Rainbow Coalition

Describe how you intentionally build the diversity of your team.

I'm very conscious about how I do that. I want to make sure that not only is it representative, but it's also prospective representative. So I make sure when I look at my team, there's significant female representation, there's people of color, there's gender. I'm looking at all of that, because I want to make sure that those perspectives are at the table, as we have conversations, because we do make better decisions when that happens. I'm very intentional about my team and about our boards of directors, we're making sure that we got age, gender, ethnicity. We want to make sure that it is a rainbow coalition of people collectively working to achieve the best outcomes for the organization, not easy.

Well, and when you say you make better decisions because of it, can you give me an example? How does it help you to arrive at better decisions?

So when we put out statements or when we're doing work, collaborate, somebody might look at it and say, "You can't use this language because it means this to someone else," so those factors help make us better in terms of that way. Or when we're doing a programmatic approach, you need to do it in this language, this language, this language, because in that community, here's what's important in there. Those are the things that help as we work collaboratively to do our work in this organization, and we represent, as you know, a broad spectrum of folks in our organization. So we're cognizant of what that means to specific individuals and genders.