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In 2000
The Coca-Cola Co. settled the largest
racial-discrimination lawsuit in history. Filed on behalf
of approximately 2,000 former and current US employees, it
resulted in a $192.5-million settlement.
 A
seven-member task force headed by former US Labor
Secretary Alexis M. Herman was appointed by the court to
oversee the company’s diversity efforts. Before its
four-year term ended, Coca-Cola, under CEO Neville
Isdell’s leadership, asked that its
oversight be extended another year.
The focus
of this diversity work was treating female and minority
employees equitably in hiring, evaluations, raises and
promotions. But Isdell and his team had an additional
goal: to turn diversity into a business advantage.
Take me
back to 2000: What was your role at Coca-Cola then?
At the
time of the settlement, I was vice chairman of Coca-Cola
Hellenic Bottling Co. in the
UK,
the second-largest bottler in the world, and looking
forward to retirement. I retired at the end of the
following year, after 35 years with the company.
When did
you come back—and why?
The call
to return to The Coca-Cola
Co., this time as chairman and chief executive officer, came in
2004. It would have been easy to pass up the offer and
leave the challenges to others, but the company I first
joined in 1966 and loved so much kept falling short of
what I knew it could be.
With the
task force’s guidance, Coca-Cola was in the process of
establishing a culture that embraced diversity and
harnessed its strength, and I wanted to be part of this
effort.
In terms
of diversity, where is Coca-Cola today?
We have
come a long way. Between 1999 and 2006, minority
representation among Coca-Cola executives at the assistant
vice president level and above increased from 8.4 percent
to 21 percent. The percentage of women in executive
positions grew from 16 percent to 28 percent during the
same time.
Below the
executive rank, minority managers increased from 16
percent to 25.5 percent. Coca-Cola is now recognized by a
broad range of organizations as a leader in fairness and
diversity.
How did
the company get to these results?
We
established measurable programs and initiatives designed
to recruit, mentor and retain women and minorities in our
work force. It started with a simple premise: that all our
open positions would have to have diverse candidate slates
before we could proceed with interviewing and selection.
To support
this, we broadened our recruitment strategy and required
our external sourcing partners to do the same. We began to
look and communicate in new places; for example, reaching
agreements with approximately 50 Hispanic job boards,
ensuring that our recruitment messages were being seen by
candidates where they were looking.
In 2001
the company instituted mentoring programs, which have
produced encouraging results. After five years, as the
magazine DiversityInc has reported, 81 percent of
African-American mentees were still with the company, as
were 100 percent of Asian-American and 96 percent of
Latino mentees. (Of Caucasian mentees, 73 percent were
still employed at Coca-Cola.) And 80 percent of all
mentees had progressed in their careers, changing jobs at
least once since the program was implemented.
You said
that Coca-Cola has made diversity central to its business
strategy. How?
We
recognized that to seize opportunities to appeal to
diverse consumers, we needed a work force that could first
see these opportunities. One step in that, of course, is
simply having a more diverse work force. But it also meant
harnessing their insights.
We
established employee networks, which we call forums, to
enable employees throughout the organization to actively
participate in shaping our culture and identifying
marketplace opportunities.
Here’s an
example of one forum’s contributions: a new energy drink
featuring Blue Agave flavoring. With the support and
guidance of our Latino employee network, we launched our
first North American product line with fully bilingual
packaging, including labeling and nutritional information.
Additionally, our employee Latino network helped our sales
force to introduce the product to our Hispanic-owned
customers, leading to an extremely successful launch.
How did
you work with the federal task force?
Most would
have viewed an external task force as intrusive and
unnecessary. Instead, we chose to look at the task force
as a valuable adviser. After all, the members of the task
force, led by former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman,
were all accomplished experts in the fields of diversity
and fairness; to not take advantage of their expertise
would have been a serious management mistake.
We shared
every aspect of our employee strategies, initiatives,
programs, policies and practices with them. We shared all
employment decision data with them. They conducted
employee focus groups and shared thematic insights with
us. In short, we asked them to help us see things for what
they were, and we took advantage of their broad
experiences and insights to change our culture.
Neville
Isdell is chairman and chief executive officer of The
Coca-Cola Co. |
