To unleash the full promise of Diversity, make better decisions and drive innovation, organizations must learn to appreciate and mine the knowledge and experience of individuals with different backgrounds and viewpoints. Inclusiveness is a competency which needs to be developed and acted upon by all executives in order to release diversity’s strategic power.
Already, companies serving global markets are actively building cohesive cross-cultural teams. But even companies at the leading edge of Diversity and Inclusion know there is much work yet to be done.
Diversity Pulse Check
Has your company firmly embedded Diversity and Inclusion in your business strategy and in the attitudes of leaders and staff, so they can transform your organization’s culture, helping it embrace differences to unlock the promise of greater value? Numbers alone do not make your organization diverse and inclusive. The true measure is the degree to which your culture encourages people to value the strengths and ideas of those who are in some way different from themselves. Egon Zehnder offers a Diversity Pulse Check to gauge your management’s conscious and subconscious commitment to inclusion; map how leaders’ current diversity mindset shapes your culture; and identify where often unconscious biases in individuals and processes work against your Diversity and Inclusion aspirations.
Competency and Potential Models
Our objective competency and potential assessment model ensures that measurement of leadership effectiveness and potential are rooted in behaviors and achievements rather than subjective impressions and often subtle biases. We ensure that key dimensions of our competency model – particularly Team Leadership, Collaboration and Influencing, and Organizational Development – take Diversity and Inclusion fully into account. We can also assess leaders against a stand-alone competency of Inclusiveness, to evaluate core capability and more explicitly drive new leadership behaviors.
Executive Search
Decades of experience have taught us that sound Executive Search begins with deep understanding not only of the position to be filled, but also of the role the executive is expected to play within the leadership team – where diversity can be decisive. We thoughtfully collaborate with you to systematically integrate your Diversity and Inclusion strategy into search criteria and candidate selection, while effectively grounding the entire process in our proprietary Competency and Potential model. Our consultants can also provide expert advice on assembling appropriately diverse interview panels.
Leadership Development
Our Leadership Development approach thoughtfully blends the most effective methodologies to help your executives make the most of their objectively assessed potential, fulfill their personal and professional aspirations, and drive your business strategy. We ensure Diversity and Inclusion are explicitly taken into consideration in every leader’s development plan – whether from an in-group or out-group perspective.
Succession Planning
Diverse talent is often less or differently experienced from the traditional succession candidates who have followed more typical career paths. Our expert consultants help you objectively and reliably gauge potential, so you can justifiably offer qualified but less or differently experienced candidates opportunities to participate more fully in succession plans.
Board Consulting and Director Search
Egon Zehnder is an insightful and deeply experienced partner in ensuring your board functions effectively as a team, and is always prepared to fill vacancies with outstanding directors. A key to making your board more vibrantly diverse and inclusive is focusing on abilities and potential – not just experience – when assessing directors and director candidates. Working collaboratively with your board and appropriate committees, we identify new talent pools and recruit directors who bring you strategically vital forms of expertise, diverse backgrounds, and fresh perspectives. Our Board Effectiveness Reviews identify practical steps you can take to enhance inclusion as your board grows more diverse.
Maximizing On Your Investment
For all newly appointed senior executives, the first few weeks and months in the role are critical, but all the more so when they are bringing valued diversity to the team. They must quickly understand the organization’s culture, set the right priorities, and establish credibility with peers and other stakeholders whilst being themselves. Our Accelerated Integration service addresses each of these issues. We start supporting executives well before “Day One” in a new role – ideally, as soon as the appointment decision is made. We help the organization reflect consciously on how to leverage the new executive’s fresh thinking and perspectives, highlighting their difference while making them an integral part of the new organization. Working in collaboration with the hiring executive and with HR, we help the organization and the newly appointed executive build an accurate and insightful picture of the upcoming integration challenge, helping craft a plan to hit the ground running. Throughout the first 90 days, our consultants sit down with your new executive and other key stakeholders in the organization at regular intervals – creating “islands of time” to productively reflect on progress and calibrate their approach as needed.
Team Effectiveness
Our Team Effectiveness Review is grounded in extensive research spanning 150 different sources of academic expertise as well as our decades of experience working with top leadership teams worldwide. Key elements of our team effectiveness model are Team Balance (diversity and how it is leveraged), Openness (to new ideas and ways of thinking), and Resilience (ability to constructively raise and resolve issues). The Team Effectiveness Review reveals, with authority and precision, how to make teams more diverse, inclusive, and effective.
Assured Results
Egon Zehnder provides the comprehensive, energetic, and expert support your leaders need to shape and successfully fulfill an ambitious, measurable, and proactive Diversity and Inclusion strategy. We have an outstanding track record in Diversity and Inclusion consulting. It is work we pursue with true passion.
Diversity Commitment
As a truly global and equal partnership comprising individuals from many cultures, ethnic groups, languages, and beliefs, we have a deeply personal appreciation for the value of diversity. As a firm dedicated to working with our clients to build their global and local talent capabilities, we view diversity as an essential adaptation to today’s dynamic markets as well as a key to enhanced innovation, creativity, and growth. At Egon Zehnder, a diversity mindset permeates everything we do. Read the full text of our Commitment to Diversity at www.egonzehnder.com/commitment-to-diversity.
