Started From the Bottom Now We’re Here

The Kellogg Foundation has always been known to be strong partners with iconic brand, just a strong reputation, but internally, as we would have surveys and we used some of the Center for Effective Philanthropy grant to the in-staff service to judge how we are doing, and while the resonance was so high with the Kellogg Foundation, we wouldn't score very high in some of those surveys, and in fact, there was a time Ð

What were you not scoring high on?

Staff feeling, staff engagement, for example, that whole space around staff engagement. People loved to be there because of the mission but there was a disconnect in some way and they weren't feeling truly valued and engaged, and so we would see scores of engagement that were much, much lower than I wanted us to have as an organization, so we committed ourselves to work at it, and I said I don't want us to be in those lower quartiles, I want us to be in the top quartile, and at the time I said it, it was like, are you kidding me, we're going to get from the bottom to the top? And I knew we could do it, and in this past survey, we are in the top quartile, so we have taken that journey with the staff and it's with a more diverse staff.

What did you do to move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile? What advice would you have for other organizations to get there?

So, the first thing I would suggest is please, when you work on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we call it our racial equity agenda, you have to do that in earnest. You can't create these marginalized functions that are kind of off on the side and not really embedded in every part of the organization, and that's been our journey. I think at the beginning, we were bringing people of diverse ethnicities and genders, etc. into the organization but we really haven't embedded that value into every part of the organization and created the space for people of different ethnicities to thrive, and I also think our leadership model was very hierarchical and that didn't give people the opportunity to lead.