Building a world-class finance team: companies can gain a competitive advantage by shaping their finance departments with exceptional talent and guiding those selected on a path that benefits all.

• Author: Wagner, Leslie
• Position: DIVERSITY

Diversity is good for business. In companies throughout the world, diversity planning thrives, focusing on an integrated series of efforts, from recruiting to retention designed to harness each individual's full potential. These efforts deliver a more engaged workforce, one that is more reflective of today's global customers and committed to delivering improved results.

But in these days of economic uncertainty, even well-proven programs are asked to do more with less. For companies with a deep history of diversity programming, or those in the early stages of building functionality, there are a series of strategies that can be leveraged to maximize the impact of diversity efforts in the finance organization.

Diversity in Finance

Bringing diversity programming directly to finance professionals can help breathe new life and enthusiasm into these efforts. Far from diminishing diversity efforts led by Human Resources, finance-specific diversity programming can broaden the scope of those initiatives. By starting with a functional commonality, diversity activities can be tailored to be more relevant to financial professionals.

In doing so, they can deeply explore diversity in its broadest sense--from traditional topics of gender, race and ethnicity to other diversity dimensions, such as background, experience, communication style and family status.

Further, by creating more diversity events through finance-sponsored efforts, team members can be afforded additional opportunities to participate in, and even help craft, diversity initiatives.

Engage All Levels of Employees

On initiatives from the roll-out of new enterprise resource planning systems to the adoption of new reporting processes, executive sponsorship frequently means the difference between success and lukewarm adoption. So, too, can diversity endeavors benefit from the engagement of a company's senior leaders.

Not only does this sponsorship signal that diversity activities are of the highest value, even in times of cost optimization, it also promotes greater participation by all team members through the promise of exposure to senior management.

Encourage corporate leadership to actively participate in diversity planning committees. Their support will win greater volunteer commitment from all levels of the organization, and employees from different teams and work groups will be able to learn from their leadership as they collaborate to develop relevant diversity activities.

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