Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Philanthropy News Digest post, Lindsey Poole, a corporate responsibility senior associate at EY Americas, describes how to build diverse, high-performing teams.

• How might the strategies described here work in both the private and public sector? In what ways can we embed the principles of inclusion in our organizations?

• Here's more on how foundations and CSR initiatives are making social change happen.


Diversity in the workplace has become a widely discussed topic, and while every company has its own approach and initiatives designed to promote diversity, most of us agree that diverse teams — not just across race, gender, and nationality but also background, knowledge, and skill-set — perform better.

It's for this reason we invest in programs that promote high-performing teams by encouraging our people to "think outside the box." One program in particular — the EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors program — empowers our people to help overcome challenges that most corporations actively look to resolve: thinking and operating in silos. The EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors program sends high-performing, early-career professionals from the Americas and Israel on a week-long expedition with the Earthwatch Institute to Mexico or Peru.

Like employees at most large organizations, our people can easily become siloed, teaming with colleagues within their same business unit or with similar areas of expertise. Any team hoping to be high-performing, however, must bring together the right mix of skills and talents needed to turn a shared vision into a quality, tangible solution.

Programs like EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors are designed deliberately to embed this thinking into their structures, not only exposing participants to other business units that may otherwise be invisible but, more importantly, engaging them in different ways of seeing, analyzing, and solving problems.

In addition to the EY-Earthwatch Ambassadors program's contributions to professional development, EY's annual Global People Survey consistently shows that participation in the program has a very strong statistical correlation with engagement and retention.

Read the full article about creating the highest performing teams by Lindsey Poole at PhilanTopic.