CEO: Ralph Babb
The 50 companies on this year’s Best Companies for Diversity list represent brands that recognize the value in cultivating an inclusive environment driven by company leadership, through senior management and the board of directors, as shown in the Black Enterprise Registry of Corporate Directors. Some are taking a step further, by engaging employees during these turbulent and confusing sociopolitical times.
Here, we’d like to highlight Comerica, Inc., a financial services company based in Dallas, and what it’s doing to push forward and nurture diversity and inclusion.
At Comerica, each of the senior executive decision-heads are required to have diversity and inclusion embedded as an objective in their performance plan. If the goals defined on a given scorecard are successfully achieved, it is tied directly to the executive’s performance evaluation and compensation. The senior executives also require managers to include diversity in their performance plans, and they strongly encourage other employees to do the same.
The company’s 17 employee resource group networks and five local diversity awareness roundtables set annual goals, reporting the achievement of those goals to the Chief Diversity Officer at the end of the year.
In an effort to strengthen their commitment to diverse communities, Comerica has 19 Market Segmentation Initiative teams, which focus on building long-term successful relationships with targeted populations across all of Comerica’s markets, including African Americans, Hispanics, the LGBTQ community, and women. The teams aim to reach these populations by demonstrating that Comerica understands them and their financial needs. Some of the ways the teams strengthen relationships include community outreach through event sponsorship, interacting with community leaders, getting involved with chambers of commerce and other community organizations, and hosting educational seminars and workshops in the various communities.