Paulo Mendes, PartnerHowever, to enact this meaningful change and strategy, companies must start at the Board level and invest in efforts at every level of the company. The days of cascading DEI work are over. Companies that are serious about outcomes, not just activity, have a top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out approach to embedding DEI and the habits and culture within the company. With a robust metrics-based strategy, they can measure the progress of initiatives on an ongoing basis, make targeted interventions to reduce inequity, and hold people to account as they would with any other priority they intend to make real.
This is exactly where Heidrick & Struggles International (Nasdaq: HSII) excels.
An industry leader serving industry leaders, Heidrick & Struggles equips global organizations with leadership consulting, culture shaping, and senior-level executive search services delivered through the lens of DEI. It is the first premier leadership advisory firm to offer a full spectrum of executive and high-end talent solutions, catering to clients, including 70 percent of Fortune 1000 companies.
Driven by a team of professionals with deep-rooted industry expertise, it empowers clients to ingrain diversity and inclusivity in their cultures, identify the best leaders, and achieve the highest levels of profitability and performance.
“At Heidrick & Struggles, we live diversity. We believe DEI creates a richer tapestry of thinking that results in better grounded and more productive business decisions," says Paulo Mendes, partner at Heidrick & Struggles. “For us, DEI is not merely a political and social goal but a strategic business imperative.”
High-Impact, Integrated Solutions
Heidrick & Struggles' 2nd global DEI survey reveals that a staggering 93 percent of leaders today view DEI as an imperative factor as employees increasingly place value on equality advances in their work environment.
To support and nurture diverse, equitable, and inclusive teams, Heidrick & Struggles offers three interconnected solutions; Accelerate Impact & Results, Create an Inclusive Culture, and Build Visible Representation.
Starting with a leadership consulting service, it leverages in-depth diagnostics to help top teams understand the real and perceived gaps in their organization and embrace DEI for accelerating organizational, team, and individual performance through Accelerate Impact & Results.
Create an Inclusive Culture helps clients with culture shaping by shifting mindsets, building new behaviors, and ensuring inclusion in day-to-day interactions among individuals and teams.
Build Visible Representation is focused on enabling clients to attract, promote, and develop the best talent. Drawing on its robust relationships with companies and candidates across industries, Heidrick & Struggles helps clients tap into both internal and external pipelines, facilitating executive search.
Delivering tangible results for clients through ongoing investment in digital capabilities and innovations is Heidrick & Struggles Navigator, a first-of-its-kind digital leadership platform. It helps clients drive business growth with the right leaders in the right roles through data and AI-powered decision-making.
Rooted in Customer-Centricity
A 100 percent client-focused company, Heidrick & Struggles understands their unique needs, drives them to embrace DEI, and applies best practices to co-create solutions by leveraging its global reach and ingrained industry knowledge of local markets.
At Heidrick & Struggles, we live diversity. We believe DEI creates a richer tapestry of thinking that results in better grounded and more productive business decisions
For example, employers without access to an internal and external pipeline of diverse talent for filling executive roles miss out on the opportunity to make meaningful progress. This is addressed by intentionally propelling them toward advancing diversity within their organizations while staying on top of broader regional trends. The team co-creates a DEI strategy to build truly inclusive cultures and reap the benefits that come from that.
One such strategy included creating a pipeline of Latinx professionals for U.S.-based organizations. Although Latinos contribute to more than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce, they represent less than 3 percent of the board members. Heidrick & Struggles aims to change such scenarios.
In 2018, Heidrick & Struggles announced that at least 50% of initial board candidates presented to clients will be diverse. In 2022, the company exceeded that ambition; the slates it presented around the globe show that its initially presented candidates were 64% diverse.
Co-creating Solutions which Work for Each Client’s Reality
Employing its data-driven methodologies, honed through decades of relationships with the world's largest organizations, Heidrick & Struggles recommends a set of seven actions to clients to help them ingrain DEI into leadership development, executive search, and culture-shaping initiatives.
It begins with clients clearly defining what DEI means to them and ensuring there is a clear understanding of that across the organization. Clients must place employees at the center of their efforts to effectively implement DEI strategies in their daily operations. As the pandemic-induced regulations are relaxed and employees return to offices, the team provides clients with a range of engagement approaches, like brown bag lunches, to keep the communication flowing among leaders. A range of inclusion questions allows clients to give equal opportunities to new hires and long-serving employees and foster a sense of belonging.
Taking a systematic, enterprise-wide approach to DEI, Heidrick & Struggles leverages existing systems for measuring progress by evaluating KPIs and consistently communicating the results to employees while driving change by keeping the board members engaged and allowing them to stay in touch with stakeholders.
Leadership teams are guided to answer questions like, “Have you defined diversity, equity, and inclusion for your organization?” or “Are you taking a systematic approach to behavioral change?”
With actionable insights generated from multiple data points, Heidrick & Struggles creates an immediate impact and gives a clear direction for clients. As most clients lack consistency while executing DEI initiatives, it works with their leadership teams to help them stay connected and constantly communicate with each other.
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Data is our lever to develop and employ ambitious yet achievable long-term targets and goals for clients. We familiarize ourselves with their culture and have a strong track record of working with top companies with an emphasis on structure and cultural alignment, which includes racial equity and DEI
Heidrick & Struggles blends its data experience and innovation with clients’ context and lessons learned and best practices to deliver a customized project.
“Data is our lever to develop and employ ambitious yet achievable long-term targets and goals for clients. We familiarize ourselves with their culture and have a strong track record of working with top companies with an emphasis on structure and cultural alignment, which includes racial equity and DEI,” says Mendes.
It also keeps track of the trends in DEI to improve its proprietary services and reports.
Results that Speak Volumes
In an engagement with a Latin America-based, Fortune 100 tech company that was looking to foster DEI in their workplace, it worked with the client’s leadership team to educate them on embracing diversity in an effective way, helping them hire diverse candidates in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.
On another occasion, it helped a Fortune 500 industrial company with several plants across Latin America build their DEI talent pipeline to meet their needs.
Firmly tethered to the mission of fostering diversity at all corporate levels, Heidrick & Struggles is making a significant difference with its diverse teams. More than 50 percent of its board members and 30 percent of the management committee are diverse, which enables the team to truly understand and embrace the differences among themselves and work in an inclusive environment.
To continue its winning streak, it focuses on building new capabilities in artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cybersecurity, and digital transformation and invests in tools and features to offer better solutions to clients.
“As a Latino living in the U.S., I can feel things are changing in workplaces. We are aiming to accelerate this change and strengthen the impact of DEI in the corporate world,” says Mendes.
