Pat Wright: Strategies for Increasing Diversity in CEO Succession Pools

Jobs, Skills and Training

In his most recent View from the Top blog, Professor Pat Wright polls and classifies the themes imposed by companies to diversify their CEO succession pools, with results indicating that companies fall on a broad spectrum varying from no strategy to purposefully accelerating their diverse talent.  These strategies include prioritizing diversity through other initiatives, honing in on diverse successor candidates earlier in their career, and setting diverse candidates on accelerated programs.  Wright notes that, while it is "not good news that almost 20 percent of the companies we surveyed seem to be doing nothing to increase the diversity of the CEO succession pools…over 80 percent are making some kind of efforts to increase the number of women and minorities that someday will be able to compete for the top job."