Greg Cunningham | Rewiring How DEI Gets Done

Jennifer Tescher
Welcome to EMERGE Everywhere. I’m Jennifer Tescher, Founder and CEO of the Financial Health Network. For two decades, I’ve worked with leaders across industries to answer one central question: How can we make people’s financial lives better? Now I’m sharing these conversations with you. Listen in to hear how these visionaries are rewiring our society to support financial health for all.

As I think about our mission of improving financial health for all, we’ve got quite a few headwinds as we think about the next era. And right now, top of mind for me is the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’re seeing it and hearing it in recent decisions from the Supreme Court. We’re seeing it in comments and actions from business leaders. We’re seeing it as they step away, in some cases, from the important work that they’ve been doing over the last several years. But if we’re not able to get past that headwind, we’re going to have a really hard time of achieving the “for all” part of our mission. Financial health for all. So how do we move past the noise and stay focused on driving equitable financial health outcomes, especially for those who have been historically and systemically left out?

I’m going to have a chance to explore those questions today with my guest, Greg Cunningham, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer for U.S. Bank. I met Greg last year when I joined the U.S. Bank Consumer Advisory Council, and I could immediately see what an important impact Greg was having on the bank.

So I don’t need to tell you that we’re in a just incredibly tumultuous time around issues of diversity and equity. Last year, the Supreme Court issued this landmark decision on affirmative action, which has huge implications. Large corporations are laying off folks like you. Companies are cutting their DEI programs. Claudine Gay’s recent resignation from Harvard prompted a lot of heat and light around this idea of DEI itself being even racist. Set the scene for us. Where are you seeing things play out in your seat at U.S. Bank, and how does it feel, really, in this moment?

Greg Cunningham
What a great question, Jennifer. You know, all of the things that you just described have created a lot of, I think, anxiety for people who do the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion and believe that DEI actually is a catalyst for not only improving conditions for people of diverse backgrounds, but for all people.

I think those of us who’ve always seen DEI as a catalyst to contribute to prosperity for all of our stakeholders, for employees, for customers, for communities in that the real business case for diversity was about bringing innovation to business, and it was about bringing growth to businesses. I don’t know that that narrative was always as front and center.

The reason, Jennifer, that diversity matters, the reason that you need more women and people of color and people with disabilities and the reason that you’re concerned and you’re committed to that is because it’s better for business. It’s better for the business. And the innovation component of it is, I think about innovation as embracing the new realities, and I think the environment we’re in today is so incredibly troubling because we’ve sort of lost this notion that diversification is good in any part of your business. I don’t think any business doesn’t think that diversification is a bad thing and including in your talent pool. So when we think about the real imperative around DEI, we think about it first and foremost as critical to who we are as an organization and what we stand for.

Our purpose is about powering the potential for all of our stakeholders. I can’t think of anything more critical to that than creating a culture where everyone can be successful, where we’re thinking about how to be inclusive in the way that we look at the marketplace and we sort of embrace the realities of not only the demographic trends, but the cultural trends and how we serve customers more effectively and more efficiently. Finally, how we serve communities. Listen, the racial wealth gap and any wealth gaps are bad for everybody. Racial wealth disparities in this country aren’t just bad for people of color. They’re bad for everyone. It’s a drag on the U.S. economy as a whole. It affects the household income of every single American so said differently – everybody should care in helping to resolve them.

So I think for us, navigating this time is about focusing on the things that are really important and making sure that the narrative around DEI is focused on the things that actually impact every single person’s life right now.

Jennifer Tescher
Yeah. Before we go to the future, though, how is it that we’ve lost the thread? Like everything you just said is pretty logical, right? Makes sense. Seems pretty basic. But the discussion, if you can call it a discussion, the finger pointing taking place and demonization that’s taking place would have you think that these activities, activities we associate with DEI, are in some way evil, immoral, going to spell the demise of society as we know it. How did we get to that place?

Greg Cunningham
Well, it was DEI and, you know, other corporate activities were used as a weapon in the cultural war that’s taking place. And I think it’s incredibly unfortunate for those who find it necessary to try to take something that is so vital to us delivering on our promise, you know, both more broadly as a country and certainly more specifically around our efforts within business. I don’t know how we get out of that place, but it’s certainly been used as a tool to create this divisiveness and this fear that something is being taken from people – that somehow efforts of DEI are meant to take from some people or this redistribution of wealth, and it’s never been about that. I think what the business community has a real opportunity to do is to stand firm in this time, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to make changes in how we think about the programmatic aspects of DEI. And yes, there’s probably some changes to language and, you know, some nuance changes – just doing good hygiene, and you should be doing that anyway. You should always be looking at your programs and making sure that they are delivering on the things that they’re intended to do.

So what we’re doing is making sure that we just have good hygiene around our programs, but what we can’t and will never do is retreat. You can never retreat from the notion that this is absolutely critical not only to doing well from a business perspective, but doing good and being a good corporate citizen and contributing something to society other than just providing products and services because I think the responsibility is even more important now. And by the way, the fact that some companies have retreated from DEI in this time when it’s even more important to do the work, I think has just really brought to light that for a lot of organizations it was simply performative anyway. So those companies who really think that this work is transformative and not performative, this is when you have to stand firm and put your foot on the gas and keep going forward.

Jennifer Tescher
Yeah, well, I know that that’s what you and U.S. Bank are trying to do and we’ll get there. I definitely want to talk about that and your specific efforts at the bank, but I want to talk about you for a minute. I want to talk a little bit about how you ended up in the seat that you’re in. If you look Greg up on LinkedIn, it’s not obvious. So, you know, before joining the bank, you spent 16 years at Target as a marketer, and when you first moved over to U.S. Bank, you were supposed to lead customer engagement. So how did you get from there to here?

Greg Cunningham
I love this question, Jennifer, because you’re right, it’s not obvious. And to be honest with you, when the opportunity was first presented to me, I said no. I was not interested in it at all because I didn’t want to be, you know, the Black guy doing DEI work for a corporation. And, you know, at that time not really understanding the important role the bank could play and what not only having the seat, but when I thought about it, I didn’t want to have the seat. I actually wanted to occupy the seat. There’s a difference. And when I came back to the organization and talked about what occupying the seat meant for me, and that it wasn’t just an exercise in human capital management.

I was a child of the late sixties. Young, but I was a child of the late sixties. My dad was a small business owner in Pittsburgh. He owned a butcher shop. When Dr. King was assassinated in ‘68, the unrest and riots in Pittsburgh, my dad’s shop was looted and burned and all of that. My dad went to a downtown bank to get financing, to get his business back opening again, and, by the way, restore some sense of dignity and provide for his family. Of course, he’s a Black man in the sixties. The bank said no. Not even no – they were like, no.

Jennifer Tescher
Hell no.

Greg Cunningham
Right. I didn’t know if I should swear on your podcast. But yes, that’s exactly what they said. But there was a White gentleman, a German Jewish immigrant, Mr. Lutz, who was the one who sold my dad the butcher shop. He actually lent my dad the money to get the butcher shop back open. I’ll never forget my mom. And then my dad died the very next summer of ‘69. Just all the trauma and anxiety. He died the very next summer. 

I’ll never forget my mom telling us the story of Mr. Lutz lending my dad the money because it would have been very easy. I was the youngest of five. She was worried that we would always be angry or have some anger against White people and everything that was happening and how the world was unfolding in front of us. But she made it a point to tell us that story of Mr. Lutz because she wanted us to know that there are good and bad people from all walks of life, and this man was very kind. I think he ended up forgiving the loan after my dad died, like he was just an amazing person. She felt that was really important, that we knew that part of the story. 

I reflect on that often, certainly as I talked about occupying the seat and the irony of now working for the fifth largest bank in the country, and the seat that I occupy and the responsibility that comes with that in how I can help people like my dad actually, you know, not only live their dream, but have a sense of dignity and provide for their family, especially now. I feel it. I feel the personal responsibility to do this job in a way that is very different, how people might see the work of DEI and what it is. I’m not going to run from the title of DEI. There were times where I thought we should, but I feel like leaning into it and sort of changing the narrative about what this work is will help people understand how we all benefit from it.

Again, going back to your original question of how this thing got weaponized, is it became sort of this exercise in human capital management and how do you sort of increase numbers on a scorecard so that everybody felt like we were doing something.

That’s not what I’m trying to do. The three components of it that I wanted to make sure I was influencing was not only how we had representation, but what employees were experiencing. How it allowed everybody in the organization to show up as their authentic self, but it also meant how we served a broader cross-section of customers that we sort of embraced. Where the demographics were going was we looked at geography and we understood culture, like how we showed up for customers in a way that was most relevant, and then finally, how we invested in community. I wanted to make sure that I was able to influence and impact all three of those, so they have sort of always been, at least in my tenure, DEI has always been sort of this internal and external practice of how we drive growth for the organization.

The reason I ended up taking the job is I realized somebody was actually going to get the job. Like you asked me whether I said no or not, somebody was going to get the job and I didn’t want to be that guy who was, you know, critical of people doing their job. It was actually my wife who said to me, it’s like you can either sit back and be critical of whoever gets the job and how they go about doing it, or you can actually do the job and you can actually point the way for the organization to make real change. And I just thought that was, again, your word, so logical to think about it that way. But when I looked back on my career too, I had always thought the thread throughout my experience was all about being in service. It was all about serving something larger than myself, and this was a new challenge that I felt was certainly worthy of taking on.

Jennifer Tescher
Yeah, and you’ve had kind of a meteoric rise at the bank, and I’d like to think that’s a combination of your success, but also events in the world, right? So for those of you who don’t know, U.S. Bank is headquartered in Minneapolis and figured quite prominently in the events surrounding George Floyd’s horrific murder in 2020. Talk a little bit about that moment. Where were you in the bank at that time, like kind of where were you focused, and how did those events sort of play out for the bank? 

Greg Cunningham
You talked about my previous experience as a marketer, and I like to more accurately describe myself, Jennifer, as a storyteller because I believe in the power of story to bring people together and create this sort of mutuality in shared humanity, and so I love talking about this. Your question – George Floyd was murdered less than three miles from where I’m sitting right now. So in Minneapolis, although it was a global sort of reckoning around racial equality and racial justice, it hit differently in Minneapolis and it hit differently for the bank because of the sheer proximity of it and having our own bank branches being destroyed in the unrest that followed. All of it brought it home in a way that was incredibly tangible for our entire organization.

The day after it happened, I got a call from our CEO, and I was working within the corporate social responsibility area and I was working on DEI. I was leading DEI at the time, but within the context of corporate social responsibility. I remember him calling me that morning and asking me if I had heard the news of, what were my impressions, what should we do, all of that. Now, mind you, this is the CEO calling me probably before 8 a.m. in the morning and, you know, wanting me to sort of wax, you know, prophetic about all of these events and I was very emotional at the time. The way I would describe that conversation was we started out as the CEO and the Head of Diversity having a conversation, but we ended that phone call being first names.

We had gotten to a place where it was two people having a conversation about what this means, both for us personally and how we both should show up. Him asking me what he needed to do and how he needed to show up as the CEO and what that meant for me and my role. The one thing that jumped out to me and the word that just kept coming into my head, Jennifer, was this notion of access. Is that it would be hard for me to talk about what I should do and what the organization should do if I didn’t have access to him because I needed to know what was in his heart, and I needed to know what was in his intention, and I needed the titles to go away, and I needed to know him on a first-name basis, and he needed to know me on a first-name basis.

Jennifer Tescher
And at this point, you weren’t yet on the operating committee?

Greg Cunningham
No. No, I was not.

Jennifer Tescher
Where were you seated?

Greg Cunningham
I was probably three levels below. I was probably three levels below, and so that summer, he promoted me to the operating committee, reporting to him. That accelerated our efforts more than anything that I could ever express to you, is because what you need, what all of us need and crave, is the access to influence decisions, to help shape culture, and help shape the direction of the organization. So that was probably the single most important decision that he made. This is just weeks later after the conversation. So I give a lot of credit to Andy Cecere, our CEO, for making that decision. It elevated the importance of it for the organization, but also for the community to understand how seriously we were taking it and how important it was to how we saw our business, to our role in the community.

Jennifer Tescher
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Jennifer Tescher
So talk just a little bit more about in the aftermath, beyond your role, how did U.S. Bank show up? And I ask you to retell that because, gosh, 2020 – it’s three years ago, right? Certainly George Floyd is on everyone’s lips and always will be, hopefully, but it’s fading. It’s fading for people, and I also believe in the power of stories. I think it’s important to remember that time as we try to sort of get back to a reasonable place, so tell us about the aftermath.

Greg Cunningham
Immediately following George’s murder, one of the first things we needed to do was make sure that the community realized that we weren’t going anywhere. As I said, we had three branches right here in the Twin Cities that were destroyed. The first decision that we made was that we weren’t going to leave these communities because that’s typically what happens in communities that have historically been underinvested and disinvested in, is companies decide to leave. Well, we made the decision we were going to rebuild all three of the bank branches. One of them, we actually donated the land and relocated the branch, but we built those branches back better than ever. That was step one. 

We also knew that we needed to support communities through our philanthropic efforts and not just make contributions to organizations’ operations, but we needed to deal with the trauma that people were going through and the trauma that some of the staff people were going through. Because if you remember, those organizations who were already doing the work, suddenly everybody had looked to them like, what are we going to do? What should we be doing? Staff was still dealing with the trauma of what happened, and all of a sudden there were microphones and cameras in everybody’s faces asking, well, what should we do and what is your point of view on this and how do I help? So we want to make sure we were taking care of community in that way. 

The biggest thing we did though was we launched our Access Commitment. So doubling down on this notion of access, we created this overarching platform that really helped U.S. Bank understand how do we lean into issues of social justice and equality. We’re a bank. We’re a financial institution, and so what we do understand is we understand economics and we understand how to help communities prosper. I fundamentally believe, Jennifer, and the reason we went down this path, is because there is no separation between social justice and economic justice, racial justice and economic justice. There’s no separation. You can’t have one without the other. It’s simply not possible. So the bank leaned into what we do well, which is how do we help develop programs and initiatives that help close wealth disparities? We launched an initiative within our wealth management area, which really sort of looked at how do we help people who need financial advice, financial education? How do we just remove barriers that prevent people from being able to take advantage of those kinds of services? Within our retail team, how do we help close homeownership gaps? We launched three special purpose credit programs, which allowed us to provide more flexible lending terms and get capital in the hands of future homeowners and small business owners. 

Then the third thing was really just sort of doubling down on this notion of providing more financial education and financial literacy initiatives. So it became a bank-wide initiative, and the first thing I went to when in some of my earliest days on the operating committee, what we call our managing committee, was to say to each one of my peers, I need each one of you to think about how you are going to contribute to this notion of creating greater access. Again, I haven’t said anything about changing a number on a scorecard or, you know, putting more women and people of color because that became obvious. 

In the process of all of this, we are in the process of acquiring a bank, Union Bank out of California, and as a critical piece of how we are going to grow our business, California is essential. Well, engaging in California and becoming more involved in those efforts, California has 60% of the residents are people of color. Forty percent of them are Hispanic. It’s not a DEI initiative. It’s critical to our growth. What I’m saying is it becomes obvious that you need women and people of color in senior decision-making positions because if you don’t, you will not be successful. And so that’s the DEI part of it, is making sure that the talent is supportive of the business goals – not the other way around.

Jennifer Tescher
So, you know, let me stop you there because, yes, I couldn’t agree more. But if you think about the way in which DEI shows up at different companies or even at different financial institutions, what is included in those three letters, where that position is seeded in the company. What’s the purview? Does it go beyond human capital management?  

Greg Cunningham
It has to.

Jennifer Tescher
But there’s no standard playbook. It looks different everywhere.

Greg Cunningham
And it should. 

Jennifer Tescher
Well, yes, but you’re one of the few who really can then talk about what the institution is doing about the business.

Greg Cunningham
Yeah.

Jennifer Tescher
And so many companies made what I call George Floyd commitments, right? And we’re now at the point where whether they were real or performative, folks are checking the box, right? Did that. The problem with those initiatives in many cases is that they were initiatives. We put together a set of activities. We put them in a box. We created a scorecard around them, a very public scorecard, and we brought someone in to kind of manage, to make sure that we hit those goals. But if you talk to a lot of those people, right, they’ll say, well, not much has changed day to day within the institution of how we actually do what we do every day, because that was like a special thing and it didn’t change much. What I’m excited about – what you’ve been sharing is that it sounds like it’s becoming increasingly embedded in how the business is run day to day.

Greg Cunningham
It’s the only way. It’s the only way, Jennifer, to make progress. It’s the only way we’re ever going to make progress, and here’s where the responsibility becomes so critical and where I’ve been very fortunate, is one of the first meetings we had or the first opportunities I had was actually to present to the board. The board has to embrace this as something bigger than a performative exercise. At the board level, you have to have a deep appreciation for how this is critical to the business being successful. You got to be ambidextrous in the sense that you have to have this understanding that doing well and doing good and being able to to exercise both of those things at the same time. That’s the ambidexterity of this, like you actually can do both. It actually is more profitable to be a good corporate citizen. It actually is. I was fortunate enough that I had the opportunity from the very get-go, right after that phone call that I described for you before. That happened in June. In July, I got promoted to the managing committee, had the opportunity to present to the board, and share the same thing that I’m sharing with you with the board. And they said, you know what? They said the exact thing that you just said, this just makes so much sense.

Jennifer Tescher
I’m curious, you know, you talked about how important it was, how formative it was to have that human to human conversation with Andy – to know his heart and to have him know and understand your heart. What about at the board level? How do you do that? Or is it just a business case?

Greg Cunningham
No, it’s the same principle. It’s the same idea. It’s sitting down with board members after the presentation. It’s the time at the board dinners or in between the meetings where you have the conversations, where they get to know your heart, you get to know the things that they deem to be important. What you find is we all want the same thing. We all want the same things. It’s how we get there is where we might be able to have debate and discourse and all those things happen. But the thing that’s critical for DEI executives in particular is you can have the best strategy ever written around DEI, but if you can’t articulate it, it’s dead in the water. It’s only as good as your ability to articulate it, and that’s where it’s oftentimes described as the hearts and minds piece of this work. You can’t ever, like of course, all of the decisions and all of the plans we put together are grounded in data. A hundred percent. We’re a bank, so everything is data-driven, but that’s only going to get you so far. That’s going to get people’s heads nodding. 

The things that are going to change behavior is actually when you reach somebody’s sense of compassion and understanding. It’s when you are able to appeal to somebody’s sense of a shared mutuality, sharing a space with someone, being able to connect with them around a story that gets them to go, I went through the same thing. Here’s a great example, Jennifer. We were launching the Hispanic component. So we started our journey with Access Commitment. We started with the Black community because that’s where the wealth disparities were the greatest. I’ll spare you the numbers of all that we’ve invested, but it’s been an incredibly powerful program. We realized that there are similar wealth disparities in the Hispanic community, so last year we launched the Hispanic component of Access Commitment. This banker was sharing with me a story of helping a customer online, and he’s on the phone with this woman who doesn’t speak English very well. And in the background, he can hear this little girl translating everything he’s saying for the mom. Finally he says to the woman, hey, do you mind if I speak to you in Spanish because I speak Spanish, and he’s saying this in Spanish and he could just feel the woman’s anxiety go down and the trust level go up. So he shares this story with me and I go wow. For that community, language is access.

So we created, being the storyteller that I am, what I do, we turn it into a documentary. We create this documentary about these 11 million kids who are translating everyday life for their families. It’s called “Translators.” It’s on translators.com if you want to watch it. It’s a very powerful story. But I share that because when I brought that idea to Andy, I said, hey, we’re going to launch Hispanic Access and I’ve partnered with the marketing folks and we’ve created this film. He’s like, a what? We did this documentary, and I put together a one-minute trailer. I just want you to watch. He’s like, just tell me what it’s about. And I described to him what it was about. It’s about these 11 million kids. And he said, I used to do that for my family.

Jennifer Tescher
Really?

Greg Cunningham
He’s Italian. He said I used to do that for my parents.

Jennifer Tescher
Wow.

Greg Cunningham
When they immigrated. So send me the whole thing. I want to watch the whole thing. I share that, Jennifer, as evidence that what people want is they want a shared humanity, a shared understanding – something that they can relate in their own life. So for him it was I totally get that. It doesn’t have to be Spanish, but I was that kid. I get it. I relate to it. I think the more we can be in proximity with each other and the more we can share space and have conversations, doesn’t mean that we always agree. I tell people in the company all the time, it’s not important to me that we agree. I don’t really care. It’s not really important to me that you understand, but it’s important to me that you want to.

Jennifer Tescher
Yeah. Bryan Stevenson is a hero of mine, and when I think of him, I think of the word proximate or proximity. He talks a lot about the importance of proximity, and I couldn’t agree more. I will say though, that puts tremendous pressure on you or others who sit in your seat and also are people of color, right? Or have an element of their identity that is often seen as other. Because you have a leadership and functional role to help drive understanding, but this is personal for you.

Greg Cunningham
Very much so.

Jennifer Tescher
How do you deal with that? It’s exhausting.

Greg Cunningham
It is exhausting, but I think about I read a book years ago by Andrew Young. It’s called “An Easy Burden.” He talked about getting that same question where people would ask him and Dr. King, how do you deal, like people are throwing bricks at your head? He said they would often just sort of talk about what the generations that came before them went through and that this is an easy burden compared to, you know, some of the things that they had to deal with. And I feel the same way, back to your original question about today’s environment and the SCOTUS decision around DEI, we’ve been in a lot worse places. Imagine being here during Jim Crow or imagine being here after the Dred Scott decision. Come on, like, we’ve always come through it. You just can’t take your foot off the gas.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t have to change, but you can’t retreat. We’ve been in a lot worse situations. To me, what fuels me every single day is an understanding of that – is the understanding of what we’ve come through and what those who fought during those periods, what they put on the line. What I’m quote unquote, sacrificing or whatever, as pressure comes with what I do, that’s the responsibility. It’s bigger than me and once you come to terms with this ain’t about you. This ain’t about you. When you come to terms with that, it’s a lot easier to lean into it or to accept the criticism, and believe me, the criticism comes from both sides. 

There’s a side who feels you’re doing too much, and now DEI is like, you know, it’s discriminating or whatever it is. And then it’s those who feel like you’re not doing enough, and what about us? We should be moving faster. I’m like, look, I don’t have time for any of the noise. I’m trying to do the work. I’m not going left. I’m not going right. I’m going forward. 

We’re really doing the work at U.S. Bank, and it doesn’t mean we always get it right and it doesn’t mean that we are at some destination. It just means we’re committed to doing the work and we have to rely on partners like you and others to help guide us through it and help us make good decisions. But it’s too embedded in how the organization sees itself and how it wants to show up and power the human potential for all of our stakeholders and all of that. I just feel so fortunate to work for a company that is truly, truly committed. And as I said, it doesn’t mean you always get it right, but you certainly aspire to that.

Jennifer Tescher
Greg, I think that’s a fantastic place to end our conversation, so thank you for joining me on EMERGE Everywhere.

Greg Cunningham
Thank you, Jennifer. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Tescher
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