As private equity firms strive to become more inclusive, chief diversity officers from three firms with advanced strategies spoke at our M&A’s Leaders in DEI Speak event and shared their approaches. Mergers & Acquisitions recently recognized all three in our inaugural PE Leaders in DEI list, featured in our September issue.
“Carlyle, through its over 200 portfolio companies around the world, employs nearly 1 million people, so it’s a pretty exciting platform to drive change broadly,” said Kara Helander, managing director, chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, Carlyle Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CG). The firm has recently tied compensation to progress on diversity, equity and inclusion, starting with the CEO and giving DEI Incentive Awards to employees. “You pay for what you care about and what matters. We’ve given $2 million to 50 of our colleagues who have gone above and beyond in driving DEI in the firm.”
“When you step back and look at the alternatives sector as a whole, you see a lot of change in business models,” said Jonathan Simon, managing director and head of leadership development and diversity, human capital, Apollo Global Management Inc. (NYSE: APO). “Apollo started out 30 years ago as a pure-play private equity firm, but we have evolved the platform now into being infrastructure. We’ve got an incredibly growing private credit business. As you think about the growth of AUM and the growth of the employee base, you think about the modern high-performance culture and operating in this 2021 environment, with the overlay of a pandemic. We think intently about, what is culture? We think about incentivizing the right behaviors, and getting people to think about what drives culture and getting people to be culture carriers. Ultimately, we all own this space that we go to work in every day to serve our investors. If you look at the arc of Apollo, for us to be able to continue to attract the best talent to the firm, we have to evolve the culture. We’re on a journey to help our leaders understand the role of vulnerability, the role of empathy, the role of belonging and psychological safety on teams.”
“At Vista, we’ve developed a program called Conscious Inclusion,” said Khalida Ali, director of diversity and inclusion, Vista Equity Partners LLC. “We’re all familiar with the idea of unconscious bias, and it’s part of the conversation, but we recognize and acknowledge that, yes, bias is in all forms and facets of everyday life, but we move the conversation beyond that to focus on: What are those proactive behaviors, what are the actions that leaders and employees can take on to actually foster this culture that we want?”
To discover more of the conversation, watch the video.
— Mary Kathleen Flynn
