According to Scotiabank’s Vice President of Leadership Naomi Shaw, sustainable revenue growth and leadership are two key goals for the bank. “You can’t have one without the other,” she states emphatically. As Canada’s most international bank, operating in more than 50 countries, having a diverse leadership is about reflecting the customers and communities it serves. Over half of its employees are from outside Canada and more than 20% of their Canadian employees are visible minorities. At the leadership level, 12% are visible minorities. And this has not happened by chance.
The bank has taken deliberate steps to change the face of its leadership. Measures have been put in place to imbed a culture of diversity within the organization and to address what she refers to as “unconscious biases” that may pose obstacles to the hiring and upward mobility of diverse people including visible minority leaders.
Simultaneously, the bank encourages the principles of diversity through cross-pollination within the leadership ranks. Through what it calls “cross-cultural leadership” executives are evaluated on this basis with cross-functional moves, a common occurrence at the leadership level. Through this practice, respect for a range of ideas and perspectives becomes integral.
“Learning from experience is the most impactful,” Shaw says. “Even our most senior leaders ‘walk the talk’ and embrace learning from experience for themselves and their teams,” she adds. Since they introduced this approach in 2000, cross-functional moves have risen from 7% of leaders to 36%.
With DiverseCity’s Counts report revealing that just 4% of business leaders are visible minorities, Scotiabank is performing exceptionally well. But Shaw is clear that this is not yet good enough. “We can and we must do better.”
