Stevens Leadership Portal: Diversity and Inclusion

Social distancing has made it even harder to make individuals feel like part of a team. Dr. Wei Zheng surveyed Stevens alumni to learn how their managers were making them feel like accepted, valued contributors — even from six feet (or many miles) apart.

The presence of women in top management teams is associated with better company performance, including improvements in work environment and values, level of innovation, organizational capabilities, and financial performance. So what can you do to ensure that your company is taking effective steps to increase gender diversity?

Though diversity has the potential to boost creativity and team performance, simply having team members with different personal and cultural backgrounds does not ensure improved workplace relationships and outcomes. A workplace that prioritizes inclusion focuses on respecting and valuing the breadth of perspectives that diverse individuals bring to the organization, and encourages the full participation and engagement of all organizational members.

Facilitating conversations about race and inequity should not be passive nor static, being open to new information, new experiences, and personal growth are essential. We detail 7 empirically-derived methods for promoting and facilitating conversations about race, racism, and inequity.

This panel discussion focusses on how to build relationships with others who are different from us. It provides ideas and tools for deepening awareness, expanding perspectives, and enlarging behavioral repertoire to embrace differences and build high-quality connections.

This panel discussion focusses on how to have conversations about diversity that may be uncomfortable, and how to communicate effectively with a variety of stakeholders about diversity and inclusion. It provides actionable knowledge on how to enable mutual understanding, authenticity, and collective action.

Annie DeStefano is the Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank where she works with CEOs and founders of venture backed Fintech companies. She is also a member on the Advisory Board at Stevens Institute of Technology. Having worked at Goldman Sachs and Foursquare on the technology front, she has become a leader in Fintech.

Lisa Mascolo, a Stevens alumnus and current trustee of Stevens, talks about how technology is not for its own ends but an enabler of problem-solving. She also talks about the leader’s job as listening, learning, and teaching, in addition to leading; how a leader needs to be both effective and admired, both confident and empathetic, and know what to do when they don’t know what to do during disruptive times.

In this interviews, Dr. Suba talks about the applications of AI in mental health and fraud detection, limitations of AI, and how technical and nontechnical professionals can prepare for an AI-fueled world.

In this interview, Stephanie Rowe talks about her work with the TSA, pulling together large-scale technology change projects, her entrepreneurial endeavors and lessons learned, and her consulting work on product innovation. She also shares what she sees as the “branding” problem of STEM, and how STEM can be rebranded to be more welcoming of women and girls.

In this interview, Joelle Rusin talks about how her data analytics projects help solve old business problems, how she gains credibility as a young woman in technology, and how she keeps a sharp focus on her goals when navigating biased interactions.

In this interview, Archana Vemulapalli talks about how to use technologies to add value to organizations, how to build effective teams, how respect and humility have guided her to learn and thrive, and how we can make technological fields a more inclusive environment.

In this interview, Elaine Turville talks about how to gain credibility in technology, build personal brands in collaborative work, translate technology for nontechnical audiences, and integrate technology and business process expertise.

Strategies and reflections for effective self-awareness

Insights and targeted questions around when and how to effectively take risks.

Insights on how to advice goals for networking and developing the right questions to ask.

Explainer on how to adopt a mindset shift and a worksheet that can be used to track different shifts.