Stop Focusing on Retention, Says Essence CEO, and Aim for Something Much Bigger Instead

Caroline Wanga uses 22 slides to let people know who she is and who they’re going to get. One slide shows her family relationships, another tells you she’s a TV junkie but her brain hasn’t turned to mush, and still another tells you that while both her parents have PhDs, she was a college dropout. “There will be no more Dr. Wangas,” it says.

“Who you are is who you are,” the Essence Communications CEO told a Talent Connect 2022 audience earlier today in Los Angeles. “If you can’t be who you are where you are, you change where you are, not who you are.” 

When you ignore this mantra, Caroline has said, you kill her business case. Caroline, who was chief culture, diversity, and inclusion officer at Target before joining Essence in 2020, has seen how companies can make “what the great philosopher Cardi B calls shmoney” by embracing a variety of perspectives. She’s learned something else, too — if you refuse to go somewhere where they won’t let you be authentic and contribute what you have to offer, they’ll start making room for you. Companies don’t want to lose out. 

Caroline, a Kenyan immigrant known for her honesty, colorful clothing, and playful sense of humor, shared the story of how she struggled with her own authenticity as a wildly successful professional and why she believes — firmly and unequivocally — that a focus on retention and keeping employees misses the point of what HR and talent development should really be doing. 

1. Include everyone in your inclusion 

Caroline found in her own career that “some of the most safe love” came from “people that nobody would think we belong in the same room.” For example, when she had a mental health breakdown while at Target, Brian Cornell, the company’s CEO and a white man, was among her most ardent supporters. 

Caroline has often emphasized that for a company to be inclusive, everyone needs to feel included, and people need to learn to coexist despite their differences. She has advised leaders: “Agree on the destination, negotiate the path.” People can bring different ways of doing things to the workplace if they all share the same goals.

To illustrate this point, Caroline told the story of when her daughter, Cadence, was 17 and decided to make a grilled cheese by laying the toaster on its side. “What are you doing?!” Caroline blurted. “I’m making a grilled cheese,” Cadence responded. “You’re whaaat?” Caroline fired back.

“She’s had several grilled cheeses in her life,” Caroline tells the HR leaders at LA Live, “and never was it prepared that way.” Caroline told Cadence the house would burn down and the fire department was on its way. But really, she says, “I was just trying to win.”

“The moral of the story is that I believed, as you believed, that there was only one way to make a grilled cheese and only one way to use a toaster,” she said. “And if it’s not my way, be gone.”

In hindsight, Caroline sees how antithetical her my-way-or-the-highway approach to grilled cheese is to leveraging the collective experiences and perspectives of everyone in your organization.

2. It isn’t enough to preach authenticity, it has to be lived 

Caroline’s own path to authenticity didn’t happen overnight. She became a single mom at 17. She joined Target in 2005 as a supply chain intern in Tyler, Texas, because she needed a job that paid well enough to support herself and her daughter. 

She earned 10 promotions in 13 years, before landing in the C-suite as the head of diversity and inclusion, a role in which she would need to strongly advocate for employees to bring their authentic selves to the workplace. 

“When I got the diversity and inclusion job,” she said, “I was struggling with the fact that they would find out I had been inauthentic most of my life.”

So, she decided to change, to become Caroline unleashed. She cut her hair, she said, and “they didn’t fire me.” 

“The next day: Blue lipstick?” she recalled. “They didn’t fire me. The next day, I was like, ‘Tulle on Tuesday?’” She changed her wardrobe, setting the cardigans she had worn — and hated — on fire. Once she realized she could be authentically herself, she set out to transform the workplace so others could do the same. 

3. Become a CEO factory rather than a workplace that no one ever leaves 

Caroline has her own notion about how leaders can help the people on their teams succeed.

“The first thing we need to do,” she said, “is stop trying to retain people.”

She paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Whaaat?” she joked. “Did this woman read the brief? Does she know where she is?”

Caroline pointed to the Great Reshuffle and the tens of millions of professionals who decided they weren’t happy with their role and their company. “If you can’t be who you are where you are,” she noted again, “change where you are.”

Caroline also believes that Target, by creating an environment where she could rock her blue lipstick and African prints and size 11 pink high heels, set the stage for her to move on and become the CEO of Essence. 

“Why don’t you become the place,” she asked, “that people want to come for two years because they can come with their 22 slides and still make it to the top and then get out and become a CEO or something. And then you get to be, ‘That’s ours.’” 

She called on talent leaders to discard the notion that their companies should become the place that no one ever leaves. “Become a CEO factory,” she said. “Become a leader academy. Become an authenticity haven.” Focus on letting people know “who they are is who they are,” she said, and that will set the stage for your organization to become much more than a successful business. 

“You will have a fertilizing leader academy that is best in class,” she said, “and everybody will want to go there. And you will become the place that presents the people who change the world.”

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