VideoPreviously, that identification was done on an individual basis and supplemented by mentoring. Case in point: the mentor relationship between Ryan and a Medtronic manager he hired two years ago, Rodney Williams, now vice president of finance for Asia Pacific.
The son of Florida educators, Williams had it "instilled in me very early on that I could accomplish anything with a lot of hard work." After receiving his undergraduate degree from Florida A&M University in 1983, he parlayed an internship with Price Waterhouse into a full-time job in Houston. Once there, he found "other African-Americans who helped make the experience very positive, though it wasn't in a formal organization." At Monsanto six years later, he found "a much broader support network and a lot of training in diversity," but also a situation in which minority advancement lagged.
After being hired at Medtronic in October 1996, and assigned to Ryan as a mentoring partner, Williams was able to outline the challenges he sought, which included heading finance within a business unit. Ryan kept his eyes open for such a job — leading to Williams's current position — and coached him through various smaller career issues, aiming to help him "improve his performance so he could get to where he wanted to get."
The mentoring relationship has thrived, says Williams, thanks to Ryan's straightforwardness and accessibility. For an African-American to be a good leader, he explains, "people have to become comfortable being around you, and Ryan is a person you get comfortable with very quickly."
For his part, Ryan never expected much guidance as a minority along his career path. He believes he benefited from the collegial atmosphere of his first stints, at McKinsey & Co. and Citicorp, and later at AlliedSignal. But at Medtronic, he has come to appreciate the value of support systems like mentoring, and brings his own perspective to it, including a belief that it should contain old-school elements of tough love. "You have to have someone who will give you good, honest feedback, and tell you what you need," he says. Early on, Ryan suggested to Williams that his image with employees needed work, because he was sometimes "perceived as not listening, and being very direct, wanting it his way from the start." Those rough edges, says Ryan, were polished before Williams was promoted.
Still, Ryan realizes that mentoring can't work well unless the right people are hired. "The pool of [minority] candidates is not tremendous," says the CFO. A pet recruiting project involves Medtronic's audit department, once all white and now half people of color. "When people enter the finance department through audit, you're able to assess their capabilities" and make decisions about advancement, says Ryan. "It's really about making a start."
Roy Harris is a senior editor at CFO. Also contributing to this article were Alix Nyberg, Tama Miyake, Crawford Coates, and Cody Yiu.
Moral Challenge
The top four reasons CFOs say their companies pursue diversity.
- A more multicultural workforce benefits the company by offering diverse opinions and views.
- Increasing diversity is simply the right thing to do.
- Increasing diversity helps to reflect the customer base.
- More diversity shows that our company is fair-minded.
Source for charts: CFO survey of Fortune 500 CFOs; 22 respondents.
A Big Five Drive
The big five accounting firms have gotten the diversity message. All say they have boosted their minority hiring, with minorities accounting for between 20 percent and 33 percent of new hires last year.
At Ernst & Young, the impetus was a 1994 survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants showing that just 5 percent of all CPAs were minorities. "We wanted to increase that number at our firm, so we totally revised our recruiting strategies," says Allen Boston, national director of minority recruiting at Ernst & Young. Adds Kent Kirch, associate national director of recruiting for Deloitte & Touche, "If you don't emphasize diversity, it's very easy to not come in contact with it."
Much of the contact being made is at historically African-American colleges, and in regions with large African-American and Hispanic populations. To gain visibility, Big Five recruiters work with student chapters of the National Association of Black Accountants and the American Association of Hispanic CPAs.
Some work with Inroads, a St. Louis organization that places about 7,000 minority college students in corporate internships each year. "We hire virtually all of their interns, and usually get another 20 of their classmates who interned at other companies," says George Sill, director of diversity recruiting at Andersen. And competition is driving firms to become creative in their efforts. KPMG LLP, for example, offers to foot the bill (averaging $50,000 over two to five years) if a business school at an historically African-American college gains accreditation from the International Association for Management Education. "Instead of trying to outgun the other firms, we try to make systemic changes," says Bernie Milano, president of the KPMG Foundation.
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