Gitanjali Ponnappa, partner with EY's People Advisory Services, has spent 19 years working on major business development and transformation projects in asset-intensive industries around the world. Her work has taken her to emerging markets such as Mozambique, Kazakhstan, and Qatar, and she has covered fields ranging from mining, to oil & gas, to transport and aviation. Her years of international experience have given her in-depth perspective into various facets of organizational culture across industries and countries.

People Matters asked Gitanjali for her thoughts on how companies create and maintain a diverse, inclusive workforce, including senior leadership. Here are the highlights of the conversation.

Can you share some thoughts about the distinction between diversity and inclusion?

To share some personal examples: I've lived and worked on every continent other than South America. I started my career in India in the 1990s, where there was no concept of diversity and inclusion at the time; we didn't even have to think about people from other countries on our team because there weren't any. Then I moved to the US, and I found myself in a program in the mid-western US. The diversity I experienced there was very obvious visual diversity, with both Indian and American colleagues. But the way I experienced inclusion was in people sitting together. We started out diverse, but in the cafeteria, we were sitting at separate tables: the Indians sitting at their tables and the Americans at theirs. But over the course of 12 months, we started having lunch together. And that was inclusion.

At another point in my career I moved to southern Africa and managed a team in Mozambique. The diversity was very obvious: race and culture are addressed very openly there. But for them, inclusion is measured by representation. So if you do performance management and you are rating 10 managers, every race should be represented in those 10. You cannot do it for just one race. It's a different indicator (for inclusion as compared to diversity) entirely.

Stereotypes about certain industries being less open to women are quite common. To what extent do you think a company’s ability to uphold diversity and inclusion is affected by its industry?

I've worked in heavy industries: refineries, oil rigs, among teams in fields that are stereotypically supposed to be male-centric, and I don't think it's the industry.

I think it's one person, whether it's the CEO or the country head or the head of a business unit, who does or does not care about the topic of D&I. If a board does not care about D&I, programs to support it will never be funded.

Today, there is a lot of awareness about D&I at the board level. There is a lot of support for D&I programs. But from a STEM perspective, we do find that there needs to be more representation of women in these programs. Let me use EY as an example of how to address this. For the past decade, one of the ways we have upheld diversity is that each year we have brought in a junior or younger partner, that is a person under the age of 40. That is generational diversity: being inclusive to the perspective of another generation. And in the past five years, we have brought in a partner that addresses "digital", to be inclusive of the skills around new technology.

The senior leadership in many multinational companies tends to end up following the nationality, culture, and other characteristics of the headquarters, to the extent that big investors like State Street are explicitly criticizing how leaders and decision makers are recruited through “old boys’ networks”. How can companies get around this?

I don't believe that there is any way to "get around" it. I think you have to get through it. No board is going to want diversity till they see the value of that diversity. It becomes the job of advisors like EY to advise the board on what type of diversity they need to address. It cannot be diversity for the sake of diversity. It has to be purpose-driven diversity.

The other aspect of this is that irrespective of diversity, you still need to function as a collaborative council. Bringing in diversity is about disruptive thinking: to disrupt ideas, not to disrupt the way a board works together.

And I do believe that with the current world situation, with the pandemic, boards will change. Diversity and inclusion will happen. Right now we have no data behind it, but I believe that this unprecedented, historic situation will force boards to allow diversity and inclusion.

Because we will, sadly, going to have people in the workforce who will be sick. People will have to take time off to care for themselves or family members. All this will disrupt talent acquisition. And when that happens, the "old boys' networks" will need to refresh.

Some companies choose and groom their senior leadership based on international experience, such as sending them on overseas assignments to gain exposure to different cultures. How do you think this impacts their ability to create a diverse leadership team?

I would say that sending people around the globe is a traditional approach to opening the minds of your leadership team. But the question to ask is, does it create inclusivity? You might send a person all the way around the world, on four postings in a decade. They've experienced the culture, but has their experience translated itself into inclusivity? That test could be a very simple thing. For example, their own leadership team: is their team diverse? It could be the quality and the extent and the variety of the programs they fund: are they funding a wider range of programs because of their experience? 

What are some general strategies that work for incorporating diversity and inclusion into business development and transformation?

It starts with having an ally. I've borrowed that word from our LGBT colleagues: it's someone who cares enough about diversity or inclusion or both to step forward. And it must be a powerful ally. In EY, for example, our D&I programs are have sponsors at area-level leadership, country leadership, global leadership.

The next thing is to address diversity and inclusion across many aspects. Those could be gender, race, culture, even the skills and experience that people bring to the table. So we have a wide range of programs to take this into account.

Another thing that works for us is quantifying and measuring the impact of these programs. It was quite hard to do at the start, but now with technology, we are able to stitch together business data with sentiment data (what the market thinks). We have the ability now to look at data very differently, and find meaning in it.

We've applied these strategies to ourselves and to our clients, and we have seen success or progress in some form.