Diversity Exchange

We Are Made By History

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

- Maya Angelou

 Last night, I was privileged to attend an event for an organization called Facing History. This is a wonderful organization with a mission to educate children on the past so that they can make better choices for the future.

 

As we look at the work being done in diversity and inclusion within corporate America, we can easily separate it into 3 parts:

• Educating corporate leaders on the importance of a diverse workforce and enhancing their cross cultural competence.
• Developing employees and ensuring a diverse pipeline of talent for future leadership roles
• Connecting to or developing a diverse external pipeline and ensuring that our future workforce have the technical and social skills to navigate in a complex global workplace.

The value of Facing History is in developing empathetic, cross culturally competent future leaders whose decisions can change the workforce and the workplace as we know it.

So I pass on a question that was asked of the attendees at the Facing History event...What moment in history had the most impact on you and why?

Sincerely,

LaShana Jackson

Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion

 

 

Corporate Integration Leveraging Diversity & Inclusion

In July of 2010, Aon announced the purchase of Hewitt Associates, a former competitor for Aon's Consulting business unit. As most people know, there are many articles and lots of research on why corporate acquisitions/mergers fail. So what does this have to do with Diversity & Inclusion? Well, for me as Aon's Director of Diversity & Inclusion and my counterpart at Hewitt, Tyronne Stoudemire, it represented a new opportunity to combine our efforts and leverage our ability to work together to help support the culture integration and change that needed to take place.

Of course, it is very natural for individuals on both sides of an acquisition to worry about the implications of such a huge corporate undertaking. There is also a point at which the integration work begins and you begin to size one another up...defending what you feel is yours and defending your way to be the best. I think the wonderful thing about being in the Diversity & Inclusion space is that you get opportunities to practice what you preach...to reserve judgments, to not just tolerate but value the differences, to work together to overcome obstacles, and to find the similarities that we can build from. With that in mind, Tyronne and I set to work understanding how we could leverage our skills as Diversity & Inclusion practitioners, and the great work that both firms had already done in the space, to be a model for how integration could work.

And to be honest, we have so many great things working for us...two great client offerings around Diversity & Inclusion that compliment each other, counterpart Networking/Resource Groups that were eager to work with each other, Networking/Resource Groups on both sides that the other firm did not have, different language but similar intent around our strategy, and a joint commitment and passion around the work that we cannot do alone. The impact we can have need not be restricted to Diversity & Inclusion...we also have an opportunity to help support the overall culture shift and knowledge sharing that will need to take place to support the success of this acquisition.

The best way to sum up this synergy is to use an example of our two women’s groups, Hewitt's Women In Leadership and Aon's Women’s International Network, who worked together to host an event in December. These two groups quickly came together to leverage their collective strength to host an extremely successful event around Branding and Networking. This event, which was attended by over 250 colleagues, allowed all parts of our business to come together around a common development need of personal branding but to also get to Know Aon so that we can deliver distinctive value for our clients.

I am excited by the opportunity this synergy presents and look forward to the continued success Aon will have with Aon Hewitt as a business unit moving forward. With 59,000 colleagues around the world, there is much work to be done but with Tyronne’s leadership within Aon Hewitt in partnership with me, supporting our overall Firm, we have a great platform for success.

 

LaShana Jackson

Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion

 

 

I am happy in Holland....

As a parent of a child with special needs, I know the toll it can take on any parent...especially a parent who works full time! To help support working parents at Aon who have children with special needs, we have been piloting a Share Point or internal collaboration website to allow these parents to share information, resources, and sometimes just to connect and know that someone else is going through the same thing.

In honor of all of those dedicated parents who spend hours researching the best doctors, finding the right schools, and in general just fighting to give their child the opportunity to thrive, I share the following. This story was shared with me by my son's wonderful and dedicated teacher. I hope it gives you the same sense of peace it gave me.

 

Welcome to Holland

 by Emily Perl Kingsley (1987)

 

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this...

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After a few months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland".

 "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a new group of people you would have never met.

It's just a different place, It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy that Italy. But after you've been there for a while and catch your breath, you look around....and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills...and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know if busy coming and going from Italy...and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away....because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

 But....if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, very lovely things....about Holland.

 

LaShana Jackson

Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion