
But the more interesting part of the WarmLine that I didn’t expect before we started it but now has become really clear is that we’re building this great data set. So with 1,200 cases, we can now look across the organization and use our data to say, do I have a hot spot with my manufacturing group in Oregon, say? Or, are all my issues coming out of this chain of management? What do the trends in the data tell me? Then, how do I provide more systemic solutions to make a difference at scale?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What do the trends say?
DANIELLE BROWN: One thing we learned in the WarmLine is a lot of employees were talking about the fact that their managers weren’t necessarily skilled in leading a really inclusive team, being inclusive every day in meetings and in how they assigned work and in how they worked with their employees. So as a result of that this year, Intel is going to be launching training– all 15,000 managers at Intel– and a component of that training is going to be about hiring and leading diverse and inclusive teams.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s one of those areas, I think, that has really been the subject of a lot of debate lately is, does diversity training work? We recently published an article that got some attention around it saying, no, diversity programs fail. Other people have said, no, no. If they’re executed right, they really can work.
Well, how are you sort of coming down on that debate? And are you following that debate, and how is it informing your work?
DANIELLE BROWN: Yeah. Well, I followed the article with interest, and I probably got it forwarded to me about 600 times. I was like OK, guys. I’ve got it. I’ve read it. It was a great– it was a great article.
To me, management training has to be one component of a whole system. I don’t think you can run a few unconscious bias workshops and say you’re done. I think this is something that you continually have to practice. It’s the practice of management.
I do think training is an important part of it. You know, I always tell our employees that few managers come to work every day purposely being jerks to their employees, right? Most managers come to work every day trying to be good managers, and they take a lot of pride in that. But unless you give them the tools and help them understand how to be better managers and sort of apply the growth mindset that they’ve always got more to learn, they’re not going to improve.
And so I do think management training is a big part of it. Whether it’s training about unconscious bias or how to hire better, how to promote better, how to create a positive team culture. But you can’t stop there, and that’s why I talk a lot about the other work we’re doing to engineer the bias out of, for example, promotions and pay equity and hiring. I think you’ve got to take all those things together as part of a holistic system and tackle the problem that way.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So how much are you really focused on changing those systems, and how much are you really focused on changing how people are thinking?
DANIELLE BROWN: You know, that is the million dollar question. One thing we found in the space that’s sort of interesting is we can show people data all day, right? But this is about culture change. It’s about changing people’s hearts and minds. It’s about changing the way they show up every day and how they treat one another. And creating a culture where everybody truly feels valued and respected, and that work is harder to do.
Where I would say we’ve had relatively greater successes in the stuff we can engineer the process for. That work has proven far easier than changing the hearts and minds of people. And again, I think what we’re doing is, you see these tech companies like Intel taking on an issue that society still hasn’t figured out, right? I think society is really grappling with the benefits or the value of diversity and inclusion. And you know, any company is a microcosm of society, and we’re still dealing with a lot of those challenges ourselves.
Culture change takes time. It’s messy. It’s really hard, and you absolutely have to be committed to this for the long haul and be OK with some bumps and some learning along the way.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the things I’ve been curious about also is just how you talk about this stuff when you’re talking to employees. And do you have one way of talking about it when you’re talking to a person of color or a woman? Do you have one way of talking about it when you’re talking to a white man? I mean, do you have to sort of adapt the message depending on the audience, or do you talk to everybody about it the same way?
DANIELLE BROWN: You know, I do believe in talking about it to everybody in the same way. I think that’s part of being transparent, right? And so I’ll tell you how I talk about it.
Diversity to me is getting a critical mass of difference into your workforce. And of course, we do focus on our 2020 goals being along the lines of race or gender, but also that critical mass of difference could be age or generation. It could be background or experience. It could be viewpoints and thoughts.
Inclusion is about taking that difference and actually making it work for you. It’s about valuing that whatever makes you different, you’re accepted until you belong, and you’re treated with respect. Inclusion is about creating a place for that critical mass of difference is something that you treat as an asset, not a liability.
And I definitely find when you talk about diversity as being anything that makes you different, and inclusion about, hey, whatever your differences, you belong here. And you’re respected, and you matter that’s a message that resonates with everybody because we all have something that makes us different. And that’s how I try and voice this work, and why it’s important.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is there anything as part of this process that you wish that, knowing what you know now, you could back again and do differently?
DANIELLE BROWN: You know, the workforce has changed so drastically, and we’re moving from this old culture that required people to sort of come in and do work and leave themselves at the door, right? Check their differences at the door. And we’re moving to a culture that addresses the whole person.
And you know, we’re learning how to be a company that does that, that honors whole person. And you can’t really do that unless you’re willing to address issues of race of gender of class or of ability, and those conversations are just hard. And they make a lot of people uncomfortable.
I get a lot of the, why are we talking about this at work kind of thing, and I think if I could have done it over, I would have started those messy conversations a little earlier on. We’re definitely having them now. And I think that is the difference– that we’re actually trying to not change people’s hearts and minds, but educate them about the different points of view, the different perspectives people have, and get all that stuff that’s sort of simmering under the surface onto the surface and out on the table.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the interesting pieces of research that I came across in the same vein was that when you talk about diversity with white men– even white men who support diversity efforts or say they support them– they will sometimes show a stress response, like a cardiovascular stress response that seems to indicate that they feel threatened by simply talking about diversity. And so I’m wondering, when have these conversations with people that can get awkward, did you feel like you had to kind of, I guess, break through to a point where people are willing to be honest about the fact that this was making them uncomfortable? Or were they, like, pretty upfront from the beginning?
DANIELLE BROWN: Yeah, this stuff is super uncomfortable, right? Talking about race is a really uncomfortable thing. Talking about gender bias is really uncomfortable. Absolutely, we found that we needed to be vulnerable and candid in these conversations.
I’ll tell you one thing we’ve done with some degree of success is we’ve started a program that we call Inclusive Leaders. And Inclusive Leaders is a program for white and Asian male counterparts at our company. And these inclusive leaders range from executive committee members that report directly to the CEO all the way down to mid-level managers. And these inclusive leaders, we’re really trying to give them some coaching and some tools to talk about the tough stuff, right, to talk about issues of race and gender bias at work. And to be vulnerable and express their uncomfortableness with the conversation but also their willingness to learn.
We’re having them get out and participate more actively in these conversations. We’re also having them form cohorts to work with other majority males to really educate them about that stuff in a safe space. So when they do have that adverse reaction or they say, hey why are we talking about this at work, they can express those views and sort of work through the process with their colleagues in a way that doesn’t feel threatening.
You know, this stuff is hard. And again, we’re taking on problems that society is still figuring out. It takes time. It takes bravery. It takes candor, and it takes being a little vulnerable on all sides.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Definitely.
DANIELLE BROWN: And that’s really what we’re trying to do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When you think back about some of the hard conversations you’ve had, is there one that stands out?
DANIELLE BROWN: Over the summer you’ll remember, there was, unfortunately, a series of really tragic shootings of black men at the hands of police. And a lot of our black employees were coming into work and they were really uncomfortable that something terrible had happened sort of in their community that we weren’t talking about at work. People were going on as if nothing had happened, and that community was really grieving.
And so the first thing we did was get folks together and said, hey, this is a safe place, if you want to talk, if you want to share how you’re feeling. These employees said, hey, it’s great that we’re getting us together, but let’s have a broader conversation. Let’s invite our non-black employees into the conversation, and let’s have a conversation about race. Let’s bring the police together with community activists and civil rights activists to have a conversation about race-based violence. And let’s talk about it at work.
And again, this is the first time we had really tried something like this. And I remember when I was doing it, I got a lot of questions about, why are we talking about race at work? And you know, is this something we should really be spending time at work doing? And I said, hey, why don’t you come to the conversation, you know?
And what I’ll tell you is they were standing room only. And there were people that sort of came to learn something and learn about why this was such a traumatic event and how it was affecting their coworkers. And I remember talking to people afterwards saying, wow, it wasn’t until I heard the stories of these employees or these community activists about what was going on that it really hit home for me. And I want to behave differently, and I want to act differently. And I learned something today.
But that was sort of one of those things that again, we just wouldn’t– the old Intel wouldn’t have done that. And we sort said, look, if we’re going to get real about inclusion, we have to have these conversations. And we’re going to have them, and we’re going to try them. And they may be imperfect, and we’re going to learn. And I think everybody who attended one of those conversations walked away at the end of the day having heard or learned something new from a different perspective that maybe they didn’t have before they walked in the room.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: There are some tech companies in particular that have really been in the spotlight for having a culture problem, especially for women and minorities. And I’m wondering, are you sort of in touch with senior level executives at other tech companies and kind of trying to trade best practices with them? Or, what is that community like right now?
DANIELLE BROWN: Intel’s philosophy and my philosophy is I’ll share anything I’m doing. I’ll share when it works and where it’s helped. I’ll share when it’s been a mistake because if it helps make the industry better for women and for people of color, it’s worth sharing.
I do think that one difference with Intel and where I’ve really tried to encourage everybody that I speak with on this work is I say it really does start with that tone from the top. That matters. I truly believe that if you role model that from the top, you have a much better success of it happening. And I think where you look across the tech industry and you see that tone from the top, you see that leader and his or her leadership team really valuing inclusion as the way they do business, that’s how you move the needle.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If I walked into Intel today versus two years ago or three years ago, would it feel like a different company? As you walk the hallways, does it feel different?
DANIELLE BROWN: What it does. It’s so funny, Sarah. I was thinking about that the other day I was walking through our cafeteria at lunchtime, and it was a super busy day. It was right at noon. Everybody was looking for tables. And it was loud and bustling, and there was a lot of laughter.
And I was looking around saying, wow, we are a different company. You know, you’ve got everything in this row from baby boomers to millennials. And you know, there are a lot more women here than I used to remember. There are a lot more people of color.
And when I look around meetings, it used to be that I was always the only woman. And I’m rarely the only woman anymore. Our leadership team is far more diverse. So when our executives stand up on a stage, you look around and you say, wow. We’ve really diversified our executive ranks.
So yeah, it looks different, and it feels different, too. I think people are more connected. They do have a better sense of community, and it feels like it’s a place that’s getting just a little warmer and a little bit more fun to be a part of.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you guys are able to make your 2020 goals, what will be the reason that it has worked? Or conversely, if you fail to make them, what will be the reason that it has failed?
DANIELLE BROWN: If we don’t make the goals– you know, Brian and I talk about this a lot. And he’ll sort of say, look, I put a really bold goal out there because I knew that if we had a bold goal, we’d work harder, and we’d try a lot more things than we did if we didn’t have that bold goal in place. So if we put it out there and we miss it by a little, I still think we would have truly made more progress than we would have if we weren’t willing to be so bold in the setting of that goal.
Now, I certainly am not giving up or throw in the towel in. I’m certainly not ready to say we’re not going to make it to 2020. I definitely think we will. But even if you’ve put it out there and you’ve tried, and you’ve made good progress toward it, I don’t think that’s failure either.
DANIELLE BROWN: I have noticed that a lot of companies tend to make these kinds of bold announcements, and then you never hear a peep about them again.
DANIELLE BROWN: That’s funny, Sarah. I mean, that’s why we’ve told ourselves every six months we will publish our data, whether it’s good, whether it’s bad. Because you’re right. Like, you don’t want to not put out that information, and then you sort of, like, lose interest, and you lose commitment. And from there, it’s a short step to not doing this work anymore, and we don’t want to do that.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I mean, it sounds like you guys have had a lot of wins, and there have also been some hard parts. When you have felt discouraged, what do you say to yourself, what do you say to your team to get back on track?
DANIELLE BROWN: Yeah you know, when I feel discouraged– and you know, I do sometimes. Like I said, this work is hard. I spend time with our employees. I spent a lot of time this year working with our employee resource groups, whether it’s our women’s group or our under-represented minority groups or the LGBT community.
And I think hearing how the culture has changed for them, seeing them get chosen for leadership roles that they’ve been striving to, hearing somebody’s personal story about why they decided to stay at Intel or how this work has positively impacted them, reading notes from employees about how this has changed their work environment, that’s what keeps my team and I going. And there’s nothing that’s more satisfying than when an employee comes to you and says you made the difference in my career. Or you’ve made the difference in my work environment. Or you’ve helped me choose to stay at Intel and lean into this career I have here.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Danielle, thank you for updating us today.
DANIELLE BROWN: You’re welcome, Sarah. It was great fun, and I enjoyed telling you some of our Intel stories.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Danielle Brown is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Intel Corporation. The article we mentioned in our conversation today is “Why Diversity Programs Fail.” It’s available at HBR.org.
There’s also an article I recommend there on this topic called “Hacking Tech’s Diversity Problem.” Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.