Leadership at TopBuild
Challenge
We have an immersive leadership program called Manager in Training (MIT), designed to develop and groom future business / operations leaders. It is a 12-24 month apprenticeship where participants move through all aspects of branch management and leadership. They begin by either installing insulation or loading trucks in a warehouse and progress to understanding a wide array of management tools including budgeting, hiring, and managing people. Our challenge was increasing the diversity of MIT participants, who tended to be primarily males with very few women and people of color.
We began marketing this program internally and externally, specifically communicating our priority to add diversity to the program which we knew would eventually feed into our management team. We changed our recruiting approach and reach, using social media and a wide variety of recruiting resources, to attract a diverse slate of qualified candidates.
Outcomes
Within 18 months of revamping our approach we have successfully attracted a diverse slate of candidates. There are more people of color in the program and the percentage of females has increased from less than 5% to 22%.
Quote
TopBuild’s approach to Diversity & Inclusion is tailored for our business and tied to our core value of Unity. It began with leadership alignment and employee input to understand where we are and where we need to be. Purposeful training and education are taking place to ensure we have a common understanding of the role we all play and to challenge ourselves to lead and act differently. Conversations and focus groups are meaningful ways we help apply learnings and continue to evolve our actions. We developed TopBuild’s 4 A’s of Diversity & Inclusion to guide us: Awareness, Alignment, Application, and Accountability. These are iterative steps and each one reinforces the others. While Diversity & Inclusion is a concerted effort, our goal is that these values will be integrated into all of our people practices.