Charlie Scharf, the CEO of Wells Fargo, touched off a controversy last month by blaming the lack of Black employees at the bank on a “limited pool of Black talent.”
Many people shot back that Scharf is flat-out wrong. Among them is Crystal Ashby, the interim CEO of the Executive Leadership Council (ELC), an association of senior Black executives.
“The reality is there is no shortage of black talent,” said Ashby, speaking at Fortune’s online Most Powerful Women Summit on Thursday. “We happen to be everywhere.”
According to Ashby, perceptions of a so-called pipeline problem arise from a failure by companies to look beyond traditional places for executives. Too often, she says, executives turn to their own networks to fill a role—networks of people who typically resemble them.
Beyond looking outside traditional confines for talent, Ashby says it’s critical for firms to cultivate the talent they already have. This includes ensuring they are assigned new and challenging tasks, and giving them “P&L experience”—a term that describes working with balance sheets and on projects that directly affect a company’s profits and losses.
Such P&L experience is critical, says Ashby, because it is a prerequisite to gaining entry to C-suite level positions. Likewise, she recommends placing Black executives on succession planning committees since those bodies often find future CEOs among their own ranks.
Companies’ failure to facilitate Black leadership is apparent from recent surveys. According to one cited by Fortune’s Kristen Bellstrom, Black people account for only 4% of board positions at the 3,000 largest publicly traded companies—while Black woman make up just 1.5%.
Firms that fail to create Black upward mobility within their ranks only exacerbate the problem, says Ashby.
“If who you recruit looks up and don’t see themselves,” she says, “they will leave.”