In the NFL and at major companies, diversity playbooks face hurdles

The end of the National Football League’s regular season on Sunday heralded the start of two annual events: the playoffs, and the period when a wave of teams fire head coaches and general managers and begin a frenzied search for their replacements.

The league has little control over the outcomes of the matches. But over the past two decades, the NFL has tried, and often failed, to change the makeup of the top ranks in football-related jobs at each club.

For a league in which roughly 70 percent of NFL players are people of color, it is a source of shame that the vast majority of coaches and executives have historically been white. To diversify teams’ leadership positions, the NFL has largely relied on the Rooney Rule, named after a Pittsburgh Steelers owner and adopted in 2003requiring each team to interview at least one person of color when hiring a head coach or general manager.

Through rule expansions and other initiatives, the league and its teams have diversified the ranks of assistant coaching and top front office positions, including team presidents. It has been less successful when it comes to head coaches; the NFL started this season with just six minority head coaches under 32, three of whom are black.

“It’s hard when something’s been done a certain way for so long and you’re just trying to break down those barriers,” said Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations. He said the overall progress of the league encouraged him, but referring to the head coaches, he added: “I still have to live in the reality of what the numbers actually say. And the numbers are still not where we would like them to be.”

Yet in corporate America, the Rooney Rule has been the model for companies seeking to field more diverse candidates, even as the goals of such initiatives are hotly debated in the public arena, especially on college campuses. The recent resignation of Claudine Gay, a Black woman, as president of Harvard was celebrated by opponents of DEI initiatives and has fueled controversy over whether it is the best way to increase diversity or could be counterproductive.

Companies like Amazon and Facebook now have versions of the Rooney Rule for their boardsand a little shareholder advisors Look specifically for such initiatives when assessing companies’ diversity efforts. Like the NFL, many of these companies have seen an increase in diversity in some areas.

Yet institutional inertia, a lack of tracking of a diverse workforce, and little or no incentives have slowed their goals. Companies, like NFL teams, have also found ways to get around the policy.

“It’s one thing when the CEO says, ‘Yes, we need a diverse offering,’ and then you stop asking questions,” says Pamela McElvane, whose company Diversity MBA Media, has been tracking the diversity and talent development efforts of Fortune 500 companies and other large organizations for 17 years. “It all looks good, but you don’t see it consistently showing up in those organizations because there’s no incentive, there’s no accountability and there’s no reason for anyone to make that next attempt.”

Ms. McElvane’s data, which has not previously been shared publicly, includes both global and regional companies in more than 30 industries, including financial services, healthcare and consumer products, with a total of about 40 million employees.

In 2022, 85 percent of the 489 companies she surveyed said they required diverse candidate pools when interviewing for management vacancies, up from 95 percent two years earlier, Ms. McElvane said. Only 36 percent of these companies had some form of incentive or penalty attached to their policies, including performance reviews and bonuses. Other research showed a similar decline in companies’ diversity efforts in 2022.

Companies that have implemented incentives or penalties to encourage interviewing and developing employees from underrepresented groups have seen results.

The results were especially notable among senior leadership, including vice presidents and other positions in the pipeline for future C-suite executives. Among companies with incentives or penalties tied to diverse slates, people of color and women hold more than 65 percent of those jobs, according to Ms. McElvane’s 2022 data. That compared to just over half at companies that said they used different slates, but didn’t. “Fails to hold hiring managers accountable, and only 39 percent of companies surveyed did not have diverse requirements.

According to Ms. McElvane’s data, the share of companies saying they need different types of staff when hiring grew steadily from 62 percent in 2013 to a peak of 95 percent in 2020, the year the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis led to a national reckoning on race. This percentage dropped in 2022 due to a backlash from those who say efforts to increase diversity and equality are discriminatory and often do not result in hiring the best candidates.

In June, for example, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions. Although the decision has more consequences for colleges and universities than for companies, this also applies to the ruling push back by conservatives who say diversity efforts exacerbate racial divisions and advance a liberal political agenda have had a chilling effect.

Valerie Rainford, the founder and CEO of Elloree Talent Strategies, a company that uses data analytics to boost companies’ equity, said she had seen a decline in the number of potential clients over the past year, after a surge following the murder of Mr. Floyd.

“People in this room will latch on to the latest shiny object that they think will move the needle, but without looking at it in a deeper way that actually drives results,” Ms. Rainford said. “Until that’s the case, I don’t think we’ll see real progress.”

She has shared a similar message with clients who expressed skepticism about the Rooney Rule, citing the NFL’s mixed results and telling them that such strategies require continued effort and attention to work.

The NFL’s own efforts have shown that the Rooney Rule itself is not a silver bullet.

The league only implemented the rule after attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran Jr. had threatened to sue the NFL for discriminating against black coaches. Results quickly followed, especially since Steelers owner Dan Rooney championed the rule named after him.

In 2007, two black coaches, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, faced off for the first time in the Super Bowl, and in 2011 a record eight head coaches were people of color. In the years after Mr Rooney retired from the league in 2009 to become US ambassador to Ireland, progress stalled and black coaches increasingly criticized teams for skirting the rule and not being punished for it.

“We didn’t have that moral leadership from within,” said Mr. Mehri, who helped found the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a group pushing for diversity in the league’s executive and coaching ranks.

The league has been sued for discrimination, including by Brian Flores, a coach of Black and Honduran descent, who in February 2022 accused teams of conducting sham interviews to make it appear they were adhering to the Rooney Rule. (Similar complaints have been made about diversity efforts in the corporate world.)

But in the two decades since the Rooney Rule was introduced, only one NFL team has been punished for circumventing it.

By the time Mr. Mehri and the alliance met with the league in 2016, the NFL was considering how to strengthen the rule. Mr. Mehri proposed requiring teams to interview at least two people of color for every position, something that research published in the paper that year. Harvard Business Review showed that people from diverse backgrounds were significantly more likely to be hired.

During that meeting at NFL headquarters, the league’s then-director of human resources suggested he take time to study the investigation before committing to it. Commissioner Roger Goodell intervened and said, “Let’s just do it.” Even after Mr. Goodell pressured his executives, the mandate that two candidates of color be interviewed for every head coaching vacancy was not passed for more than three years.

Since then, the league has expanded the rule to team presidents and the level below head coaches (coordinators) and to women. It also added incentives. Teams that develop minority head coaches or general managers who are hired away will receive draft picks as compensation. At the league office, individual bonuses and performance reviews are tied to the implementation of a department’s diversity, equity and inclusion plan.

The results are visible in certain areas. Seven team presidents are from underrepresented groups, including six people of color, and 10 general managers are people of color (including Champ Kelly, the interim GM of the Las Vegas Raiders), both records. The overall representation of people of color and women on teams is 51 percent, up from 44 percent three years ago, according to the NFL. That includes the number of coaches of color, which grew from 35 percent to 43 percent.

“To achieve equality of opportunity in an organization, everyone needs to be pulling in the same direction, not just the CEO, but also direct reports and middle management,” said Mr. Mehri. “These types of efforts are so fragile and require such constant effort that if you take your eyes off the ball, you drop the ball.”