Out Leadership - Talent Landscape

Out Leadership - Talent Landscape

October 10, 2018

On October 10, 2018, representatives from the Diversity Committee attended Out Leadership's 'Talent Landscape' event hosted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in London.

Out Leadership is a global business advisory company that promotes LGBT+ equality and helps multinational companies in a number of different industries to grow business through inclusion. Out Leadership believes that change begins at the top, and so the company has developed relationships with the CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world in order to advocate change.

The event was split into two sessions. The first session saw Todd Sears (Founder and Principal, Out Leadership) and Jon Terry (Partner and Diversity and Inclusion Consulting Leader, PwC) present the results of a global survey ("Out to Succeed"), which finds that businesses need to do more to attract and support LGBT+ talent. The report helpfully recommends five steps that companies can take in order to fully support equality:

1. Set the right tone from the top and engage CEOs - CEO visibility as a LGBT+ ally and visible LGBT+ role models are deemed to be priorities amongst LGBT+ employees for creating an inclusive culture;
2. Create clear pathways for career progression - the report found the proportion of LGBT+ sponsors or mentors at companies to be low;
3. Stand up and advocate for equality - the report states that this should 'include an awareness of the barriers that may hold LGBT+ employees back and active intervention to tackle them'; 
4. Create inclusive communications - the report notes that a number of companies have conducted reviews of the language used in all of their policies and marketing materials globally in order to ensure that they are neutral (for example, by not assuming that parents are male and female); and
5. Build and empower ally networks.

The second session was a panel session where Sarah Churchman OBE (People Director, Chief Inclusion, Community & Wellbeing Officer, PwC), Sarah Fennell (EMEA Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Moody's Corporation), Jacinta McNicholas (Managing Director - Inclusion Diversity & Corporate Citizenship, EMEA Region, State Street) and Geoffrey Williams (Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Thomson Reuters) provided an interesting discussion on the power of LGBT+ allies and the steps that each of their companies has taken in order to be LGBT+ inclusive.