Action Learning Project

Week4 Learning Activity

Wal-mart values the gender diversity and has incorporated women into top level positions. 85% of the leadership team at this Wal-mart is African American or minority women (Brenman, 2012). Through observation, the employees at Wal-mart operate in diverse groups with the understanding of who is the leader and the plans each member is trying to achieve in their departments. With this organization possessing more women or minorities in leadership roles, some of the non-minority members see leadership as a power struggle. What is meant by power struggle is that each leader carryout the plan of action to ensure each department is ran properly but some of the leaders may use their position to overpower some to the workers which they may find as intimidating. The training metrics would be best used to uncover the diversity and inclusion need of each worker of the organization. The training metrics focuses on Evaluate penetration of diversity-related training, general training participation rates, and demographics of talent pipeline.

The questions to ask that will help determine the needs of Wal-mart that will promote effective diversity an inclusion goals include:

1.) How will training impact on the productivity, competitiveness and long-term sustainability of member companies?

2.) What level and type of training is currently implemented into the organization?

3.) What are the specific training needs in the company?

4.) What is Walmart’s annual training budgets?

5.) Which department implements programs of effective training? Training manager or HR department?

6.) Who is the target participant group/s?

7.) Which training programs does Walmart believe is the most effective?

According to Doug (2016) “Wal-mart has created a training program called Pathways that will help employees to advance key component efforts to enhance economic opportunity for the associates, the program builds on a successful pilot launched in 2015 and provides training over at least the first six months of employment.” Spending time and money to ensure employees are properly trained will aid to the success of the business. Throughout the observation, several of the non-minority individuals were observed and will be the subject of the interview. It will give more insight as to how each of the non-minority workers feel about being supervised by women of color or minority men. According to McMillon (2016) “As part of the Pathways program, Walmart is monitoring 10 metrics to track outcomes such as reduced turnover, improved productivity and increase employee engagement.” Permission was given from each department head that was a woman of color or minority male to interview at least one of the minority workers.

During the workers break time, each set aside a few minutes to answer my questions and provide some insight as to how they feel being managed my either a woman of color or a minority male figure. Some of the workers were very expressive about their experience of working under a minority group. Some of the feedback was positive and some of it was negative. When individuals use their authority to overpower the workers respect is lost and the organization overall is not motivated to work as a team to achieve the company goals.

I was able to present the questions to the operations manager, Deborah Delcout to approve and agree that each question was suitable to ask each worker. The operations manager and I agreed that the individuals would not be pressured to answer the questions if they felt uncomfortable or believed it would create tension between the worker and their department manager.

The initial goals were to assess the needs of recruiting to improve diversity and inclusion in the business but after observing the business and seeing the needs more clearer, training programs of diversity and inclusion is a necessity of this organization.