BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPECIAL FEATURE
(NOTE: This CNN article was originally published on November 19, 2019. I just saw an excellent interview with Ms. Cynthia Marshall by Simone Saunders Townsend on MSNBC and decided to research her background when I ran across this article.)
(CNN) — She’s the first African-American woman to lead an NBA team and says she better not be the last. More than a year after being tapped as CEO of the embattled Dallas Mavericks, Cynthia Marshall says she has turned around the organization’s culture and has greatly diversified its top ranks.
Marshall was hired by owner Mark Cuban last year to transform the Mavericks after Sports Illustrated exposed a “corrosive workplace culture” at the organization. Months after the article came out, an independent investigation launched by the Mavericks unearthed a number of instances over more than 20 years of sexual harassment and other improper workplace conduct, including inappropriate comments, touching, and forcible kissing.
Marshall was living in Dallas and enjoying retirement after a 36-year career at AT&T when Cuban called her for help.
“I walked in his office and while he greeted me at the door, he just looked broken. I mean, he looked as if he had been crying,” she recalls in the latest episode of CNN’s Boss Files with Poppy Harlow. “He was disturbed by it all and just said, ‘I need you.’ Literally the mandate was, ‘I need you to come in and transform the culture.’”
Marshall accepted the challenge.
Cuban, who purchased a majority stake in the Mavericks in 2000, did not face accusations of misconduct, but the independent investigation found that he had made “significant errors in judgment.” He agreed to donate $10 million to women’s advocacy groups “in recognition of the institutional and other failures” the investigation found.
“I walked into a bad culture,” says Marshall. “I walked into a place where the women were not valued and treated the way I would like to see them treated. Frankly, I think we had a problem with how we respected and treated people of color. It wasn’t a very diverse and inclusive environment when I got there. And so we needed to do some things.”
Within weeks, she had implemented a 100-day plan to turn around the team’s leadership and create a non-hostile work environment. The first areas she focused on were developing a women’s agenda and creating a values-based employment system, she says. She also sought to bring transparency to the workplace by granting an outside counsel full access to the team’s business operations.
When Marshall was named CEO, none of the employees on the executive leadership team were women or people of color. She increased the diversity within the leadership team by promoting from within and recruiting from outside of the organization. Today, 50% of the executive leadership team are women and 47% are people of color.
See CNN article at https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/success/dallas-mavericks-ceo-cynthia-marshall-boss-files/index.html
