Jeffrey L. Harmening

"Steve Sanger came along and he did a lot of things for diversity at General Mills, but one thing he's really known for is and he's here today, so I'm conscious I'm talking to the guy who did it, but is really about bringing women along in the organization. And we had our first female vice president in 1972, and the diversity, the gender diversity really picked up over Steve's leadership, and he contributed to that. And then Ken Powell did a lot with diversity too, especially the LGBT network and championing gay marriage. Very controversial at the time. But from an inclusion perspective and from our values perspective, exactly the right thing to do. "

"How does General Mills think about disability and inclusion that way in the workforce? The first thing I would say is, look, if you want an inclusive environment, you can't be selectively inclusive. I mean, inclusive means inclusive, whether you come from a military background or LGBT or whether you have a disability, whether it's a physical disability or a learning disability, we work to include all people to give their best in our organization. And we have programs internally with internships from high schools where we have disadvantaged kids who come in and learn the value of work. And I'm really proud of that work."

One of the things that we're talking about now is unconscious bias. And you talk about equality and unconscious bias. Look, we all have biases, and most of them are unconscious. And that's particularly important as you're doing job postings internally and as you're sifting through resumes, making sure that whatever biases you bring to the table are not reflected, at least to the extent possible, in either your hiring decisions or your promotion decisions or your raises. And so we're spending quite a bit of time now internally, because, to be honest, right now there is not a lot of conscious bias going on at General Mills. We've been at this inclusion efforts for decades, but we want to make sure that we're not unconsciously making those decisions. So we're spending a lot of time on that right now."