2008 Best in Class: Board Diversity - for profit


After winning the Commission on Economic Inclusion’s Best-in-Class Board Diversity award multiple times, KeyCorp continues to demonstrate its commitment to diversity in this area. As the global economy diversifies, Key realizes that diversity in the board room leads to greater creativity, more vigorous deliberation, and more integrity of process. Key believes that these outcomes foster principles of good corporate governance that help enhance shareholder value. Currently, minorities represent 30.7 percent of Key’s Board of Directors. The average among for-profit participants in the 2008 Greater Cleveland Employers’ Survey on Diversity ™ was 12 percent. Effective strategies include:  

  • Key’s Director Recruitment Guidelines provide that there will be a preference for nominees that improve the diversity of the 13-member board in terms of race, gender, religion and other characteristics. Diversity competency is a selection criterion for board seats.

  • Diversity is infused into Key’s strategic plan through diversity management goals and objectives, including diversity scorecards at the senior management levels, HR diversity workforce metrics and business plans for all lines of business, and executive compensation tied to diversity.
      
  • The commitment of the KeyCorp board to recruiting diverse directors is publicly available, including via annual proxy statements.
     
  • KeyCorp’s diversity senior executives report on a semi-annual basis to the board on the state of diversity in the organization, which includes benchmarking efforts, line of business workforce metrics and organizational trend analysis.

  • The diversity statement endorsed by KeyCorp’s Board is communicated by the CEO internally to employees via KeyNet, the organization’s intranet platform, and externally to the public via Key.com.


"Despite the current economic downturn, diversity at Key continues to be aligned with our overall corporate strategy. We fundamentally believe that inclusion in our workplace, supplier base, and community outreach is every Key employee's responsibility. This core value helps us crate sustainable relationships. Relationships that support our reinvestment in the community and support our attempt to create an inclusive and colalborative environment that helps our businesses and communities grow and prosper. "

Henry L. Meyer III, c hairman and CEO, KeyCorp