“JPMorgan’s #dei approach mimics that of any other line of business, requiring that its leads are fanatic about the details, facts, and analysis. Your heart can be in the right place, but if you don’t really think about the execution stuff, you’re gonna fail.”
He noted JPMorgan’s HR department bragging some years ago about the firm’s #diversity progress, but fusing all #underrepresented groups. (Think: #women, #blacks, #lgbtq, #muslims.) He responded, “Don’t lump it together. Come back and show me the numbers by VPs, EDs [executive directors], MDs [managing directors], and #hiring and #retention.”
They did. Women? Excellent. Hispanic? Excellent. LGBT? Excellent. Asian American? Excellent. Black? Average. Worse still, the #bank had been #recruiting at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) for years. “I said, ‘That’s not #jpmorgan. We don’t want to be average.’”
It was a turning point for the bank, which set up a separate effort focused on Black employees that was further necessitated when two he brought to the bank departed.
The first jumped ship when he was passed for #promotion from ED to MD for the third time. The other was a managing director who was skipped over for a promotion in middle markets—but later rehired.
Concerning the first, Dimon sent queries as to why the ED hadn’t been elevated to MD and was told he didn’t have the platform. “I said, ‘What the hell does that mean?’” It meant the ED’s role wasn’t big enough—meaning, he didn’t have enough direct reports—to warrant the higher position. “I’d never heard the word ‘platform’ used except when we were promoting a Black person,” Dimon said. It lit a spark. For all the roughly 500 EDs at the bank, he requested that the company track whether they had a platform and were on track for a promotion, according to their boss and their boss’s boss.
Being clear, he caveated that he’s not mandating that managers promote Black EDs. “That’s not what I’m doing. [Rather], are we honest? Do we talk about it? And if they don’t have a platform, we’ve gotta tell them.” Today, the bank tracks how all employees are moving up and through the company and who and how they’re bringing candidates into the firm externally.
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7moDeb!! It’s so exciting for me to see what’s going on because the DEI backlash is finally sifting out the performative people and companies that were never committed to the real work. Room is being made for the real ones to step up! The companies that were dedicated have only become more so. Now that those ones have fallen and are falling off the real work can be done. Adversity will always show the true motives of people. Let the warriors for good arise.