Diversity MBA Magazine – Managing Diversity, Executive Leadership Development, Diversity Jobs & Hiring

The corporate world is in constant flux. The economy gets more global every day. Business is more competitive. Technology quickens the pace of change. Corporations are forced to adapt, to morph, to be agile. That pressure is passed on to employees. “The implications for individuals is that they must bring an ability to be agile, to be flexible, not with who they are, but with what is going on in the market and how it impacts business and business needs,” says Juan Johnson, president of the Diversity Leadership Academy in Atlanta. Add to the mix an anemic economy and it makes for a challenging situation for African Americans.

“When America gets a cold, African Americans get pneumonia. We are the last hired, and first fired. While we’ve maintained our numbers in some corporate downsizing, in others our numbers dwindled,” says Price Cobb, a psychiatrist, executive coach, expert on corporate diversity and co-author with Judith Turnock of  Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.

Without question, African Americans have seen progress. A decade ago there weren’t African-American CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. Though there are only a handful – there are a handful! Over a quarter of a million African Americans are firmly entrenched in managerial and executive positions at companies that are household names. Diversity is on the radar. Read the full story

The glass ceiling doesn’t have to be an obstacle. More and more people of color are finding ways around it, and in many cases breaking through. East Germans recently celebrated 10 years of life without the Berlin Wall. Perhaps someday in the coming decades, people of color in America will be able to celebrate life without another less tangible barrier: the infamous glass ceiling.

Obstacles & Outcomes for Minority Professionals

That is the hope embodied in a book by David A. Thomas, a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School, and John J. Gabarro a UPS Foundation Professor of Human Resource Management at the Harvard Business School. Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America is the fruit of six years of research, analyzing and writing by the pair. Thomas, who is African American, and Gabarro, who is white, tout it as the first in-depth study to examine the paths that lead racial minorities -African Americans, Hispanics and Asians – to the executive suite.

“Breaking Through” is an exploration and explanation of the individual and organizational factors that lead to people of color being able to advance to executive jobs in corporations – in particular, to line executive jobs where they are responsible for running major lines of businesses and where there’s profit and loss responsibility and control over organizational and institutional resources,” Thomas said. The study examined three anonymous Fortune 500 firms and 54 executives that work at those firms,

The companies were of three very different industries, ranging from high tech to very low tech and labor intensive. “We wanted to identify firms that seem to have done better at promoting people of color to line executive jobs because we wanted not only to tell a story about individual effort and experience, but organizational efforts and experience,” said Thomas.

The 54 executives included 20 minority executives (13 African Americans, 4 Hispanics and 3 Asians); 13 white executives; 13 minorities who plateau-ed in middle management; and 8 whites who plateau-ed in middle management. There are not very many studies that have looked at all of those groups together…Our findings apply across groups.” Read the full story