Meetings That Matter
Client Requests: Some leaders have difficulty translating their commitment to diversity and inclusion into action. Others may be mired in other equally important business issues that prevent them from seeing the connections between diversity and inclusion, their work, and enterprise success.
Meetings That Matter are engaging, often courageous, meetings with executives to increase their awareness of major issues and demonstrate the impact they can have as diversity champions. Because little can be accomplished without leadership engagement and buy-in, this service relies on our senior leaders to conduct frank sessions with executives on topics such as the landscape for women in business, speaking truth to power, understanding systemic and compounding bias and, most importantly, the roles and behaviors leaders can take on to become true diversity champions.
Example:
A global financial services firm wanted to raise awareness among its top leaders of the importance of including women in executive leadership, and to use their increased commitment in tandem with a well designed strategy to develop and advance women. Catalyst proposed a high-impact session for the company’s annual gathering of firm leaders, and worked with the firm to develop the session. In this instance, our approach involved creating a panel of former and current CEOs from client and other organizations, to be introduced by firm leadership and moderated by Catalyst’s own CEO.
The session was further customized by using information from interviews we conducted with a small number of men and women senior leaders from around the world. The two men and one woman on the panel highlighted the value of women in leadership and indicated the extent to which organizations that did not include women would be left behind in terms of reputation, talent, and clients. The session was highly successful, not just as an individual element, but as part of the firm’s larger strategy; in fact, it was recorded and used extensively in follow-up communications.