NxtWork provides a solution to expanding Board and CEO resilience through diversity

On Thursday, June 29, 2023, the US Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional the use of race in college admission, a practice that many universities have used to redress inequities caused by the long history of bias against Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans and increase student diversity. While universities develop new forms of maintaining a diverse student body, concerns rise over the possibility that this strike to affirmative action practices in higher education might trickle down to DEI initiatives in the workplace. In the current environment, NxtWork’s unique focus on meaningful engagement will be the solution to continuing progress in corporate diversity.  Meaningful engagement focuses on engaging with diverse leaders in their areas of power and expertise. From there, developing trust and respectful relationships, grounded in professional interactions that enhance business resilience through interaction based upon ideas concerning critical business objectives that matter.

The US still hasn’t evolved out of the striking racial disparities in employment. African Americans still earn on average almost $30,000 less a year than their white counterpart and are usually overrepresented in low-paying jobs. At the senior leadership level, 12% of board members in Fortune 500 companies are black—a group that represents 14% of the total US population—but only 8 of the Fortune 500 companies have a black CEO—an all-time high. Studies have demonstrated that diverse leadership leads to more resilient business decision-making. In Europe, there is already a requirement that 40% of boards should be comprised of women. Yet, maintaining a diverse board and C-Suite is increasingly essential to the success of global companies. “Many of our consumer packaged goods, tech, and healthcare companies are looking at markets in Africa, the APEC region, LATAM, and those are highly diverse locations,” explained Dominique Shelton Leipzig—cofounder at NxtWork—for Diligent.

With the rising risk of employer-driven diversity programs being challengeable in a court of law, there will be a greater role for third-party affinity groups. NxtWork’s focus is on introducing companies to a group of highly diverse women leaders in their fields.  While their backgrounds inform their worldview, what they bring to the table is high-performing expertise, having led diverse teams for decades in companies with a collective market cap of over $4 trillion.  The focus on meaningful engagement with NxtWork’s members allows a company to achieve business resilience with speed and scale by focusing on enhancing talent in the board room with high performers who are experts in their field and are who are diverse. NxtWork sponsors women based on their track record of talent and success knowing that sponsorship and meaningful engagement—engagement based on a candidate’s professional expertise and strength—are often the missing links between achieving business resilience with a diverse team at scale. This Supreme Court decision is an opportunity for companies to upgrade how they recruit and support diverse candidates for CEO and Boardroom positions and NxtWork is there to help in the process.