Future Leadership Development: What Are Corporates Doing to Support Ethnic Minority Talent Progression?
Many organisations are working hard to improve ethnic minority progression into senior leadership, and many are still not where they want to be. This session creates space for a candid, constructive conversation about what corporates are doing now to shift the dial, what challenges remain, and what meaningful progress can look like over the long term.
Rather than presenting any one organisation as having “the answer”, our panel will share honest reflections on the realities of change: recognising where representation is still behind, setting clear targets, and putting the work in to nurture, retain, and support talent through to senior leadership roles, including addressing persistent gaps in representation in senior positions.
We’ll explore what’s working, what’s proving difficult, and how businesses can balance lived-experience involvement in this work without placing undue burden or creating unintended exploitation.
Key themes include:
- Building progression pathways and improving retention beyond manager level
- Burnout, barriers, and the impact of limited progression opportunities
- Target-setting, accountability, and the long-term work of culture change
- Involving lived experience meaningfully, without exploitation
Expect a thoughtful discussion grounded in real experiences, practical learning, and shared accountability with takeaways for leaders, HR, DEI, and L&D professionals committed to improving outcomes
About the Speakers:
Karen Greenall is Head of Performance and Engagement. A strategic leader for people and change, she specialises in behaviour change designing practical, measurable interventions that embed new ways of working, accelerate AI enabled adoption, and translate insight into action across business units. Her focus is on optimising business performance while creating a client centric organisation, aligning engagement, leadership, and capability building so colleagues can deliver consistently excellent outcomes for clients.
Karen leads wellbeing activity across the firm, championing a refreshed, four pillar strategy and the DWF Wellbeing Hub to normalise conversations, build awareness, and equip leaders with supportive, everyday practices. She steers the engagement strategy, turning survey findings into clear priorities, and governs core performance and L&D cycles from mid year reviews to leadership development and partner promotion processes ensuring investment is targeted where it drives the greatest impact.
Passionate about investing in talent, Karen champions early careers pathways and targeted skills development, directs L&D investment to build capability at pace, and ensures colleagues have the support, tools, and opportunities to thrive so they grow their careers and deliver for clients.
Emma leads the Barclays Business Banking Relationship team, supporting SMEs across Greater Manchester to achieve their growth ambitions. Emma has worked for Barclays for 26 years and has a wealth of knowledge of both Personal and Business Banking.
Emma is a proud Mancunian and has a passion to support businesses to build a Multicultural and diverse workforce, representative of the city and boroughs that we live and work in.
As the Pro Vice Chancellor for Social Justice and Equity at the University of Salford, Pradeep leads the strategic development and delivery of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion across the institution. Pradeep’s role involves working closely with senior leaders to embed equity into organisational strategy, governance and decision making, ensuring that inclusive practice supports performance, resilience and long term impact.
Pradeep’s work brings together academic insight and institutional leadership to address structural inequality, with a particular focus on race equity and award gaps in higher education. Pradeep is committed to using evidence led and data informed approaches to improve outcomes for staff and students and to support organisations in building fairer, more inclusive systems.
What motivates Pradeep is seeing organisations move beyond compliance driven approaches to equity and towards meaningful, sustained change. When social justice and inclusion are embedded effectively, they become powerful drivers of innovation, organisational effectiveness and positive impact for individuals, institutions and the wider community.
Interested In The Event?
If you’re interested in attending, you can book online here.
For any further enquires about this event, contact [email protected]
