Indigenizing corporate Canada
Goldman Sach’s Bill Lomax and John Stackhouse of RBC on putting the “Indigenous” in BIPOC.
John Stackhouse and Bill Lomax discuss Indigenous finance in this excerpt from the Rights & Respect Magazine, Issue 2.
Bill Lomax, the incoming CEO at the First Nations Bank of Canada, wants to see more Indigenous representation in corporations’ senior executive ranks.
“I think if you take a look at the corporate C-suite—CEO, CFO, chief operating officer—has there ever been a Native American in the fortune 500? I don’t think so. And I don’t know what it’s like up in Canada, if we take a look at the top 50 companies, but I’d be willing to bet if there’s been one, there’s been one, maybe two, if that. There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement.”
Lomax, then VP with Goldman Sachs, was in conversation with John Stackhouse of RBC during the 2022 Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase (IPSS) session called Pathways to Indigenizing Corporate Canada.
Lomax, who has worked with First Nations and Native American tribes for about 25 years, says: “We’re seeing, down in the States, one of the big issues is that there’s been this big push since George Floyd to really have corporate diversity [but] there is no focus on Natives. And so, you see the word, the acronym BIPOC [black, Indigenous and people of colour], right? Second letter in there stands for Indigenous. [They] gloss over it every time.”
Lomax adds that corporations should make building a diverse team a metric of a company’s success. “If you say half your bonus is dependent on building out a diverse team, all of a sudden you got a diverse team. All of a sudden, people are making efforts that they just have not made before.”
Stackhouse is VP in RBC’s Office of the CEO. “One of the things we have been trying to come to grips with . . . is how do we rethink or reimagine employment? Because if we’re just limiting employment to being a full-time employee... we’re missing so much opportunity. Because we have engagement relationships, economic relationships, with so many Indigenous youth and other generations across the country.
“[At RBC], we’re trying to rethink the metric itself. How do we measure economic engagement with communities, but also with individuals? This can be through contracts. And I don’t mean call-centre contracts. Like meaningful economic contracts with individuals or teams of individuals . . . taking a more holistic approach and also being open to more fluidity.”
Stackhouse says that economic reconciliation is going to require a new approach to skills. RBC’s 2021 report Building Bandwidth “looked at the challenges, but also the opportunities . . . realizing we’ve got a lot wrong in the past. And we’re re-thinking our playbook on hiring, on engagement with Indigenous youth.”
He also notes that the ‘Great Resignation’ is forcing many companies to rethink their relationships with employees.
“How do we create economic relationships and employment relationships that empower the individual to come in full time, but then leave, maybe set up their own company, serving us? And . . . maybe coming back in after they sell their company . . . Maybe they come back to us as an executive at that level, or a senior leader. They don’t come in . . . and then move up to the executive ranks. It’s going to be a lot more zigzaggy. That kind of imagination, which I think is almost intuitive with youth today, is something that we laggards in the corporate world have to get more comfortable with.”
Lomax says corporations “really miss the boat” by not doing lateral hiring.
“We really don’t make an effort in corporate America to bring in people with great skills. There are a lot of folks in here . . . that could be working in corporate Canada or corporate America . . . but your skills may be discounted or maybe not thought of as relevant. And yet they are. You may have been running large businesses for your First Nation, as a leader, you may have . . . great leadership experience. And really when it comes down to it, skills or certain skills to your area are important, but leadership really is key to making a company successful . . . . And so I think there’s a big opportunity for corporate America and corporate Canada to start recruiting there. And then on top of that, the same folks that we are just talking about should be very much eligible for opportunities for corporate board membership, right?”
At the same time, Lomax does encourage Indigenous communities to “[push] the young people in your community to go through and follow some of the traditional steps to climb that corporate ladder. Go get your MBA, get your law degree... and work your way up the ladder. Because having folks in those positions will have a big effect on the community long term. I can now bring a lot of the power for Goldman Sachs to the table. And the thing is I understand the issues in a deeper way than somebody who is non-Native trying to reach out to a community.”
Responding to concerns about balancing corporate workload with community responsibilities, Stackhouse says: “I don’t believe that working 60 hours a week is too challenging for any First Nations person. I’ve worked 60, 80 hours a week, I’ve stayed tight to my community, I go up for feasts . . . Now more than ever, we have the opportunity to stay plugged into our communities . . . If I’ve got my laptop, my phone, it doesn’t matter where I am, I can be working. It used to be . . . really concentrated. It had to be in the office. Now you work from anywhere, so that there’s no reason you can’t be massively successful in the corporate world and still be plugged into your culture is my opinion.”
Attendees connecting at IPSS 2022.
“COVID has opened our eyes to the future of work—that it can be done from anywhere,” says Stackhouse. At the same time, he notes, one of the challenges across the country is that bandwidth in a lot of Indigenous communities “is not at the level it needs to be for active, real-time engagement.
“That’s a solvable problem, but it does take a real focus, and it does take some resources . . . the support from us, the hardware and software, but also the bandwidth, the infrastructure in their communities . . . So I hope we can all kind of work on that together. That’s a real sort of Canadian project that we can make quite possible in the 2020s.”
Lomax is returning to IPSS 2023 as a panellist in a conversation called Capitalizing Indigenous Business: Towards A Supercharged Canadian Economy, alongside Alfredo Di Blasio of Longhouse Capital Partners and Sharon Singh of Bennett Jones.
Tickets for the 2023 Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase, coming to Vancouver and online on June 1st and 2nd, are available here.
This article was originally published in Rights & Respect, Issue 2. To purchase a physical copy of the magazine, click here. To purchase tickets to the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase, coming June 1-2, 2023, click here.
