Sada Geuss, head of impact strategy and investment manager at Trillium Asset Management, spoke with ESG Clarity at the recent US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico. Geuss addressed diversity, equity and inclusion in the asset management industry and how Trillium approaches that within the company.
DEI and racial and social justice have been some of the themes at this event. What are some takeaways for the ESG space?
At the high level, we’re trying to talk about how we are approaching it within our organizations in asset management, which is not a particularly diverse space, broadly.
And even within ESG and impact investing, where I think you definitely see more gender diversity, there’s still a lack of racial and ethnic diversity, if we’re looking at it relative to the broader demographics.
And then [we are] also talking a bit about our investment products, our advocacy approach and how we’re thinking about racial and ethnic diversity as a component of our investment program – how we’re building portfolios, how we’re advocating and engaging with companies, in addition to who we are as an organization.
How does Trillium look at diversity within the company?
Trillium is owned by a public company [Australian Financial Firm Perpetual Limited] … but we really run as our own separate entity, which means we’re a pretty small organization – about 45 people and growing. And historically, our approach to diversity, equity and inclusion was pretty informal.
We have a lot of LGBTQ representation, and we have a lot of women that are managing money and managing and working directly with clients. However, we had identified that there was a desire to be focusing a bit more on racial and ethnic diversity within an organization.
In 2020, we kind of came to the same reality check that the broader world did – that you have to be more intentional in that work, even if you are a small organization.
It’s not just hiring. It’s also about how you’re structuring mentorship inside of the organization, how you’re thinking of your more senior hires, where it might take a bit more work when you have to take the time to get that strong candidate pool and go outside of your networks.
The other piece is, which we came to pretty early in this renewed journey around DEI internally, was that we really focused on centering the needs of our BIPOC colleagues.
That meant we put together working groups and we thought about what are the needs of an organization? And what we were hearing back from people was that you can put all the policies in the world in place, but if we’re not connected to each other – if we’re not talking to each other, if we’re not hearing each other’s lived experiences, the implementation of that, or the culture change, isn’t going to happen.
And we didn’t need a massive culture change. It wasn’t a place [where] people felt that their identity was stifling them in their career.
People have blind spots. And people were saying there are microaggressions going on inside this organization, or maybe at client meetings, that would go under the radar for people that aren’t really looking for it or have had the privilege to not have to think about it, historically.
We have monthly dialogues – we’re doing six this year. We did two sessions of allyship and active bystander training with a focus on organizational bystanders.
Having the tools, having the training and going through scenarios is helpful in that.
The organizational working group for DEI, [is what] we call JEDI – justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. As a mission-based organization, we wanted to make sure that we led with that work.
We brought a consultant in that has been helping us with that dialogue series and also doing a full review of our language in our materials – what our HR policies look like, with a lens for racial justice.
Part of that work is finetuning and making sure that our goals, and our mission and values, as a B Corp and as a mission organization, are really reflected in all of that.
Does Trillium look at its median and average pay gaps?
We’ve been doing gender wage gap [analysis] for several years – at least seven.
But in full candor, when we were a smaller organization … it was statistically not necessarily going to be significant data. The good news is that, at this point, it is.
Our impact report for 2021, which will be coming out hopefully within the next month, will have both our gender and racial wage gap analysis.
Do the monthly dialogues aim to teach people to be good allies proactively or to avoid doing or saying things that are inappropriate?
It ends up being a little bit of both. The first sessions were a bit more around level setting and making sure that everybody understands the language that we’re using.
A lesson learned very early in the process, in the summer of 2020, when every white person figured out that racism existed, and they bought all the books and read White Fragility … [was] that people weren’t all on the same page.
So, the first section was talking about privilege, talking about systemic versus individual advantages, thinking about the place of financial services in that.
As an organization [we have always] thought about access to capital and economic inclusion.
And then the other piece of the dialogue was getting everybody involved in the work in a meaningful way. You can’t just have a leadership team, put out metrics for your hiring on your teams and then have a DEI committee giving input. You really need every person to be thinking about being an ally, in feeling connected to the “why” of the work.
One of the things that came out of our employees surveying and asking people what they wanted us to do was a desire to reestablish an internship program at Trillium.
This was a desire to have something that was really focused on inclusion and bringing underrepresented voices to asset management.
I grew up in a rural part of upstate New York – asset management was something I never would have thought of as a job. Just introducing it to folks in high school could be meaningful.
On microaggressions … we’ve learned that it’s not the intent of the words, it’s how they’re received. And the piece of that in the allyship work that I think was really important was the idea of “calling in” versus “calling out.”
We’re not going to grow if people don’t feel like they can make mistakes. But we have to come from a place of respect.
We have to prioritize the feelings of our BIPOC colleagues. And that means engaging and having uncomfortable conversations.
That’s the tension that I think a lot of organizations have to navigate.
