Message from Diversity Best Practices’ President: Why Diversity Practitioners Need a CFO Mindset to Succeed

Today’s intense, and at times unforgiving, financial climate requires diversity leaders to be exceptionally grounded in their business and financial acumen. The budgetary pressures across the enterprise mean diversity and inclusion budgets must withstand greater scrutiny as business and financial leaders weigh dilemma-laden investment tradeoffs.

To help diversity leaders have the most powerful, business-grounded conversations around the return on investment (ROI) of diversity, we wrestled with this issue at our recent Best Practice Session, hosted by Freddie Mac.

Our keynote speaker Gudrun Granholm, CEO of Box One, Inc. and former CFO at Hanna Andersson and financial leader at the Smithsonian and The Washington Post, shared the essentials of a solid and effective business case and business plan and busted several myths about what ROI is and isn’t.

In selecting Gudrun to give the keynote address, we deliberately invited a Chief Financial Officer without deep experience in diversity—the typical profile of the CFOs evaluating our annual proposals. As part of her presentation, Gudrun gave us her CFO analysis of half-a-dozen articles on the ROI of diversity found in various, well-established publications and from a strict financial framework perspective was able to poke multiple holes through the various arguments.

This is worrisome....READ MORE.