Diversity in leadership

The Commonwealth Bank is committed to developing, promoting and retaining talented leaders. Diversity in leadership is increasingly seen as an asset to organisations and linked to better economic performance. We value the diversity of thinking, experience and perspectives our leaders bring to the organisation and actively seek passionate and talented people to work in our business.

All of our people have unique and valuable talents to contribute to our organisation and we need to foster these talents in an equitable and inclusive culture.  We will continue to recruit and develop the best person for the job regardless of gender, age, race, family or caring responsibilities, disability and sexual orientation.

Gender diversity in leadership

With women making up 61 per cent of our workforce and over 45% of management roles filled by women, a key Diversity in leadership focus is to increase the representation of women in senior leadership roles, so we have a broad representation of women right across the Group.

We are using a multi-pronged approach that includes opening the conversation about gender diversity, creating greater transparency in appointment to roles, updating our business processes and policies and building our female talent pipeline, ensuring female leaders are identified early; from female graduates and branch staff, through to our most senior women.

We attract and retain top female talent through a range of initiatives and leveraging existing employee offerings to ensure we remain competitive. These initiatives include mentoring, career resiliency and high potential development programs and a range of flexible working, parental and carers support options. Commonwealth Bank Group has won the prestigious Catalyst Award for our culture change program and diversity initiatives. This prestigious international award recognises organisations around the world that have created successful programs to recruit, retain and advance women in the workplace.

With strong leadership commitment and an effective culture, it has made it possible to take our diversity in leadership focus to the next level through our innovative unconscious bias leadership program.  The program is helping open the door for greater diversity in leadership.

Tracking our progress

As an early adopter of the ASX Corporate Governance Council Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations, the Group has introduced key measures to increase the representation of women in senior leadership roles. Our goal is to increase the representation of women in Executive Management and above roles from 26.6 per cent at December 2009 to 35 per cent at December 2014.