The Race Code in Practice

When we published the Race Code, the question I was asked most often was 'how do we measure progress?' It is a fair question. Codes that cannot be measured tend to become wallpaper.

Three years on, I want to do two things. First, share what I have learned about which organisations have taken the Code seriously, and what their boards did differently. Second, offer five questions that any chair can put on the agenda of their next meeting, and which will tell you in about an hour whether your organisation is making real progress or polishing a report.

What organisations that moved the needle share

The organisations that have moved the needle on race share four characteristics. They have a named director with accountability for race specifically — not bundled into a wider diversity portfolio. They publish ethnicity pay-gap data alongside their gender pay-gap data, voluntarily, and they discuss it in the boardroom every quarter. They have shifted the conversation from representation alone to retention and progression, because the leak is rarely at recruitment — it is in the years between the first promotion and the boardroom. And they have stopped treating race as an HR topic and started treating it as a governance topic, owned by the board, not delegated to the people function.

Diagnostic questions, applied elsewhere

The discipline of asking the right diagnostic question — and refusing to accept marketing-grade answers — generalises far beyond race. It is the same discipline that separates good consumer research from bad in any market with weak transparency, including the offshore non GamStop gambling sites now competing for UK consumers. The questions a chair should ask of an executive are structurally identical to the questions a careful consumer asks of any opaque operator: where does the talent leak, who is missing from the succession plan, what does the unglamorous spending look like compared with the visible marketing. The subject changes. The form of the question, and the kind of answer that should worry you, does not.

Five questions for your next agenda

If you are a chair, here are the five questions I would put on the next agenda. None of them require a special workshop. All of them can be asked in a normal meeting.

One — the ethnicity profile of your top three layers

What is the ethnicity profile of our top three layers of management, and how has it moved in the last twelve months? If your executive cannot answer this in five minutes, the question itself is the work. The boards that have moved on race know these numbers without looking them up. The boards that have not moved know the headline figures but cannot tell you the pipeline.

Two — where you lose ethnic minority talent

Where do we lose ethnic minority talent, and what do the exit interviews say? The retention question is harder than the recruitment question, because it forces the board to look at culture rather than process. The exit interview data, taken seriously, is often the single most revealing source of evidence the board has. It is also the source the board most consistently fails to look at.

Three — succession profile

Who is on our succession plan for the executive committee, and what is the ethnicity profile of that list? If your succession plan looks much whiter than your wider workforce, your organisation is producing a future leadership that will look less representative than its present. The succession plan is where today's hiring decisions become tomorrow's executive demographics. The board should be asking about it.

Four — the spending ratio

What are we paying for ethnicity-related external speakers, consultancy, training and partnerships — and what are we paying for ethnicity-related internal investment? The external spending is often easy to find. The internal spending — sponsorship of mid-career talent, structured mentoring, dedicated promotion-readiness support — is usually much smaller, and is usually where the real movement comes from. The ratio between the two tells you whether the organisation is performing or investing.

Five — when the board last discussed race in substance

When was the last time this board discussed race for more than fifteen minutes, in substance, on a topic that was not a crisis or a reporting requirement? If the honest answer is 'never' or 'I cannot recall', that is the answer that matters most. Race becomes a governance topic when boards are willing to discuss it when nothing is on fire, not only when something is.

Picking the tool up

There is a defensive instinct, particularly in boards that consider themselves well-meaning, to treat these questions as accusatory. They are not. They are diagnostic. The board that can answer all five clearly and immediately is a board that has made the work part of its routine. The board that struggles on three or more has not — and the gap is the work.

I will end with the observation I keep returning to. Codes do not change organisations. Boards change organisations. The Race Code is a tool. The question is whether the people sitting in the boardroom pick the tool up.

If you are a chair, pick it up at the next meeting. Put one of the five questions on the agenda. See what happens. The conversation that follows will tell you more than any report ever will.