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| Best Practices |
Diverse Approaches
Suzanne McGee
03/01/2005
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KEEPING A CORPORATE CULTURE intact is an alluring goal, especially when a particular business has been successful. No one wants to monkey around with the formula—nor the team—that gets credit for a company’s ability to trounce its competitors and boost its profits. If a company has thrived with the seats around its boardroom table filled with white men and chief executives, it may fear that altering the mixture will hamper the board’s ability to work well together—and derail its and the company’s achievements.That is how the top executives at one Midwestern real estate company, a young but thriving business, explained to recruiter Susan Shultz their reluctance to even consider naming a woman or minority candidate to a vacant board seat last year. “Success can breed complacency,” says Shultz, president of SSA Executive Search International in Phoenix. Members of the real estate company’s board, she adds, “all look alike: men, in their 40s, very successful, with private jets. They don’t want anybody who isn’t just like them to join them.”
Women and minorities who want to join boards still face an uphill slog in their quest. For example, the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR) points out that while 14 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic and Hispanics make up 10.7 percent of the work force, they represent only 5 percent of officials and managers and less than 2 percent of corporate directors. “You see a tremendous bottleneck in terms of their presence in the positions of the greatest power and influence,” says Alfonso Martinez, HACR’s CEO.
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