So, Dave, thanks for joining us today.
We really appreciate you making the time.
It's a pleasure.
I know diversity and inclusion
is a personal passion of yours.
Why has this become so important
and why do you see it as important for Lilly
in terms of its organization and its employees?
If we believe, as I do,
that talent is uniformly distributed across gender and race
and all other dimensions of difference,
if you want the best talent and you're underrepresented
in one of those dimensions, by definition
you're missing a competitive edge.
There's an emotional side too,
which is about engaging your workforce.
And I think there, we found as we engaged
on a big lift in D&I,
there was so much pent up positive energy
that became unleashed by focusing on those differences
and raising up groups that, in society, are not raised up.
So Lilly has talked a lot
and used the pharma marketing construct
around customer journeys, and you've used that,
I think, internally on a number of
your diversity efforts around employee journeys.
So we wanted to tackle those two things.
One is really pull out
where were differences profound,
where were women feeling that they weren't
at an equal footing with men
so that we could then do the second,
which is how to act against those problems.
We could diagnose them much more carefully.
To really understand frustrations, intentions,
you need to do qualitative research and ask people.
So, journaling, and focus groups,
and using qualitative market research techniques.
We turn that against the challenge
of an employee's journey through our company.
How did they start?
What happened that frustrated them along the way?
As they ascended in management,
how were those challenges differing?
And we all know the power of storytelling and narrative,
and by creating narratives that were not
individual women that actually responded,
but generalized journey experiences,
women felt incredibly listened to in our company.
It was describing their experience and you could see
and feel emotionally the difference.
So we got past the why are we working on this discussion,
and quickly to, we've got to fix this.
We don't want that in our company.
And so it's been a profound catalyst.
We've replicated it for women, for Blacks, Latinos, Asians.
We're currently doing LGBTQ, which is going to, I think,
present some new insights
that will surprise many of us as well.
Are there ways that you actually measure
the business benefits that you mentioned
from diversity and inclusion?
We think about D&I as having four main impacts on us.
One is talent sourcing.
Another is talent unlock inside the organization,
or the best people getting to the right jobs.
The third is innovation.
And the fourth is market impact.
So are we reaching diverse populations?
We do set goals and measure ourselves against goals
for representation at every level of the company
in every division of the company
for the major ethnic groups in the U.S.
and globally for women.
We measure our performance in communities of color,
reaching particularly the Latino,
Hispanic communities in the U.S.
It's been a challenge for pharma and a challenge for Lilly.
We serve a number of diseases
that are quite prevalent in that community
and that's an area we're measuring performance as well.
Lilly is headquartered in America's heartland,
yet a lot of the diversity and inclusion issues are global.
How do you adapt what you do or approach across
different cultures and markets that you operate in?
We've built a set of tools to understand
and then impact D&I across the company,
but of course the specific dimensions
of diversity in a particular culture are highly contextual,
and so there we let our local leadership decide
what are the priorities for you and your business?
The goal everywhere is to look like and access talent
that is similar to the entirety of the population.
Can you tell us a bit more about
the reverse mentoring program you have
with your LGBTQ employees and with senior executives?
The idea is that the diverse person who's often junior
is mentoring the executive in
not just how to interact
with employees of that difference,
but also even the subtleties that perhaps
we all unintentionally project that are not effective,
or in some cases offensive.
What else do you see left
to do on diversity and inclusion?
As I now look at the leading metric,
which are of the jobs we can staff each day,
how are we doing, it looks very promising.
I think we have a chance over the next several years
to have gender balance across the company at all levels,
to have minorities in the U.S. represented
at the rate of their population in the U.S.
Those are real goals we can achieve.
Will we be done with D&I there?
No, no way.
Because D is a precursor to I.
Diversity is often described as being invited to the party.
The inclusion is being asked to dance, basically.
Are you engaged in the decision making,
in the leadership of the company fully?
And we have a lot of work to do there.
Probably the diversity journey,
we're at the end of the beginning here.
And I think we're seeing when we work on that
we can make real progress and become a very diverse company,
and that by itself is a huge achievement.
What do you then see as your role in taking that on
and making it continuing to advance?
When push comes to shove, you have a high performer,
who may be not so inclusive, what happens to them
in their career versus someone who is inclusive?
That's treating it like a business issue,
and I think that's a unique role a CEO can play as well.
Dave, thank you for joining us today
and sharing your experiences and learnings,
and really congratulations to Lilly
for the success you've had in really driving diversity
and building an inclusive culture.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.