Britta Wilson

A fierce advocate of inclusion, Wilson is dedicated to helping companies build a culture of inclusion to embrace diversity.

Britta Wilson believes that in many organizations cultural transformation is requisite for inclusion, diversity, and belonging. As vice president of inclusion strategies at Pixar, Wilson focuses on creating a culture of inclusion predicated on respect, curiosity, valuing differences, representation, and learning, which in turn results in increased psychological safety and belonging. When this occurs, Wilson believes that a wider variety of voices will be empowered to tell meaningful stories that will resonate across the broadest audiences possible.

A long-time champion for the marginalized, sidelined, and silenced, Wilson has helped leaders understand the business, personal, and professional impact of inclusion, exclusion, and belonging. Her success has shown that once these impacts are realized, it is critical for leaders set a clear and authentic tone throughout the organization with supportive behaviors, with the primary goal to ensure that employees have lived experiences, which align with inclusion.

Prior to joining Pixar, Wilson assisted a tech company that was struggling to hire women technologists. Over the years, a number of solutions failed to deliver the desired increase in female hires. Wilson and her team conducted a system analysis on the company’s talent acquisition process, examining each step of the interrelationships in order to identify the levers that would yield the most impact. Wilson and team discovered a number of factors that were impacting the talent pipeline and hiring of female technology professionals. For example, the talent acquisition process was burdened with ill-prepared interviewers, unclear role requirements, and narrow mental models held by the hiring team, which disproportionately affected female applicants.

Wilson and her team adopted a strategy to refine the process for inclusion, build knowledge, and ultimately address bias. Over a nine-month period, the team refreshed the career website to include more diverse faces and stories, retooled the language in job postings to be more gender neutral, and established relationships with women in tech network organizations. In addition, the company began hosting events and showcasing successful female technologists, required hiring managers and interview participants to attend learning sessions on bias, and established a new-hire ambassador program, among other actions. By taking this approach, they achieved an estimated 35 percent increase in female applicants and a slight increase in the retention of female technologists.

Wilson believes that our next generation of leaders must be skilled in building inclusive workplace cultures; thus, she has taught classes and workshops and facilitated sessions to equip them. She was also recently named Outstanding MBA of the Year at the National Black MBA Conference in Philadelphia.