Lenovo’s Calvin Crosslin is in a unique position. In December 2020, he succeeded his mentor, Yolanda Conyers, to become Lenovo’s chief diversity officer—a role that includes both oversight of representation goals and a product diversity office dedicated to ensuring that the company’s offerings can be used by all.
In an interview with HR Brew, Crosslin explained his corporate diversity strategy and approach to goal-setting, and how Lenovo’s product diversity office came to be.
Companies approach DE&I efforts in different ways. How is your team structured at Lenovo, and how does it guide your approach?
The team is small but mighty…I’ve got a director and then two team members under that director. I spend a lot of my time on the diversity aspects of things, which is really to meet the representation [goals]...My team spends a lot of time making sure that we foster an inclusive culture, everything from training to engagement with our employee resource groups.
We’ve really tried to work across HR to make sure the HR generalists that support the actual business are talking DE&I and embedding DE&I in the business practices…We want people to be thinking about DE&I or accessibility and inclusive design early on in the process.
How do you set goals for your organization?
We looked at our industry peers’ [DE&I reports], our true competitors, peers, and in some cases customers…Then we asked our internal HRIS organization to do an analysis of how we got from around 17%, let’s say, [for] example, women executives in 2017, to the 21% in 2020. What trajectory does that put us on then, what trajectory will we continue to be on naturally without a lot of intervention?
But there’s always a lot of intervention. And so we map that and we [say], “Okay, if you continue that…What does that look like? And if you set slightly more aspirational targets, what does that look like?”
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What is the story of Lenovo’s product diversity department?
It was an all-volunteer army initially. In 2019…in that time-frame, it was a number of folks that just had a passion and energy around this topic, mostly from the software organization, some from legal, and we [got] together and started thinking through this for certain products, particularly software products, that we needed to do a better job—everything from making sure the materials or the launch were accessible or thoughtful [to] the actual design.
We were able to then go hire full-time resources…from there, we’ve now staffed it with not just engineers and software folks, but true accessibility experts that can really help either assess products themselves or…[to] embed that into the thinking of our development team, so that early on, they’re thinking through and designing our products that way.
The journey has been that we have a lot more adopters…I’d say most of the company has rallied around the fact that we need to do this right, from a senior executive level all the way down, that we need to be more thoughtful early in the design phase all the way through the process of launch.
Would you recommend a product diversity office to your peers? How?
Yes…Not only do you make more products accessible, whether you’re talking about neurodiversity or physical disability, but also there’s innovation that comes out of it. Oftentimes, you will create something that’s for one community or constituency, and it has a broad application.
One [example] that I always use [is] closed captioning for someone who’s hearing impaired. But if I’m in a coffee shop or a loud airport, I turn it on, and so that’s a much broader application than what is originally designed for, and we find the same thing with our products.—AK