Gender Diversity Initiative

Transforms Intention to Action and Equips Leaders to Own Initiative

Transforming intention to action
Everybody was in place to launch a global women’s initiative: initiative co-leaders were chosen and the CEO was set to be the executive sponsor. However, different stakeholders had different priorities and opinions about the appropriate focus and the company did not have a formulated strategy that aligned the organization across levels and geographies to deliver results. A number of grass roots employee resource groups had formed to support women in the organization. While these organizations were helping to support women, they were not yet creating the organizational change needed to make significant progress.

The client sought a partner skilled at working with and listening to a range of stakeholders as well as one that could create a strategic plan, so they selected Exponential Talent for our collaborative style that respects current efforts and engages them to build greater change and impact.

Women's initiative strategic framework
To align company executives and women’s initiative co-leaders, Exponential Talent facilitated an executive level planning process that united the voices of key stakeholders with a comprehensive strategic framework for an initiative that included:

Vision, goals, operating principles;
Initiative structure, key programs and strategies
Implementation timeline

The strategic framework was designed to integrate diversity initiatives with the company’s business strategy to create more sustainable change and the buy-in of business leaders, executives, and individual women across levels.
To lay the foundation for effective strategic planning, Exponential Talent provided the strategic planning participants with:

A benchmarking analysis to highlight strategic strengths and opportunities
Executive education on how to disrupt bias in recruitment, advancement, retention and inclusive culture
Best practices for initiatives and interventions

By creating a shared understanding across participants, the group was able to readily align on a go-forward strategy. In addition, the participants because key leaders of the initial changes rolled out by the initiative, so the strategy plan process also created a high level of organization readiness to start to change.

Generating business value through diversity
The strategic framework enabled the company to align stakeholders and move quickly from intention to action.

The framework also set the tone for gender diversity being identified as a core business priority, yet was flexible enough for customization to happen given varying needs and priorities of different organization areas and departments and geographies.
The resulting initiative structure ensured that implementation would be driven by business units across geographies as opposed to be perceived as a “human resource” initiative separate from business priorities.