Can You Create A Winning Team?...Roosevelt Thomas

For future business leaders, the state of business, and our country, we need to get beyond seeing diversity as just achieving the desired profile-whether it be racial, a gender balance, or even a certain age mixture. We assume that if we get rid of all of the "isms" -racism, sexism, and so forth-that everything will be okay. Wrong. If you don't know how to manage a diverse workforce, you won't move your company forward. The challenge becomes: Can you, as a manager, create an environment that allows you to access talent, however it comes packaged?

--R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., Subject-Matter-Expert, Diversity Management 

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY provides a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. This blog is Part III of the series, "Are We There Yet? My Climb and Journey". In this blog, I talk about a few bumps in the road or incidences at AT&T that occurred while I was getting my MBA in an Executive Education program at the University of Pittsburgh.  These incidences became a turning point in my career.  

A conversation with John T. Delaney, PhD., Dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, about the current state of women in executive leadership and why women do not choose to get advanced business degrees at the same rate they obtain professional degrees in other areas, like law and medicine, was the catalyst for this series.

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As a company, AT&T was committed to diversity. First of all, they had a company statement to support diversity and denounce discrimination. They also provided diversity training for their employees. In fact, across all of their divisions, AT&T had implemented by the late 1990’s all of the steps referenced in Frank Kalman’s recent article on Diversity-Executive.com, “Five Steps to Embed Diversity and Inclusion Into Organizational Culture”.[i]  (See below for the “Five Steps”) Personally, I saw their support of my business education at the University of Pittsburgh as a demonstration of this commitment. However, two specific incidents that occurred during my MBA program with my local division’s leadership left me with a very negative impression of my local management.

Let me start off by saying it was the company’s policy that once they decided to support an employee in an Executive Education program, they would be fully funded for the duration of the program.  However, my division, without cause, tried to re-nig on certain parts of its financial commitment to my Executive Education program. While I was completing my MBA program, I along with several other employees in my group was moved into a new division because of the dissolution of an international only government marketing team. As time drew near for the capstone class trip that would include travel to Prague in the Czech Republic, Italy, and France, my new division...

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