Vincent Bryan - 2VP, Information Systems at Travelers
Vincent joined us on a spectacular summer day at the Wayzata Sailing School. Vincent shared several of his stories on learning about being a target of racism and microaggressions when he moved to the US from Jamaica. He has lived and worked in several states and is now in Minnesota with Traveler's. One of the focus' he is involved with is diversity and 5 years ago the company made a commitment to be more diverse and understand what is needed to attract, train, and retain employees from diverse (non-white) backgrounds. The company also makes a concerted effort to reach into other networks such as vets and disabled employees.
Some of the learning shared:
1. He found that within the employee population, they hired diverse employees but did not promote them or increase their salaries, and were not effective in reaching and understanding those employees.
2. Leadership positions were not being filled my minorities and why was this? The dug deeper than the typical "not trained or qualified" and looked into WHY this was an issues.
3. Travelers was not promoting women and they learned that with mentoring, men talked to men about "Business" and men talked to women on "How to be a good employee" so that when it came time to pick candidates, women were not able to speak the business language needed.
4. He also learned that having white men lead in diversity hiring is much more effective than having a minority leading this initiative because it appears to be self-serving.
Travelers has also made some small but important changes in language. In IT they removed "slave" and "master" and replaced with "primary" and "secondary," and removed black/white list and renamed "allowed" and "not-allowed." While these are small changes, they are huge in language impact.