Our PeopleArticle
Leading from Every Seat in Our Diversity and Inclusion Journey
April 21, 2021
Our PeopleArticle
April 21, 2021
A key component of our 2030 Sustainability Commitments is creating opportunity for all. We prioritize workforce diversity that reflects our communities, gender parity in leadership roles, and an uplifting culture that is purpose-driven, inclusive, and engages and develops people. We constantly strive to ensure that the communities where we live and work have the resources they need to thrive. That effort and commitment requires a unique kind of leadership.
At Trane Technologies, everyone is a leader; we all lead from every seat.
With the responsibility and privilege of leadership comes the opportunity to intentionally lead inclusively. We believe that when you don’t intentionally include, you unintentionally exclude. We also believe that inclusive leadership is effective leadership and effective leadership is inclusive leadership.
So, no matter how you look at it – being an inclusive leader is essential to our company’s purpose, strategies, and principles. And with that approach to leading, we’re embedding leading inclusively into the fabric of our culture, who we are and how we do things.
Being an inclusive leader starts with awareness of bias and valuing equity. It’s about becoming someone who supports those who are underrepresented or marginalized. It’s about advocating for belonging by creating an environment where everyone feels valued and included. As inclusive leaders grow their understanding and impact, they leverage their positions of power and privilege to sponsor others so they too can advance. Inclusive leadership is about ultimately ensuring that equitable systems are in place to foster an inclusive culture.
We are leading inclusively within our company by implementing leadership principles, that when practiced consistently, foster an inclusive culture. We are also deploying learning paths that develop inclusive leadership capability and other components of an inclusive culture such as allyship and mitigating unconscious bias. Part of our commitment to inclusive leadership comes from our goal to be an employer of choice for the best talent, including talent that is currently underrepresented.
At the end of 2020, our workforce was 25.3% women and 35.5% racially and ethnically diverse employees. 21.7% of leadership positions were held by women and 12% were held by racially and ethnically diverse leaders. Five out of the 13 members of our Board of Directors are women. Through our 2030 Sustainability Commitments, we aim to achieve gender parity in leadership and workforce diversity reflective of our communities and increase racial and ethnic diversity of our salaried population in the U.S. by 50% from 17% to 26%.
As a member of the Paradigm for Parity (P4P) coalition, we’ve joined more than 100 other corporations who are also committed to closing the gender gap in corporate leadership. Collectively, P4P companies employ more than 6.1 million workers worldwide from 28 industries, including technology, health care, food service, retail and financial services. Through the partnership, we’re instilling P4P’s 5-point action plan to bring parity to our leadership teams.
While we’ve been on a diversity and inclusion journey for over a decade, we are staying the course. We’re widening the gate and extending the table.
As we continue to improve our culture internally through the inclusive leadership approach, we are also engaging in external efforts to create systems and opportunities that are founded in diversity and inclusion and create opportunities for all.
In 2020, Trane Technologies joined the OneTen coalition as a founding member. OneTen is a group of America’s leading employers who are committed to investing in career growth and advancement for one million Black people in the U.S. over the next ten years.
As part of the OneTen coalition, we are applying our inclusive leadership approach to ensuring that we are part of the solution of systemic change that creates hiring, upskilling and promoting Black talent for family-sustaining careers and creating inclusive cultures.
Deep and meaningful change takes time and ongoing energy and attention. While we’ve been on a diversity and inclusion journey for over a decade, we are staying the course. We’re widening the gate and extending the table.
Inside our organization, we do this work because it is who we are. Authentic diversity and true inclusion will result in more innovation, better business results, and the best talent doing their finest work with each other and in service of our bold purpose.
We do this work outside of our company to ensure that everyone can reap the benefits of inclusive opportunity and leadership. We do what’s right, always.
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