With the NBA playoffs starting this weekend, the on-the-court product will be featured endlessly in highlights packages and promotional materials across a wide audience. Less exposed than a Kevin Durant dunk will be the work being done by Oris Stuart off the court to improve the league’s diversity and inclusion efforts.
Stuart, who came to the NBA after stints at Korn Ferry and as CEO of Global Novations, is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the NBA. “Our efforts are focused on ensuring the league office is representative of our fans and the marketplace for talent at every level, in every aspect of our business. Not just in the league office, but across all 30 teams as well.”
Considering the NBA’s product isn’t just viewed by millions of Americans every week but globally as well, it’s no small task to ensure everyone feels represented. Stuart has spearheaded best practices processes across the league to help identify minority and women talent and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is a signatory of the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion—which is led by PwC Chairman Tim Ryan. But that’s just the start for Stuart and the NBA.
Chief Executive spoke with Stuart about being in the limelight as a professional sports league and how that impacts the NBA’s diversity and inclusion efforts. Below are excerpts from this conversation.
We start with inclusion as a core and central value to how we operate and how we engage with everyone in our business operation, in our sphere of influence. And that’s essential because when we lead with inclusion, it allows us to support diversity over the long haul. We have created and conduct learning experiences focused on making our environment ever more inclusive. We have dialogue around the things that get in the way of being an inclusive organization. We create expectations about how we will behave as leaders and as colleagues in our organization and our operations and how we engage each other.
That’s where we start. Beyond that, we measure our progress. We develop practices and expectations around how we will recruit talent, how we will develop talent. We do everything we can to really live a up to the values that we espouse. For us, it’s an inside out proposition, starting with inclusion and then really doing everything we can to make sure the diversity of our organization reflects the environment around them.
You don’t create a successful organization like we have over many years without developing approaches and practices that helped make you successful. So any kind of change, like expanding your sourcing for talent, introducing new processes for recruiting, building a new partnership with organizations that can help you on your journey. All of that requires a belief in where we’re headed and a commitment to behaviors.
Change with any individual and certainly within any organization is often difficult. But what I can tell you is that the support at every level of the NBA league office and teams has been incredible. I work for an organization that really wants to be the best it can be. It’s really a matter of identifying things that we can and should be doing differently and really leaning in to those. And so, it’s just, it’s really dealing with the challenge of changing practices that have been built up over time or evolving those practices. That’s a challenge in the midst of driving towards our broader business objectives, but nothing that I haven’t seen the full support of in just about every aspect of our business,
One of the things that is clearly understood at the NBA is that diversity and inclusion are just good for business. Our fans are diverse, the marketplace for talent is diverse, our suppliers are diverse, the communities we live in are diverse. Our players are diverse and from all over the world. Twenty five percent of our players were born outside of the United States. We’re a global business, a global brand with lots of constituents that we aim to serve. There’s a full recognition that to be effective, to grow our game, to continue to innovate, that we have to be diverse and we have to be inclusive. And so the business cases is quite clear to us.
Our focus is on making sure our processes are inclusive at every level. We want to have the best talent. We want to attract the best talent and then we want to select the best talent, whoever that talent is. That’s around gender that’s around. That’s around ethnic background. It’s around experiential background and so many other dimensions. We think about this opportunity and this challenge holistically. Others outside the organization may make that distinction, but we’re just focused on making sure that there are opportunities for the best talent wherever they are, where they’re come from, whatever their origins, to help us grow the game. That’s our approach.
This is one of the values of being a party to CEO Action (for Diversity & Inclusion). You have so many great organizations that have distinguished themselves in these topics and who freely share their best practices and where they’ve had success and challenges. One of the things that we’ve been very focused on is having conversations around unconscious bias around our enterprise, but not only having an awareness conversation, but really focusing on steps that we can take and strategies that we can implement to interrupt that bias. Not just interrupting it in how we recruit, but how we advance people in our organization and how we solve business problems. And so being able to refer to some of the approaches and programs and experiences that many of these organizations have done, particularly I in learning experiences and exercises I’ve found to be particularly valuable as we’ve advanced our own journey on unconscious bias.
Chief Executive Group exists to improve the performance of U.S. CEOs, senior executives and public-company directors, helping you grow your companies, build your communities and strengthen society. Learn more at chiefexecutivegroup.com.
0
1:00 - 5:00 pm
Over 70% of Executives Surveyed Agree: Many Strategic Planning Efforts Lack Systematic Approach Tips for Enhancing Your Strategic Planning Process
Executives expressed frustration with their current strategic planning process. Issues include:
Steve Rutan and Denise Harrison have put together an afternoon workshop that will provide the tools you need to address these concerns. They have worked with hundreds of executives to develop a systematic approach that will enable your team to make better decisions during strategic planning. Steve and Denise will walk you through exercises for prioritizing your lists and steps that will reset and reinvigorate your process. This will be a hands-on workshop that will enable you to think about your business as you use the tools that are being presented. If you are ready for a Strategic Planning tune-up, select this workshop in your registration form. The additional fee of $695 will be added to your total.
2:00 - 5:00 pm
Female leaders face the same issues all leaders do, but they often face additional challenges too. In this peer session, we will facilitate a discussion of best practices and how to overcome common barriers to help women leaders be more effective within and outside their organizations.
Limited space available.
10:30 - 5:00 pm
General’s Retreat at Hermitage Golf Course
Sponsored by UBS
General’s Retreat, built in 1986 with architect Gary Roger Baird, has been voted the “Best Golf Course in Nashville” and is a “must play” when visiting the Nashville, Tennessee area. With the beautiful setting along the Cumberland River, golfers of all capabilities will thoroughly enjoy the golf, scenery and hospitality.
The golf outing fee includes transportation to and from the hotel, greens/cart fees, use of practice facilities, and boxed lunch. The bus will leave the hotel at 10:30 am for a noon shotgun start and return to the hotel after the cocktail reception following the completion of the round.
