For Ann Miletti, Allspring's chief diversity officer, ensuring that the $485 billion asset manager's workforce is diverse goes hand in hand with the principle that a diversified portfolio leads to better investing outcomes.
Miletti knows a thing or two about the importance of diversification – she's also Allspring Global Investments' head of active equities, and her experience managing portfolios and trading stocks has shaped her approach to her role as diversity chief.
"Why? Why does it matter? Why are we doing this?" Miletti asked. "This business, almost everything I did as a portfolio manager, as an analyst … all the things we think about doing is balancing risk vs. reward and a lot of that is built on diversification. Why wouldn't you think about diversifying your people, too?"
Efforts to increase the diversity of the asset management industry have been slow going. Results from the Investment Company Institute's 2022 U.S. Asset Management Diversity & Inclusion Survey, which was released on May 30, indicate that 34.4% of the industry's workforce comes from "historically underserved or underrepresented communities," up from 30.5% in 2020. The survey also found that slightly less than 40% were women. Among C-suite professionals, the contrast is even starker, with 83% of those employees identifying as white and 77% as male.
Miletti is well aware of the statistics, and admitted that Allspring's diversity "starting point," as she called it, doesn't differ much from the rest of the asset management industry.
"I know what the stats in the industry are, and I know they haven't changed that much. I believe that diversity of thought, diversity of opinion – all of that is important," Miletti said. "Groupthink in our world is death."
Though Miletti said increasing gender and racial diversity at Allspring is important, she takes a broader approach to defining diversity.
"It's not just sex or race," Miletti said. "It's age, it's religion, it's what region you come from, what languages you speak. It's all of those things."
Research from Willis Towers Watson in March found that investment teams in the top quartile of gender diversity outperformed their bottom-quartile peers by 45 basis points in terms of net excess returns.
Miletti – who was appointed to the role of chief diversity officer by CEO Joe Sullivan last year – said her first act as chief diversity officer was to launch employee resource groups.
Allspring's eight employee-led Connectivity Groups – Women, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Veterans, Native Peoples, Diverse Abilities, LGBTQIA, and Asian and Pacific Islanders – offer a place for Allspring's employees to connect and discuss various issues and workplace culture.
So far, Miletti said about one third of all of Allspring's employees have joined at least one connectivity group – something she described as "the biggest win so far."
"From a culture standpoint alone … (the groups) bring everybody together and connect people in different locations, in different departments, in different ways," Miletti said. "And then creating events for people to get together in person, whether it was doing something internally or doing something for our communities, that has been a really great thing."
In addition to launching connectivity groups, Miletti has also spearheaded an internal effort beginning in January to collect demographic data on Allspring's workforce. Before her appointment last May, Allspring didn't have much in the way of internal data on the makeup of its workforce.
"As a leader myself, I couldn't tell you what the investment department looked like. I couldn't have told you in May when I said yes to this, I couldn't have told you six months after I took the job – which is a little bit embarrassing," Miletti said.
"How can you expect – how could I expect, how could (CEO) Joe (Sullivan) expect – any manager within the firm to be intentional with the things they're doing if they don't even understand what their starting point is?"
Miletti said that the data has revealed "pockets where we can be proud" as well as "pockets where the data tells us we really need to be a little bit more intentional" – but stressed that change does not happen overnight.
One step Miletti's interested in taking to increase Allspring's workforce diversity is re-evaluating the firm's hiring process – from the way job descriptions are written to how candidates are interviewed.
"We're looking at our job descriptions. Some of them are written so that they – I mean, they would scare you to death," Miletti said. "I would have been embarrassed to tell you my background 10 years ago, but I was a school teacher. I ended up in this business all by mistake. Would I ever have applied?"
Miletti started out her finance career working in Wells Fargo's call center and worked her way up.
"I would have never applied for a job on an investment team when I read the job description," Miletti added. "You don't want to lower your qualifications, but there are things you can teach about our business and we know that. So what are the things that are must-haves, and what are the things you can teach?"
Increasing the firm's hiring from diverse backgrounds is part of Miletti's strategy to diversify Allspring's workforce.
"If we do want differentiation of thought, then you can't have a cookie-cutter approach to doing it," she said.
