Liner Notes: DK Bartley

Welcome to the third edition of Liner Notes, where I reveal the stories of Moody’s colleagues and other guests who are moving the financial industry forward. Up this week: DK Bartley.

Describe your role. 

As Chief Diversity Officer for Moody’s Corporation, I am responsible for our global diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) strategy. My primary responsibility is ensuring that diversity in all its forms—including race, gender, sexuality, and experience—is interwoven in all aspects of our business.

How did you get into this area?

I myself am the product of numerous corporate DE&I programs. I have been involved with DE&I since my high school days, serving as the chairperson of the Brooklyn Borough President Youth Council. This council was formed as a direct result of the murder of Yusef Hawkins, a black youth who visited the predominantly white Brooklyn neighborhood Bensonhurst to potentially purchase a car, where he was attacked and killed by a mob. This occurred during a time in New York when racial unrest dominated the evening news daily. From there, the rest of my career is history.

We’ve been fortunate to have you at the helm of our DE&I efforts amid the events of the past year surrounding race and inequity. Before coming to Moody’s, you spent time leading talent acquisition in a number of industries. What makes finance different? Where are the challenges, where are the opportunities?

As an industry, finance in particular is about precision. In other industries you can learn as you grow and enhance through experience—cultivating talent is far more developmental. In finance, the talent must get the numbers, decisions, and outcomes right almost immediately; there is very little room for error. That is certainly the challenge, but the opportunity is that if you do get it right in our industry, there are a variety of exponential benefits. The customers are happy, you get promoted faster, and you are recognized on an individual level as adding value to the company.

Well said—having started my career on Wall Street in investment banking, I found striving for precision to be extremely satisfying. Moody’s has a long list of DE&I partners. Can you tell us about one of the Moody’s partnerships or programs that is particularly meaningful to you?

For me, it has to be our “Bridging the Gap” program, where Moody’s employees help youth in New York’s inner city prepare for college, mentoring them as big brothers and big sisters. Every summer we provide internships to many of these young men and women. The sponsorships and support systems that arise from those connections can persist for the rest of their careers, whether they come back to work at Moody’s or not. The program is particularly meaningful to me, not only because it’s where I grew up and got my start, but who knows—one of those young men or women may be our CEO in the future.

Agreed, it’s an incredible program. Our intern classes are always impressive, particularly those that come out of the Bridging the Gap program, and the graduation ceremonies are always inspiring. Having been fully remote for over a year, how have you adapted your DE&I strategy to meet the needs of a remote workforce? 

We have activated—quite literally—everything we do from a remote perspective. From the outset, and much to my surprise, it has worked significantly to our advantage from a DE&I perspective. As a result, our ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) are formally now rebranded as BRGs (Business Resource Groups) and have almost doubled their memberships from 3,500 to over 6,000, infusing the discussions with a huge variety of perspectives. This increase is a direct result of remote work and virtual programming: there are no physical barriers, multiple time zones can be incorporated, and perhaps most importantly, the pandemic has brought out the creativity and resourcefulness of all of Moody’s employees. This connectedness has helped us forge a new type of culture at Moody’s that goes beyond DE&I, enriching and enhancing the experiences of all of our employees around the world.

It has been remarkable to see how our BRGs have grown during this time—one of the real positives to come out of the challenges of the pandemic. Given Moody’s global scale—11.5K employees across 40 countries—how do you ensure consistency in the company’s approach to DE&I?

We overcommunicate! We have a DE&I website, an intranet site, and even a mobile app. For every business unit, we have DE&I Ambassadors that communicate each week to their colleagues. We have regional DE&I Managers, regional advisory committees, regional pulse surveys, and an annual DE&I summit. This constant stream of communications has culminated in the DE&I content we produce, which I’m proud to say is now an annual report. Simply put, we are consistently communicating through a variety of channels. Most importantly, in all of these channels we encourage feedback, similarly to how we continually incorporate our clients’ feedback. This process is what informs our overarching approach to DE&I at Moody’s.

Why do you see DE&I as a business imperative — not just for Moody’s but for its customers?

At the core of Moody’s, we sell ideas, expertise, and insights. You can only get the best ideas and the best analysis by comparison and collaboration among different professionals with a diversity of thought and experience. If I were a Moody’s customer, I would find that rigor and quality assurance absolutely priceless. Can we really say we’re helping capital markets and global businesses make the best decisions if those decisions haven’t been examined through a diverse lens? That’s why DE&I is pivotal to our success as a business.

In your nearly two years at Moody’s, you’ve taken the firm from allyship to advocacy. What upcoming initiative or program excites you? What’s next on your agenda for Moody’s?

Thank you, Rob. The transition from allyship, which is passive support of our diverse colleagues, to advocacy, which is the active sponsorship and advancement of their goals and wellbeing, is among one of my proudest achievements at Moody’s. As for upcoming programs, we recently published our first ever Annual DE&I Report. The report shares our DE&I data and goals related to enhancing gender diversity globally, and racial and ethnic diversity in the United States. I know that I’m not the only one at Moody’s who is excited about this. At the most recent Global Town Hall, we announced the report and fielded questions, ready to discuss challenging questions. Surprisingly, the collective reaction was the complete opposite of what we expected. Everyone at the firm wanted to participate and take on some level of ownership. The questions were primarily about what our colleagues could do as managers, individual employees, and BRGs to help us meet our goals and further cultivate DE&I at Moody’s. I was beyond elated that the announcement went so well. The change is real, and I’ll be the first to admit that DE&I is a shared job—we all do our part, and it is the responsibility of the entire Moody’s family. We have come a long way, and I am so jazzed about our next chapter!

What’s the one thing people might not know about working at Moody’s?

We are the best place to work on the planet. You can bring your authentic self to work, all day and every day, whether you are working remotely or whether you’re back in the office.

And finally, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The following quotation is usually misattributed to the great Mohandas Gandhi in 1913, but the phrasing as we know it had not seen use until 1970. Arlene Lorrance was a schoolteacher in Brooklyn who launched a program called The Love Project to improve the lives and education of students at Thomas Jefferson High School amid rising poverty and violence—an initiative near and dear to me. You’ve probably heard her advice before—be the change you want to see!