HP Hires Qualcomm DEI Exec As New Chief Diversity Officer

Glenn Williams will join a company with ambitious DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) goals, taking over from Lesley Slaton Brown who earlier this year left to take over DEI initiatives for the National Basketball Association.

Glenn Williams

HP Inc. Tuesday said it has appointed Glenn Williams as its new chief diversity officer.

Williams joins Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP from San Diego-based Qualcomm where he started over four years ago as director of human resources before spending the last 19 months as that company’s vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer.

As chief diversity officer, Williams will lead HP’s global DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) strategy with a focus on driving investments and programs as part of the company cross-company and industry-wide DEI initiatives.

[Related: DEI: A Call To Action For The Channel]

An HP spokesperson said Williams will start his new role at HP at the end of May.

Williams is taking over as chief diversity officer from Lesley Slaton Brown, who held that role at HP until this past February when she left the company to become senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer for the National Basketball Association.

The HP spokesperson said Brown’s departure was announced internally. “During her 28 years with HP, Lesley made a significant impact on our company and further strengthened our longstanding culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. Lesley is a distinguished HP alum and we continue to wish her well in her exciting new chapter,” the spokesperson told CRN via email.

HP President and CEO Enrique Lores wrote in a Tuesday LinkedIn post that DEI has long been an HP strategic imperative, and that Williams is expected to help advance the company’s work in this area.

“Building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture across HP and the communities we serve has long been one of our strategic imperatives – and it has never been more important. It’s an integral part of understanding the needs of our customers, driving innovation, and building a Future Ready company.

“Glenn’s leadership will help us to build on our progress and lift our work across the company to the next level. Because as far as we’ve come, we still have much more work ahead. Looking forward to welcoming you in a few weeks, Glenn!” Lores wrote.

HP in 2021 laid out a set of ambitious goals for DEI it wants to hit by 2030. These include achieving gender parity in HP leadership, have over 30 percent of its technical and engineering personal be women, meet or exceed labor market representation for racial and ethnic minorities, maintain a 90 percent or higher rating on internal inclusion index for all employee demographics on an annual basis, and reach 1 million workers via worker empower programs.