Leading Toward Diversity

Recent studies from institutions such as the Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, and Gartner agree: diverse-workforce companies overwhelmingly outperform their less diverse competitors—in almost every measurable area. But what does that mean from a practical standpoint, and how do we, as leaders, increase diversity within our own teams? Corie Barry, Best Buy’s CEO and the youngest female CEO in a Fortune 100 company, has ideas.

Raised by self-employed artists, Barry credits her unique upbringing with shaping her desire to lead inclusively. “The interesting thing about artists is it’s not about one beating the other,” she says. “It’s about art being important and all of them succeeding. And that means your success is inextricably tied to someone else’s… Those ideals and those ethical moments really were important in shaping… the leader that I’ve become.” Barry works hard to uphold these beliefs.

​Since taking the helm as Best Buy’s CEO in 2019, Barry has committed $44 million to expand college prep opportunities and provide scholarships for HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), has provided hands-on training and mentoring to tens of thousands of highschoolers in lower-income areas through its Teen Tech Training Centers, and has boldly (and publicly) committed to filling one out of every three new non-hourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees, and one out of every three new, non-hourly field roles with women by 2025. “I always get frustrated when I hear… ‘We don’t have enough diverse talent,’ or ‘We need to bring some talent into the community,’” Barry says. “No… we have plenty of diverse talent. We just aren’t creating the pipelines into our organizations.”

What about organizations that can’t invest millions of dollars into future diversity, or leaders who don’t make the hiring decisions? Barry offers three effective strategies:

1. Reverse Mentoring – “Your whole career, you look for mentors who are more accomplished than you, and can help you get to the next level. My perspective, now, is that I need to surround myself with people who are incredibly different.” Barry encourages leaders to look for the differences within existing teams (age, gender, race, experience, able-bodied or disabled, cultural fluency, political mindset, etc.) and then to pair diverse teammates together with the stated and explicit goal of learning from one another. Barry credits Best Buy’s reverse mentoring program with increasing empathy and creative problem solving within her teams, and she believes any leader in any type of workspace can benefit from this practice.
2. Sponsorship – To increase diverse representation in leadership roles, Barry encourages leaders to pair promising employees from underrepresented groups with sponsors who already hold leadership positions. “A mentor is there to help you think differently… A sponsor is someone who’s going to advocate for you when the door is closed.” Barry maintains this type of advocacy is essential to changing the unconscious bias that often accompanies leadership appointments and believes truly diverse leadership across the business landscape cannot be achieved without it.
3. Cross-Dynamics – When building teams for new projects, and especially when making company-wide decisions, Barry pulls together employees with the widest variety of differences possible. “A more diverse approach means you will look around the corners of problems in a different way… It means you come to really differentiated solutions because you’re getting all these different points of view.” Barry encourages leaders to participate in the conversations, to listen more than we speak, and to ask enough questions to understand the differing points of view before making decisions together with the group. “We believe it’s a business imperative,” she says of this approach. “Every bit of work that’s ever been done in the field would say more diverse teams deliver better outcomes. Period.”

​While it remains vitally important to lay the groundwork for future parity, Barry believes today’s leaders have remarkable influence over the current workspace environment. By shifting our focus toward leveraging—rather than managing—the differences within our teams, we not only harness the strength of our combined human experience, but also set the tone of collaboration and respect throughout our companies.
 
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