When Lisa Wardell was appointed chief executive of Adtalem in 2016, she was the only Black woman in the S&P 400 index of mid-cap companies. James White is a former chairman of the Adtalem board, and in his book Anti-Racist Leadership: How to Transform Corporate Culture in a Race-Conscious World (co-authored with Krista White and nominated for the 2022 CMI Management Book of the Year), he describes Wardell’s extraordinary impact at the largest for-profit college chain in the US:
As CEO of the US education group Adtalem, Lisa Wardell diversified the pipeline students coming into the finance and healthcare professions
She became CEO at a time when the company, then known as the DeVry Education Group, was facing reputational damage due to a lawsuit and was in serious need of a turnaround. We knew she had what it took to change the culture and steer the company to the future. She has said she took the job mostly because Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television and who was a trusted mentor to her, advised her that this was an opportunity that so few Black people get. She more than rose to the occasion. She settled the suit and gave the company a fresh start, repositioning our brand and our portfolio of businesses, with a corporate culture that under her leadership became more decisive and urgent, and more focused on financial performance. She’s led the higher education sector in implementing new standards in transparency and financial literacy, and she tried to produce medical professionals who are willing to work in underserved communities…
“Wardell has also made Adtalem a company that aims to fill critical global workforce needs. The subsidiary Chamberlain University, particularly known for its school of nursing, graduates one of every 34 nurses in the United States, and a disproportionate number of black and Latinx nurses. She has instituted a much more thoughtful way of building a pipeline of diverse students into the medical and financial professions – for example, through relationships she’s formed with historically Black colleges and universities.
As the proud mother of black teenage sons, I am gripped with fear for their safety, deeply anxious that the sheer randomness of this bigoted violence might ensnare them and threaten their lives
former chief executive of Adtalem Lisa Wardell responding to the murder of George Floyd, 2020
A different response to crises
“In 2017, Wardell faced another test of her leadership: two Category 5 hurricanes battered two of her Caribbean campuses in just two weeks. She quickly organised a way to keep her damaged medical school going – on a cruise ship in the harbour, where more than 1,000 students were able to live and take classes for two months. Who else would think of that?
“She was no less quick to come up with a crisis response strategy when the Covid pandemic and the George Floyd tragedy struck. Adtalem, through its global education foundation, gave a total of $300,000 in donations to a healthcare organisation and a financial services organisation aimed at fighting poverty in Chicago, where Adtalem is headquartered. Many corporations have foundations and philanthropic programmes, but Wardell has been particularly savvy about aligning hers with the school’s mission.
“The statement she sent out after the George Floyd killing was highly personal. ‘As the proud mother of Black teenage sons, I am gripped with fear for their safety, deeply anxious that the sheer randomness of this bigoted violence might ensnare them and threaten their lives,’ she wrote. ‘And as the chairman and CEO of Adtalem Global Education – a family of organisations that prides itself on its diversity and inclusion and its culture of access, empowerment and care – I am more resolute than ever in the need for our community of colleagues, students, members and customers to do our part to ensure that our values are reflected in the community where we learn, work and live’.
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“If there weren’t CEOs who felt they had a personal stake in fostering a better climate for race relations – whether it’s because they’ve encountered bias first-hand or they just understand that it’s good business to be on the right side of an inclusive society – no one else in the executive suites would feel entirely safe sticking their necks out to support the Black Lives Matter movement. And even in less tumultuous times, while forward-thinking managers in some divisions might recruit and train more diverse pools of talent, no one other than the CEO would have the authority to say we are going to embrace diversity by changing our board composition and the way we identify people to fill our most critical assignments.”
This is a lightly edited extract from Anti-Racist Leadership: How to Transform Corporate Culture in a Race-Conscious World by James White and Krista White. Lisa Wardell stepped down as Adtalem’s CEO in August 2021 and now sits as executive chairman at Adtalem Global Education.
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