This blog is Part III of the series, "Are We There Yet? My Climb and Journey". In this blog, I talk about a few incidences at AT&T that occurred while I was getting my MBA in an Executive Education program at the University of Pittsburgh. These incidences became a turning point in my career.
As a company, AT&T was committed to diversity. First of all, they had a company statement to support diversity and denounce discrimination. They also provided diversity training for their employees. In fact, across all of their divisions, AT&T had implemented by the late 1990’s all of the steps referenced in Frank Kalman’s recent article on Diversity-Executive.com, “Five Steps to Embed Diversity and Inclusion Into Organizational Culture”.[i] (See below for the “Five Steps”) Personally, I saw their support of my business education at the University of Pittsburgh as a demonstration of this commitment. However, two specific incidents that occurred during my MBA program with my local division’s leadership left me with a very negative impression of my local management.
Let me start off by saying it was the company’s policy that once they decided to support an employee in an Executive Education program, they would be fully funded for the duration of the program. However, my division, without cause, tried to re-nig on certain parts of its financial commitment to my Executive Education program. While I was completing my MBA program, I along with several other employees in my group was moved into a new division because of the dissolution of an international only government marketing team. As time drew near for the capstone class trip that would include travel to Prague in the Czech Republic, Italy, and France, my new division did not want to pay for the travel costs associated with the trip. Without any justification and against company policy, they...
