Attracting, Mentoring, and Retaining People of Color in Today's Workforce

By Dr. Brien Walton, Board Chair, Maine Venture Fund

This essay is an excerpt from an article published in the Spring 2022 edition of The University of Pittsburgh’s Leader to Leader Journal in its final form.  A link to the full article is included at the end of this excerpt.

In the early 2000s, it was almost unheard of for many organizations to have a formal plan or program to encourage diversity in the workplace. In the 1980s and 1990s, the few programs that did exist were often there to help organizations avoid or settle civil rights lawsuits. The sad reality is that most people of color often feel marginalized, undervalued, and forced to assimilate to fit in with their colleagues at work, often at the expense of denying who they are.

The lack of diversity in the workplace is something I have witnessed firsthand since becoming an entrepreneur in the late 1980s. Over the years, I have become accustomed to being the only brown face in the room – often placed in the position of “being the first.”

In 2013, I was the founding CEO of the first university-based educational technology venture capital fund in the U.S., which I launched in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. No graduate school of education in the U.S. had successfully established a venture capital fund independent of their business school before.

A similar situation arose when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 created a new financial pathway called “Opportunity Zones” to help economically distressed communities attract risk-mitigated investment from taxpayers with capital gains. Instead of creating a real estate-focused fund for wealthy investors like 98 percent of other Opportunity Zone Funds - in response to this new opportunity, I created the nation’s first municipal-focused fund that prioritized investment in businesses that operated on a socially responsible basis. That social impact investing model was recognized by the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2020.

On July 1, 2021, I became the first African-American to chair the board of directors for Maine Venture Fund. It was unprecedented, in part, because according to a 2021 Deloitte study, only 3 percent of investment executives nationwide are African-American, and according to the 2020 census, only 1.7 percent of Maine’s population is African-American.

Over the past 30 years, I have helped launch and manage dozens of businesses. For many of those years, I believed people of color had to assimilate into the non-diverse cultures found in their respective workplaces to survive. I quickly learned how to “fit in” with colleagues, supervisors, and potential investors and to be as homogenous as possible — a necessity in my early career because many managers tended to fire people who did not fit in with the organizational culture. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, there have been a series of national and international events that have accelerated the proliferation of social justice, diversity, and inclusion initiatives exponentially. 

Despite the steadily increasing number of social justice initiatives, people of color’s advancement in the workplace remains stagnant. Human resource managers and executive recruiters struggle to find “qualified” minorities to lead large-scale projects, businesses, or agencies but often overlook potential talent that may already be in-house. This article examines strategies to help organizations become more culturally competent and ideally, become more effective mentors for high potential minority employees.

Strategies to Help Organizations Become More Culturally Competent

Based upon my experiences over the past decade, I believe the most critical step in creating a diverse and multicultural workforce is to alter an organization’s hiring process to provide equal opportunities for all applicants, regardless of age, nationality, race, religion, or sexual orientation. That helps attract the talent, and then ensures the organization’s culture wholeheartedly adopts those policies as a “shared vision.” This shared vision is what helps retain a diverse and multicultural workforce. To get there, I believe in a three-factor strategy to help organizations become more culturally competent:

Strategy #1: Top-down support is essential

Clear communication from the CEO about what is expected from all employees that is reinforced along the chain of command can expedite the normalization of the policies throughout the organization. The key here is for management to evaluate what they can do to onboard diverse employees while minimizing resentment, e.g., possibly leveraging emotional intelligence principles to create a communication strategy emphasizing flexibility and empathy.

Strategy #2: Create a sense of community – value individuals and incentivize collaboration

A non-diverse culture does not change overnight, regardless of how well drafted the new policies have been prepared. An effective strategy to facilitate the transition to more diversity is starting with intra-organization collaborations that add value to productivity. As part of the interdepartmental collaboration, employees share their insights from personal and professional perspectives. Participants learn from the observations of others about how social impact issues can affect financial operations outside of their day-to-day routine.

Strategy #3: Proactively educate and reinforce diversity and inclusion best practices

All of the good intentions in the world will be for naught unless management has proactively made the effort to understand the principles of diversity and recognize the benefits to the organization. To be a convincing advocate of diversity policies to the rest of the organization, the chief executive must understand and be able to articulate the benefit of and role the policies play in the future success of the organization.

Effective Mentors for High Potential Minority Employees

• Practice empathy

The key to effective mentorship of high potential minority employees is empathy, the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes. My recommendation is to have mentors take the time to get to know who their employees are, where they come from, what they aspire to achieve, and how they plan to get there.

• Adopt a mentor-protégé approach

Mentorship should be viewed as a “transfer of knowledge.” The indirect benefit of this approach is the employee will often perceive the mentor as their ally or advocate, who can help them safely navigate the challenges of a non-diverse work environment.

• Mentors need mentorship too

Just as the best teachers in the country have to receive continuing education to keep their skills fresh, mentors often benefit from training in communication skills, digital literacy, as well as current trends in their subject matter.

In Conclusion

Organizations that re-evaluate their approach to diversity and mentor people of color are positioning themselves for long-term success as the nation becomes more socially aware. Maximizing that potential for success starts with understanding the benefits of a diverse workforce, creating an inclusive corporate culture, and proactively encouraging the professional growth of talented employees of color. As organizations help their diverse employees succeed, the organization better reflects their values as global citizens, which can positively impact how the community views the organization, as well as how the employees view themselves.

To read the full text in its entirety, visit https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/F9Q3S3UHA4G72ZKRVDER?target=10.1002/ltl.20633.

About Maine Venture Fund

Maine Venture Fund invests in dynamic businesses that have the potential for significant growth and impact in Maine. For more information, visit maineventurefund.com. 

Inquiries:
Terri Wark
Maine Venture Fund
(207) 924.3800
terri@maineventurefund.com