Young people are vocal, and if we don’t listen and act, they will disengage.

In response to reader feedback, we’re making Journey to 50/50 articles more focused on practical, actionable insights. Who better to launch the new format than David Lawlor, whose company just reached its 50/50 target?

Use your ‘power capital’

Being the CEO or President doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, but it does mean you have elevated power and influence. I call it ‘power capital’: it’s finite and requires choices and intentionality.

Leaders can easily get consumed with profit and loss, and operational meetings, and inadvertently end up with a reactive agenda. But others choose to be proactive, and that’s what I’m determined to do.

As soon as I was offered the job, I knew I wanted to smash the glass ceiling for women in the company in our region. I wanted to have a real impact on ED&I and gender 50/50.

For me, there is no point being in an influential position if I don’t articulate my beliefs to drive a progressive evolution for our business, brands and culture.

Tell your own stories

I’m a storyteller (comes with being Irish, probably!). I often share my mother’s story – she had to forego a university education because her father expected her to take care of her siblings. Her advice to me and my three sisters was to take every opportunity to learn, to grow and to better yourself. How could I regret my mum’s lost opportunities without trying, in my own career, to create an environment where all women feel they can succeed and be their very best?

Seek out allies

A first action as a CEO is to establish who your allies are. Surround yourself by like-minded, pragmatic, cut-through people who can get things done. When I started out in this role, one of my first allies was the Senior VP of HR, who was equally excited about cultural transformation and its potential impact on our performance. We built it out from there. People at all levels were quick to put their hands up. Initially I would’ve seen myself as one of a few, but now I see myself as one of many.

A first action as a CEO is to establish who your allies are. Surround yourself by like-minded, pragmatic, cut-through people who can get things done.

Map the path

Set the question: We know what we want to become, but where are we starting from? What is the path to get us where we want to be? A milestone for me was our first big leadership conference, where I made a promise to senior leaders that we were going to smash the glass ceiling for women in our region. Promises can be tricky commitments at this level – organisations are measured by whether they have a genuine commitment or whether they’re just paying lip service.

I wanted people to know that here at the Kellogg Company the leaders were serious about inclusivity and opportunity.

 

Make a public pledge

I knew nothing about LEAD Network initially. When I found out about the CEO Pledge – a public commitment to attaining progress towards gender balance – I recognised the pivot it could provide our organisation. I don’t think the Pledge should be optional, I think it should be a condition of membership of LEAD Network.

Signing the Pledge galvanises things internally, and brings credibility. Externally, it says a lot about who we are and who we want to be. It connects you with those in a similar situation and those who are already at 50/50 and can share their insights.

Listen and learn

The issue of maternity leave came up consistently as we listened to our people. I have three kids myself, and I watched and learnt from my wife’s experience through maternity. Women can feel vulnerable at that time. This was an evident dynamic around which we could bring change. When one of our leaders promoted someone who was on maternity leave, I loved watching the ripple effect that had on people’s perceptions. We are now in the process of finalising a domestic abuse policy and also our parental leave policy, to drive equity. And we have already introduced new policies on fertility, pregnancy loss and menopause. Women may still have reasons to leave the workplace and that’s fine. But with some of the policy changes we are making, we are giving our people all the options they need to make the choices that are right for them.

Hunt down fresh challenges

We have achieved 50/50 at middle manager and above, but some countries or functions may have less or more of a balance than others. Disparities will always exist. As a manufacturer, supply chain is a big part of our operation, and it’s still largely male dominated. This is an opportunity for us to go after, and we believe partnering with schools and universities to encourage more females into STEM is one way.

 

Use data to prime your pipeline

Reaching our 50/50 target is a real testament to the work our teams are doing. We’re making data-driven decisions and using our people analytics platform to continuously monitor the impact on hiring, development, and attrition to our gender balance. We know that to maintain gender parity, we need to have a strong pipeline of diverse talent and our talent reviews are laser focused on who is coming through as well as on immediate moves.

 

Keep moving forward

We are proud of the progress we have made but it’s important not to be complacent. In the week we temporarily put aside our humility and set LinkedIn on fire with the news that we had hit 50/50, we had a leadership meeting where one of the agenda items was how to sustain that progress. We talked about the residual challenges that we need to address, and how to further build our policies and pipelines so that the momentum is even more robust.

We remain committed to embedding it and ensuring it’s a cultural dynamic that evolves and sticks.

This special edition of Journey to 50/50 is adapted from a speech Olena Vdovychenko gave via a live link from Kyiv at the LEAD Network conference in October 2022.

The outbreak of war

When war broke out I was coming back from holiday. There was a 70km-long queue of people and cars trying to leave the country and I was the only one returning. The emotion was so strong I will never forget it. My only thought was how to save and secure my family and team. My 14-year-old son and my mother were in a bomb shelter, and my great, courageous team were all over the country: 3,400 people, or 7,500 when you include their families. In 2021 we had made contingency plans; we had pre-paid buses in Mariupol ready to evacuate people, but no one expected a massive invasion from all sides.

Leading in times of crisis

Ukraine has been through two revolutions, plus the war in 2014, and Covid. During those crises, METRO learnt that if you care about the team, the team will care about the business. At the start of the war we only wanted to evacuate our teams and offer financial support. What really helped was our lean processes; we have always preached the empowerment of our teams. In crisis this is even more important because you give power to the fields so they can make fast decisions to support their people, their customers, and their communities without needing additional alignment with headquarters.

People around me were full of a mix of different emotions of their own, so I was talking more to myself than listening to advisers. I was listening to my intuition and what I think will be appropriate to secure the teams. This is such an unknown situation for every one of us, and you can’t advise on something you’ve never gone through.

Feeding the country

At the start of the war, 80% of the country’s businesses closed. Half later reopened, with 10% moving to the west of Ukraine. Around 100,000m2 of warehouse space in Kyiv was bombed to destruction. I can never praise my team enough; they managed to switch suppliers, showed creativity in finding new sourcing, and signed new contracts with smaller suppliers to provide the country with food. As a result, at the beginning of the war availability was 50% and it is now above 87%. Twenty two out of our 26 stores are open daily.

Olena Vdovychenko, speaking via live link from Kyiv

Uniting behind a bigger mission

In times of crisis you switch from KPIs to ‘keep people involved, informed and inspired’. Communication is a key success factor. We held twice-weekly town halls to let people know what was happening in the country, which stores were open, where we were reallocating them and what support was on offer. Later came smaller, more informal check-in calls so people could talk about their feelings and concerns.

This is where D&I comes in, the cognitive dimension, by which I mean people’s attitudes. For example, whether you stayed in the country or left; whether you’re physically in store or working remotely. The challenge is to keep the team united. What I did was never judge feelings: people have the right to feel what they feel.

All the emotions are very strong, so what we did was take these strong emotions and centre them on one big idea: victory; supporting the recovery of the country and our humanitarian mission. METRO’s campaign is ‘Heroes for Ukraine.’ I observed that differences of opinion faded in the face of this bigger mission.

Sharing vulnerability

What I can do for my team as a leader is to support shaping their language and how they can express themselves. I openly shared how I was feeling: scared, frustrated because I don’t know when this nightmare will finish. But how I deal with that is I’m focusing on the small, positive things that we achieve every day, such as a little bit better availability, and providing humanitarian aid to our communities and the military.

A broader definition of D&I

In crisis, D&I is not limited by the classical definition; it’s much broader. We never stopped working on D&I: in September we opened the Sunshine Café, where young people with Down’s syndrome bake pizza and bread for the military and the territorial defence force. I’m very proud that we can still support people who have a right to socialisation and employment.

Our next step is to reintegrate veterans. We have 130 young men and women from the company serving and protecting us on the frontline. One day they will come back and we need to be ready. We are adjusting the work- place and looking at psychological support, and training teams in how they will be able to help. I know one thing. We will win. And when we win, my team will be reunited.

Career snapshot

I was born and raised in Middlesbrough in the north of England. When I began my career in the late 1980s the world was very different and gender diversity wasn’t on most companies’ radar. My early roles were at KPMG and Allied Domecq, and then I joined Asda. As I built my own career, I started to see the opportunities that there were to create better gender parity at every stage of what we did. I have been President and CEO of Walmart International since 2018 and before that held various leadership roles within the US division. I never had a plan for my career – I’ve just followed what I enjoy, which is leading and developing people.

Walmart’s D&I journey

From the inception of the company, fairness and respect for individuals was in the DNA. We hear a lot about our founder, Sam Walton, but in fact his wife Helen was a driving force in the business, and this set us on a path where inclusion has been critically important. Now a broader concept of inclusion has started to take hold, because we need to think not just about gender equity but about intersectionality. Since last year we have been tracking not just the proportion of women, but the proportion of women of colour, which gives us a more nuanced picture. Our latest data, for the mid-point of the fiscal year 2022, shows that, globally, women in management accounted for 43.99% of the total, while the proportion of women at officer level (vice president and above) was 33.49%. In the US, women accounted for 45.64% of total management promotions, while women of colour made up 18.8%.

We publish a twice-yearly Culture, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report on our progress. This creates transparency and accountability for the company, but it also tells a story to the world that others can learn from. It was a lot of work getting the right data and validating it, but we wanted to shine a spotlight on areas where we have challenges and successes. There was a debate within the company about how to do it, but not about whether to do it. I am very proud; it’s a privilege to have a platform to talk about these issues and change things.

Walmart’s approach

We employ 2.3m people around the world, and we touch countless others – customers, consumers, shoppers – in 24 countries. We design our business to have a workplace culture where associates with unique identities, styles, experiences, abilities and perspectives are understood, supported and championed. That work depends upon the coordination and collaboration of teams from across the company to create a consistent and cohesive experience.

I’ll share a couple of examples. Our reach is pretty unique: we believe education is at the heart of opportunity. When we set out to build our first Walmart Academy, I was talking to a department manager and I said ‘When are you going to become an assistant store manager?’ and she said ‘Oh I can’t do that, I’ve got kids and it’s a six-week course which is too far away from where I live’. So we knew it was important to design our academies so that every one of our associates could get there with daily travel of no more than 90 minutes each way. I actually had one of my team with a map, measuring where those points were that everyone could easily get to. We now have a network of 200 Walmart Academies and are spreading the model to the rest of the world.

Supplier diversity is another important area for Walmart. We focus on women-, community- and minority-owned businesses, and how easy it is for them to enter our supply chain, providing them with training to be able to do things like e-commerce and export. We also ask our bigger suppliers to think about diversity on their teams. When we go to meetings, I will say things like, ‘I notice there are no women on your team, it would be good to see some more women next time’.

Learning 1 : Small things matter

CEO backing for big programmes is great, but you have to walk the talk. Small things matter and you need to pay attention to detail. For example, when you go to a meeting, do you think about the group you take with you and what message that sends out? Make meetings inclusive. Culture is created not by words but by people starting to believe in things when they see actions happening.

Learning 2 : Look in the mirror

Be transparent with your data. There is nothing like looking in the mirror to help underline where you are and what more you need to do. It is a catalyst and a galvaniser for the business overall.

Learning 3 : Create the right support

It’s one thing to recruit or promote women, but it’s another thing to retain them and ensure they succeed. You need to go far beyond simply having a diverse slate – you need to put in place systems and support. For example, we do a lot of listening and sponsorship with our Associate Resource Groups, and we created Shared Value Networks which draw on Walmart’s capabilities to contribute positive change in the criminal justice, education, financial and healthcare systems.

Next steps for Walmart

Across the business the more opportunities we give to our associates, the better we will be as a company. We are doing this around the world, so we can bring more people through, and we are starting the process earlier as well, by collaborating with schools and universities. I believe that if we never take our foot off the gas, we will reach the point of having a fully inclusive business at all levels.

Next steps for our industry

In retail it has been notoriously challenging to increase the number of senior women but this is now changing; there is definitely a will to change. We have to keep feeding the talent pipeline, and finding new ways to reach that balance. Digital communication means we don’t have to do it in the same old way – we can think differently. I believe fundamentally in hope. Optimism is telling people it’s going to be okay, but hope is giving them a path to get there and making them believe it can happen.

Career snapshot

As the Company Group Chairman for Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health EMEA, I focus on making a positive impact on people’s personal health through our consumer brands. Prior to this role, I was Managing Director of the Northern Europe business at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health. I’ve previously been Head of Global Categories at GSK, where I led the global marketing team, and Marketing Director for Pfizer Consumer Healthcare UK and Ireland. My wife is a doctor, and we raised our family as a dual-career couple, which gave me a lot of empathy and insights into how we can best support brilliant talent who are juggling family and professional commitments. I divide my time between the UK and Switzerland and I love travelling with the family. I’m an extrovert; sharing new experiences with people is how I recharge.

Johnson & Johnson’s D&I journey

As a business we have a long track record of treating our people fairly and with respect, and making sure everyone feels like they belong. Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health has been a foundation partner of LEAD Network since 2016 and our values are absolutely aligned. Johnson & Johnson’s Health for Humanity goals require that we achieve gender parity in management positions globally by 2025.

Johnson & Johnson’s approach

We want to be inclusive, to make sure people don’t feel like they have to be a different person at work. It’s not just about gender; it’s vital that we think broadly about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), whether it is sexual orientation, race, age, or different abilities. We’ve just published our third We All Belong: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Impact Review which charts the progress we made in 2021. For example, we broadened our enterprisewide DEI goal-setting programme beyond our most senior leaders to all 27,000 people leaders across Johnson & Johnson. Each of these leaders was asked to commit to at least one annual DEI goal. And an additional 20,000 individuals opted to do the same. Progress made against these goals is assessed in the year-end performance review, and is linked to compensation, helping to drive real, measurable change.

Johnson & Johnson is a science- and technology-based business, and talent in that space is at a premium, which helps to drive diversity. We do a lot of work with school-age girls and young women to encourage them to consider a STEM career. We have a number of initiatives to accelerate the development of talent, for example our Ascend and enterprise sponsorship programmes. And we also have a paid four-month returnship programme, Re-Ignite, available in several countries around the world, to help professionals get back into a STEM career after a career break. Re-Ignite offers onboarding, mentoring and technical training within a nurturing, inclusive environment.

When I was growing up, my mother worked, but she also kept the family together as my father pursued his career. So when I came into the workplace I firmly believed in diversity and meritocracy: I hired people on the basis of who was best for the job. This meant I had a gender-balanced team, and I quickly began to learn more about the challenges facing women in the workplace. I remember having to convince women to take promotions. They would say, ‘Am I ready, can I do it?’ It was about confidence; I never heard it from men. Setting the right tone from the top and establishing management accountability are really important. We have had DEI goals that have long been in place for senior management, but now all managers have very clear DEI targets. It needs to be all managers, because otherwise the layer of middle management becomes the glass ceiling. When we hire, we are looking for talent who will be allies to reinforce an inclusive culture.

At Johnson & Johnson we have lots of different employee resource groups (ERGs), such as Open and Out, which is for our LGBTQ+ community, and the Alliance for Diverse Abilities, which I sponsor. One of our longest-standing ERGs is the Women’s Leadership Initiative, which was set up more than 25 years ago. Initially it was for women to share their experiences, but it has expanded over time to become a significant influencer in how we set our agenda to promote women. We hear from women in the business about what they need, and that in turn informs our strategic approach. Our STEM initiatives came from that; it’s a cohesive environment.

CPG companies can use their brands, marketing and scale to drive the agenda and eradicate stereotypes. Johnson & Johnson champions positive role modelling; we call this CAST, which stands for ‘Casting Aside Stereotypes Today’. We audit our output to make sure we are representative of the audiences we serve. We also leverage our procurement, through our Supplier Diversity & Inclusion Programme, which has a track record of advancing supplier diversity around the world. In the UK, we are one of seven founding partners of the Buy Social Corporate Challenge, an initiative to promote the use of social enterprises in corporate supply chains. In addition, we support minority-owned and women-owned businesses as part of our UK programme.

Next steps for Johnson & Johnson

We want to retain and attract the best talent we can. We know from research that Gen Z and Millennials have high expectations of companies, and this makes a massive difference to who they choose to work for. Those firms that only pay lip service to diversity, they avoid. But companies that are driving a diverse and inclusive agenda, and are socially responsible, will attract all that new talent.

Next steps for our industry

Covid has opened our minds to the possibility of flexible working. In Europe we were pretty flexible already but I think the pandemic has opened our eyes further, presenting opportunities to have more flexibility, whether that is condensed hours, job sharing or remote working. Johnson & Johnson is now trialling a hybrid workplace, with a blend of days in the office and days working remotely. It’s still important to come together regularly to innovate and it’s good for people’s mental health. I believe flexible working will encourage more people to stay within the workforce at all life stages, so they can get fulfilment from both their career and their family life.

Career snapshot

I earned a degree in political science followed by an MBA at Harvard, and started my career as a sales rep in the wine industry. In 1995 I founded State Street Brewing Company in Chicago, which I sold in 1997 when I joined Coors Distribution Company as VP and General Manager. I went on to hold senior leadership roles with AB InBev, the Coca-Cola Company, and The Nature’s Bounty Co., where I was President and CEO. Since 2017 I’ve been CEO of Kellogg Company and in 2018 became Chairman.

When I was first approached about taking on my current role it was one of the most humbling moments of my career: I became my eight-year-old self, sitting around the breakfast table with my parents and my siblings. Kellogg has a culture of belonging and as soon as I got here I could see that gender equality was in the company’s DNA.

 

Kellogg’s D&I journey

We have a target of 50% women in managerial roles globally by 2025, and are on track to hit it. In 2021 we had 44.4% women at management level and 38.4% at senior management level. Five of our 12 Board directors are women, and four of the 13 members of our Executive Committee are women. More details can be found in our 2021 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Annual Report.

Covid provided us with a challenge and a setback; the gender equality figures fell slightly, but these are now rising again. We continually track how we are doing; we have the charts and organisation designs in front of us and we update them in real time. We meet as a leadership team regularly and are constantly asking, what is working and not working? Where we have female leaders, they attract others. Where women are under-represented it can be difficult to get over the hump; you need that critical mass. But once we get that, we break through.

 

Kellogg’s D&I approach

Our goal is not just about being seen as progressive. In a company like ours, where the vast majority of purchasing decisions are made by women, if we don’t have the right level of representation we are not doing our job to understand the consumer. We are transparent about our goals because it creates accountability. Kellogg signed the CEO Pledge in 2019 and our continued partnership with LEAD Network remains as important as ever. To help fulfil our commitment, we have 353 LEAD members across Europe and six volunteers who play an active role in the LEAD Education Committee and local chapters.

 

Start with your Board: do you have a gender balance, and if not, what is the plan to get there? Then do the same for your executive leadership team, because employees look up and want to see people they can relate to. When we recruit young women, they will see that almost half of our Board is made up of women and people of colour.

Make sure women are not confined to classically female areas, but are in profit and loss roles, and in critical strategic planning and development roles, for example having a seat at the table for M&A decisions. It is fine to have women in HR, but if you don’t have female line leaders and women in manufacturing, sales, and country management, then you are not doing what needs to be done. We want to give women joining Kellogg the message that they can do anything. College graduates deciding where to work will have the choice of a dozen or more female senior leaders they can talk to.

At the start of the pandemic, I intuitively thought the ability to work from home would be beneficial to women. I was wrong. What we learnt was that it was an added burden, and I saw women exiting the workplace quicker than men. We have worked hard to address this. When people were first on Zoom they were embarrassed about noise in the back- ground – children shouting, dogs barking – but what I told them is: ‘That’s the music of the family and it’s absolutely fine to have a child climb on your lap when you’re on a call with me’.

 

Constantly look for areas where you can improve. We hold active listening tours and exit interviews. At the exit interviews we ask people, ‘Is there something we could do to keep you, even now?’ We also have ‘stay interviews’ where we ask people what motivates them to do their job every day. Our longest-running business employee resource group is Women of Kellogg (WOK), which provides a great way for us to stay engaged and get real-time feedback. We don’t just want the stuff that is nice to hear, we say: ‘Tell us what your unmet needs are’.

You also need to reach outside of your organisation to get a view of the most contemporary situation. We work with an organisation called WeQual, which holds a contest for women who are one step short of the C-suite. I interview the finalists and select the winner. It is a great opportunity to hear from women outside of our company, understand their career progression and learn what got them to where they are today.

Next steps for Kellogg

In the past two years we have gone from crisis to crisis, and we need to lean in with empathy. We focus a lot on mental health, because if people don’t take care of their wellbeing they won’t be happy, productive and successful. We recently introduced a program called Locate for Your Day, which means deciding where you will be most productive on any given day, and working from there. I never go to bed at night worrying about whether we are working hard enough, whether people are putting in the hours at the office. What I do worry about is, are people getting the resources they need to be successful?

 

Next steps for our industry

As an industry we need to focus on flexibility, agility and learning about ways to get work done. We need to take technological advances and embed them in the future of work. And we need to make sure we do not snap back to old behaviours. A year ago I thought people would never go back to shaking hands. But now everyone is shaking hands again – people have a tendency to revert to the old ways very quickly. Let’s not let that happen, instead let’s be intentional and make sure we continue doing the things that work well and drive engagement.