Anne Chow knows a thing or two about issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Way before the Trump administration took power in November calling for “the end of DEI” and a number of top companies canceled their efforts, Chow had made her reputation as a forceful and highly successful leader of one of the country’s biggest organizations, AT&T Business, where she was the first female CEO.
Today, Chow is lead director at Franklin Covey and on the boards of 3M and CSX, teaches at the Kellogg School of Management and in September came out with her first solo book, Lead Bigger, the Transformative Power of Inclusion. She’ll keynote our next Women in Leadership online discussion, Breaking Boardroom Barriers on March 13 (join us!), where she’ll share her vision of C-Suite and board diversity, talk about how women can enter the boardroom in greater numbers—and why it matters.
Chow spoke with us ahead of the event and argued that those who are abandoning their inclusivity efforts are likely to damage their businesses in the long run. “Inclusion and the ability to lead inclusively is a core leadership competency of the modern world,” she says. “If you cannot lead inclusively, then you will eventually lose to somebody who can.”
You have a lot of experience being the first woman to reach specific heights in the corporate world. You’ve spoken about it and written about it and teach about it. From your perspective, what do inclusive teams and diverse boards do for companies? Why is that important? Is it important?
I think about it this way: Diverse teams and diverse leadership teams, including boards, have proven to be right. There’s plenty of data out there that shows they’re more innovative. They deliver better results. They take better risks. They are more collaborative. And diverse teams, especially diverse leadership teams, tend to build more inclusive cultures.
Inclusion is an action. Inclusive cultures, inclusive environments, inclusive leadership are environments where people feel connected, they feel like they belong, they’re more highly engaged. They are environments which are safe, not just physically safe, but psychologically safe. Inclusive cultures are where people can show up as who they are and therefore can do their best work.
Inclusive cultures embrace new and different ideas that manifest in different people, but also different data and information sources. There’s data out there that shows that inclusive cultures generate more new product revenue. They are able to capture new markets more effectively. And so my very strong point of view, and this is actually why I wrote the book Lead Bigger, is that inclusion and the ability to lead inclusively is a core leadership competency of the modern world. If you cannot lead inclusively, then you will eventually lose to somebody who can.
How do you define inclusive leadership?
I use that term synonymously with leading bigger. Leading bigger is about widening your perspective to have greater performance and impact. How do you widen your perspective? You surround yourself with different people, different points of view, different data sources, different information sources.
Leadership in today’s world, in a world which is more interconnected than ever, more dynamic than ever, yet more polarized and divided than ever, demands inclusive leadership to make sure that we are not missing something because of our blind spots, because of our history, because of our prior cultures. It’s that adage of what got us here will not get us there—whether it’s relating to technology, the environment, social shifts, the economy. I mean, all of the above.
It’s a whole new world in every move, every step forward. We’re faced with things that we were never faced with before. So inclusion is a strategic imperative. I have always viewed that culture is not separate from strategy. Culture is an integral part of strategy.
Look at all the data that’s out there about the top reasons M&As fail. It’s always related to culture, whether it’s a failure of leadership integration, lack of cultural integration, lack of role clarity—these are all aspects and markers of a culture that is either neutral, good or not good.
So cultural health isn’t a “soft” concern?
Culture is a real thing, and it needs to be embedded in every strategy that you have. Consciously build a culture that enables your performance against your strategy, the set of performance objectives that are the priorities to your stakeholders, which include your shareholders or investors, your customers, your people, your suppliers, your community. Diverse teams and inclusive cultures are just markers of great business.
With all the pushback against DEI from the Trump administration and a number of major companies, it’s an interesting moment to be looking at this, isn’t it? How has anti-DEI sentiment affected your perspective?
I’ve never been a fan of the DEI acronym. I take them as separate things. Diversity in my view is just what the world is becoming, more diverse. Every generation in the United States becomes more diverse. The fastest growing racial group is multicultural people. Women of color will become the majority of all women in the country in the next 20 to 30 years and women of color represent one in five Americans today.
It changes the idea of “minority.”
The whole idea of minority is nonsensical. No two people are the same—even identical twins who share the same DNA are not the same because they don’t have the same exact experience or skillset. They don’t share the same mind, they don’t share the same heart, they don’t share the same set of hands, if you will.
We need to think about diversity differently. Consider the pandemic, where all of a sudden, almost overnight, whether you wore a mask or not became an element of diversity. Whether you got a vaccine or not became an element of diversity. Whether you work at a location or from home was an element of diversity.
Gender, physical disability, political diversity, veteran status, neurodiversity, generational diversity—there’s an infinite number of dimensions that describe each of us as individuals in terms of how diverse we are from each other.
Do some differences matter more in a corporate setting?
In the context of leadership, you have to decide what aspects of diversity are important to you. Having been involved in various executive searches, maybe an element of diversity that’s important to you in one particular job is bringing in somebody from the outside.
Why? Because the whole leadership team may be composed of people who grew up in the industry, grew up in the business, and therefore you lack external perspective as it relates to technology. Where the industry might be going. Whether you have practical experience in AI or not, which cuts off several generations of talent.
What about the other parts of DEI?
Equity is about fairness. Equity to me is an outcome. And every leader and every leadership team, including every board, has to decide what fair outcomes are important to them in order for them to operate at the highest level, to deliver the most shareholder return.
As we are recruiting new engineers, as we are recruiting new salespeople, are we in the places we need to be to get the best talent, not just the best talent for today, but the best talent for tomorrow? Same for promotional opportunities. Do we want to make sure that the best talent has fair and equitable access to promotional opportunities within our team, which means then we have to look at those processes behind how we promote and progress people, and are they fair and equitable to ensure that we get the best talent?
I’ll use AT&T as an example, since that’s where I had the bulk of my corporate career. One of AT&T’s business imperatives was closing the digital divide, making sure that Americans have fair and equitable access to broadband services. That flavor of equity was important to us in our strategy and in our mission. Every leadership team has to think about that differently. Does it relate to their workforce? Does it relate to their customer base? Does it relate to their investor base?
So what do you say to those who are turning back their DEI efforts?
The naysayers against DEI say that it is unfairly giving advantages to people, giving them jobs that they’re not qualified for simply because of their race or gender. DEI done right is not about that at all. I’m not saying that there aren’t organizations where that’s what they did, organizations that treated it very performatively. That’s where you get into trouble.
And then you don’t get the benefits.
Right. You don’t get the benefits at all. When you’re calling somebody a DEI hire or accusing them of being a DEI hire, the irony is you’re not actually insulting them. You’re insulting the person who made the staffing decision. You can’t launch yourself into a particular job. Somebody has to choose you for that job unless you’re an entrepreneur or you’re running a family business. But for the majority of jobs, as we think about them, somebody’s making a decision to put that person in the job. And I ask this of any audience out there, how many of you want to hire somebody who isn’t the best person to do the job?
If I look at my career, I had 26 different bosses. The majority of people who promoted me at those inflection points in my career were white men. Do I think they chose me because I am a woman, or I’m Asian or I’m both? No. I think they chose me because I was the best person to do the job. If they thought that I was achieving some quota for them, it wouldn’t just be that I would fail, but they would fail as well. No great leader wants that.
So, I tend to not get caught up in the acronym. In fact, I don’t like the acronym. I’ve never liked it. Inclusion itself has been made too small, stuck at the end of the DEI acronym.
This isn’t the discussion, though. Some companies are just abandoning their efforts.
These companies are making decisions that they feel they need to make in order for their business to be successful. They are making these decisions because they are mitigating whatever risk they feel they have in front of them. And they are communicating in a way that they feel appropriate to serve whatever priorities they have at this moment with whatever priority stakeholders they have at this moment.
Do you have any advice to offer?
My advice to them would be that I hope that you have thought through and are managing through not just the intended consequences of your statements and your actions, but the unintended ones as well for the rest of your stakeholders.
Having been in business for a very, very long time, I know that not everything is a priority. If everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority and the toughest job of leadership is making choices. Sometimes, yeah, you have to sacrifice long term for short term. Sometimes you have to sacrifice short term for long term. Sometimes you have to prioritize a set of stakeholders over another set of stakeholders. And your job in a leadership role, whether it’s in the C-Suite or in the boardroom, is to take that in aggregate.
I’m not on the inside of any of those companies, and so it would be unfair for me to judge them on the merits of what they’ve said and what they’ve done. Knowing some of these companies and some of these CEOs that have “pulled back” or made statements to pull back, do I think in Anne’s view of what inclusion is and how important culture and inclusive leadership is, do I think they’re pulling back on their purpose and values and how they go about doing great work? I don’t.
Some of them I think are absolutely performative. Some of them were not serious in the first place and therefore it’s super easy to do this. Some of them—I’m purely making this up, but I suspect—have not thought about the unintended consequences of their actions. Do they lose market share? Do they lose access to part of the talent population, part of the labor pool because of what they’ve done to their brand? Only time will tell.
