All we do is continue to hire white guys from the outside. Diversity & inclusion is a joke. Countless qualified people of color and women, god forbid, are passed over. I have five times the experience of my new manager! #TimeToMoveOn. Eric Sprunk, wake up!!!
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Sprunk likes to include ... those that make him feel popular. Surveys are just check boxes to deal with the noise
You must be new! Survey's are nothing than a political check box. For years. So are CFEs, MAXIMs and 2x pay. What is sold as the right thing are layoffs: Jobs get re-hired after getting rid of the old and vocal ones. Adjusting the stat curves where necessary, Don't be naive. Nike doesn't care about you.
Agree completely with 5uwb. The old Boys network is the expectation to confirm exactly to the unwritten expectations of the top boys & girls where visible attributes play less of a role than the invisible. The NYT pieces that came out a few months ago barely scratched the surface as to what is going on at Nike but simplified things to an easy to 'fix' problem. Throw in a survey, knock out a few recycled maxims (lets reduce down to 4 and make them really big inflatables so people know we mean it this time), blame the rest on HR and fire a few peeps left and right. Result: Core underlying issues not resolved and folks even more scared to be authentic and open. And hire a bunch of conforming outsiders/friends to fill the openings.
Did you seriously expect change? It's just another brand story to the company aimed at making you feel empowered. You are not.
“Just look at the recruitment photos and marketing”
Now I’m legit mad. Judging how company works internally based on external marketing and recruiting is id--tic. You should know better if you worked at Nike. Again, post after post of people telling you minorities experience a toxic environment and feel passed over, yet you can’t stop pivoting to purely agisim? You think this is an either or thing? S-xual harassment and racism is just as rampant. Your toxic experience does not negate or override someone else’s.
It’s been pointed out time and time again, distrabution centers and retail makes up the majority of Nikes diversity. There are very few minorities and women in acutual positions of power that can make company wide change. If you paid attention to what talent acquisition actually says and read the actual number breakdowns instead of our public marketing you may have learned a few things. You could have easily posted about ageism without trying to negate the posters original point (which keeps going over your head at mach 3). Almost everyone universally agrees here ageism is a huge problem. This is the type of gaslighting that drives people like me out of Nike.
Heres an idea; maybe instead of trying to undercut posts like this and scream “no, I have it worse!”, try uniting with people like this to include combating ageism along with s-xism and racism. You might make more progress that way.
@ulsz: The original poster mentioned Eric Sprunk which was focusing in on a specific department. And since where HQ is what global policy is made, or feels kinda relevant, huh?
Go to Memphis. Nike has many minorities working in leadership positions in their distribution and logistics buildings. Nike is more than just WHQ. But discrimination because of age is company wide. No doubt about it. Just look at the recruitment photos and marketing. Nike is not respectful of baby boomers.
@nqfe: I don’t have numbers currently, nor access to anything current. I left 6 months ago. But having current friends in HR and talent acquisition, Nike lags behind in hiring minority leadership. Go have a conversation with the team that handles minority outreach and get a brain dump. They will talk to anyone FTE or ETW. Also, as a minority in IT, I can tell you the diversity is at the bottom and mostly ETW’s who rotate out.
I’m generally curious what org you work in where you report to all minority’s and white males are the minority. Where is this magical place? Dosen’t track with any of the orgs I know in Nike. I consider myself as one of those folks who got passed over and pushed out. If you still don’t believe me, I would be more than happy to switch this over to a private communication channel. I would prefer not to out myself more than I already have.
In that case lnnx, since you’re claiming a “statistical anomaly”, please go ahead and share those numbers with us. I mean, you just claimed to have statistical evidence invalidating what was said. So let’s see those numbers, and a citation as to where you got those numbers.
“I would be careful to not necessarily blame your situation on “a lack of diversity”. In my case, I’m a white guy and my manager is a minority. How does that fit into the narrative of, “Nike is passing over perfectly qualified minorities to promote less qualified good ol’ (mostly white) boys”? Answer: It doesn’t.”
Alternative answer: Your situation is a statistical anomaly. Confirmation bias is a hellava d--g homie. The numbers are still on the original posters side.
Nike let’s all it’s peiple over 40 go.
Awesome post user @5uwb - well written and 1000% accurate
Yes, all this is true and diversity must be across a spectrum, not just that which we can see that makes us different. The real question is...for open positions is a "wide net" being cast? Are the candidate pools diverse? Is the panel diverse? It's an old excuse to say we hired the most experienced, most qualified when your search and recruiting follow old rules and amounts to the usual suspects, I mean predicatble candidates. Challenge the criteria and the sourcing too.
Equality = means everyone is equall. Whether you’re black, white, Latino, Asian, etc, man, woman, g--, straight. That also means that everyone should judge the person not because of his/her physical characteristics, but by the beautiful mind behind it. That means, yes, sometimes a white male will be hired and black woman will be not. there will be times when black women will get the desired position. It’s not a discrimination if objectively he is better suit for the position.
Isn’t that what we all striving for? Fair assessment of us as professional, rather than beacauese youRe minority?
To the original poster: just to be clear here, it is an all-too-common mistake for people to think that “diversity” simply and primarily refers to a physical characteristic like skin color or gender. While those characteristics certainly CAN be a part of what we call “diversity”, you also have to think about things like diversity of experience, background, and thought; things that are most frequently not obvious or detectable by a simple physical attribute.
Your post introduces my one big worry about “diversity” conversations at Nike. Far too many people - perhaps even most people - think that “diversity” is primarily about a physical attribute. Again, that is a mistake. And unfortunately I don’t believe that Nike itself does a good enough job emphasizing this point. Every “diversity” conversation I have or witness at Nike inevitably gets back to a physical attribute. I fear that most employees, including many in HR, don’t entirely understand the very concept of “diversity”. Which is why those conversations tend to end up at an inevitable place of physicality.
If we conclude that “diversity” is something that can be objectively measured with metrics like “number of minority employees”, then we are doing a great disservice to what “diveristy” actually means. And yeah...I’m not always so sure that Nike itself understands this.
BTW OP, I otherwise sympathize with your plight. I am also more experienced than my manager. My manager is actually a great guy and someone with whom I enjoy working. I have no real gripes with him on a personal level. But yeah, there’s no doubt that he simply doesn’t have my level of experience and valuable institutional knowledge. I suppose that’s just “the way of the corporate world”. Some people climb that ladder when other deserving individuals don’t. And sometimes there isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason behind it.
I would be careful to not necessarily blame your situation on “a lack of diversity”. In my case, I’m a white guy and my manager is a minority. How does that fit into the narrative of, “Nike is passing over perfectly qualified minorities to promote less qualified good ol’ (mostly white) boys”? Answer: It doesn’t.
I don’t think my manager was promoted because he’s a minority. Likewise, I also don’t think I was passed over for his job because I’m a white guy. Sometimes things aren’t fair, simply because that’s life. There doesn’t always have to be a nefarious agenda behind it.
Sprunk won't likely wake up until the investors cause a commotion.
If you own stock, make noise.
Sh--, I'm a white guy and I'd like to come back. Chances are not in my favor.
You cant just go around assuming that these people identify as white and male.