You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.
I can't tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I'm interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Representation in leadership roles is crucial for inspiring diverse candidates in the workforce.
This quote highlights the importance of representation in business leadership, emphasizing that seeing someone who looks like you in a position of power can motivate individuals from diverse backgrounds to aspire to similar roles. It suggests that diversity in leadership not only enhances organizational culture but also attracts talent from varied demographics, as potential employees feel a sense of belonging and possibility within the company.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a corporate diversity training session, sharing this quote can inspire discussions about the importance of representation in hiring.
More from Mellody Hobson
All quotes →Observe your environment. Invite people into your life that don't look like you or think like you
Black women have a kind of advantage over white women in the workplace. They go in prepared to face some discrimination, so when it happens, they aren't shocked.
The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don't look like us, speak like us and don't come from where we come from.
Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail.
I was desperate to understand money. Not to make it, to understand it. I wanted to know how it worked, and I wanted to know so that I would have enough and would be able to make good financial decisions. That led me to Ariel.
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You ask how I feel to be the first female president in southern Africa? It's heavy for me. Heavy in the sense that I feel that I'm carrying this heavy load on behalf of all women.