A global media and entertainment company came to Intellerati with a clear mandate: transform the senior leadership team by making it more representative of the talent available in the market. The CEO had set the strategy. What was needed was the research to make it actionable.
Representative Leadership Context
The push to build more representative leadership teams has become one of the defining talent challenges of this decade — and one of the most politically complex.
The share of women in new senior leadership appointments peaked in 2022 and has since fallen for three consecutive years, reaching 32.8% globally in 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. Board appointments show a similar decline. Among S&P 100 companies, use of the “DEI” acronym dropped 68% in major filings between 2024 and 2025, according to The Conference Board. Gravity Research analysis of more than 1,000 corporate documents found that references to DEI fell by 98% in Fortune 100 communications between January 2023 and May 2025. Most companies are not abandoning the work. They are moving it out of the public record.
The language has changed. The need has not
The business case is unchanged and well-documented. McKinsey research demonstrates that companies with high racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.
As McKinsey and LeanIn.Org concluded in their Women in the Workplace 2025 report, the largest study of its kind:
“Corporate America has made real progress in women’s representation over the past decade — and companies that prioritize gender diversity see bigger gains. For companies that lost focus this year, 2026 should be the year of recommitting.”
— Women in the Workplace 2025 by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org
The Challenge
When our client approached us, the senior executive team was overwhelmingly white and male. Divisional leadership reflected the same pattern — a reality the Chief People Officer, himself a person of color, described as systemic and industry-wide. Radio stations, television networks, and media conglomerates across the country shared the same profile at the top.
The client recognized it was time for a different approach. Rather than waiting for diverse candidates to surface through conventional search, he asked Intellerati to build a Diverse Executive Talent Pool — a research asset the organization could draw on continuously as senior openings arose.
Actionable Intelligence
Diverse executive talent pools work by expanding the inputs: more diverse candidates at the identification stage, more diverse finalists at the interview stage, and better odds of a diverse hire at the offer stage. Representation at the top does not happen by accident. It requires deliberate research methodology.
Using both primary and secondary sources, Intellerati identified, profiled, and mapped senior executive talent of Asian, African-American, Black, Hispanic and Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander descent, as well as female executives across all categories. We targeted the leading media conglomerates, radio companies, television networks, motion picture companies, and digital media companies, mapping talent at the Vice President, Senior Vice President, Executive Vice President, and C-suite levels.
The Results
Intellerati delivered more than 750 profiles, complete with verified contact information, career biographies, and profile photos. The diverse talent pool immediately expanded the organization’s candidate universe for senior openings and gave recruiting leaders a structured, searchable asset they could use proactively rather than reactively.
By investing in diversity research before a search opened, the company took a concrete step toward the kind of representative leadership that reflects both the talent available in the market and the audiences it serves.
