07 An impossible staffing transition - thwarted by physics

How the structure of the HR system made it impossible to hit a bank's aim to grow numbers of staff from minority groups - and general lessons.

I once had a top executive from a US Bank in a workshop who explained a worthy aim for her organisation - they wanted to increase the representation of minority ethnic groups among their senior staff to better reflect the wider population. The bank had gone very public with this objective, to send a strong signal that it was an equal opportunities employer at all levels.

At the time, the senior cohort included about 10% of people from the defined groups, and management had set a target to get that representation to 25% within 5 years. That only means switching 3% of the cohort each year. So surely that would be do-able right?

Unfortunately not!

See why this can't be done in the full blog post at sdl.re/vem07.

Categories: : business models, strategy