Cascading DEI at Cars.com
D.V. Williams, Chief People Officer at Cars.com partners with ExecOnline to cascade the organization's DEI foundation.
D.V. Williams, Chief People Officer, Cars.com
One of the things that we as an organization did as we were building our three-year roadmap for DE&I, is this focus on learning.
So, you know, the first thing we think about with diversity people say, you have to start with representation. And we’ve been fortunate as we look at the leadership ranks, our board of directors is 36% diverse or identify as diverse. Our executive team was 40% ethnic and racially diverse. And so it was less representation and more of a pivot to learning.
And so the first thing that we did, we partnered with ExecOnline. We really focused on everyone from the CEO and all of his direct reports first go through the diversity equity and inclusion training for a couple of months through ExecOnline.
And that was very pivotal because we all have our kind of notions of what we believe the foundational components are and what we should be doing, but to level set that expectation of how we should then guide the organization was extremely important from there.
You have to keep that train moving. So now the executive teams, direct reports are going through the exact same training so that we can start to build this culture of what the organization should look like, how we should be leading from the top and then make making sure that we have the right internal tools to educate at all other levels within our team.
