Former AT&T Business CEO Anne Chow talks leadership, courage, DEI, and her next chapter

She is a longtime advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, advancing women in technology and cultivating next-generation leaders, and is currently Lead Director for FranklinCovey and an Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She is also the co-author of The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias, a guide on “how to reframe bias, cultivate connection, and create high-performing teams.”

The following interview took place at a Deloitte event when Anne was on the cusp of retiring, or as she calls it, “rewiring,” from AT&T after 32 years with the company.

Throughout the conversation, Chow reflected on her leadership and legacy at AT&T and candidly shared her insights and philosophies—which she calls “Chow-isms”—on a number of topics, including community, courage, diversity, her call to action for other leaders and what she plans to do next.

DEI has always been a passion area for me. This is something that I have lived with because it is who I am. I experienced it in every facet of my life including my career journey, so much so that I feel it to be such an imperative for every business, every organization, and every team.

I think the biggest challenge we face, which is also absolutely tied to the biggest opportunity, is the fact that we are human and we are flawed by definition. I actually think unconscious bias is one of the biggest problems we have. And the reality is, we all have bias; it's totally normal to have it. But somehow, we have to create an environment—whether you're in academia, corporate, healthcare or government—where we’re able to talk about biases and perspectives and grow and learn from them. If you don't surface them, they will always sit beneath, and they guide our actions, our words and our decisions with consequences we may not even be aware of.

One of the greatest challenges is to get underneath these biases, which requires that people become very vulnerable and that they really do an immense amount of introspection. You have to understand your origin story and you have to do introspection on yourself first, because how do you unpack this topic of bias and inclusion and culture and connection unless you're willing to start with yourself? You must lead by example. And I think it takes a very strong, great leader to be able to admit that, “Yeah, I totally messed that up. I had this bias my whole life, but now I see that it is a bias.” And importantly, now that I see it, I want to reframe it, understand more, and change my course of thoughts and actions.

Once I graduated from college, I knew enough that I did not want to fall into potential stereotypes of Asian people in pure technology roles or women in traditionally “women roles” like HR. When I was going through school, I saw that I was a little bit different in that sense. I did that six-year program, which was this combination of highly technical skills, but also business, and I knew in my early twenties that I wanted to sit in that mix. If I translated that into the corporate world, I wanted to be where the decisions were made. That's all I knew. I wanted to be where power and influence were.

I didn't call it trailblazing then; I just didn't want to fall into the stereotype. I wanted to put myself in places where Asian women had never been or rarely were, and I wanted to prove to myself and others that it could be done. After about five years into my career after a couple of promotions, there was a very conscious “aha” moment for me. I sort of looked up and realized that people were looking at me and they were expecting me to lead at a very different level because I was one of only a few or the only [minority woman] at that level at that time. I realized I had an obligation, and I realized that I had a platform because I had a certain title and a certain role. I felt I had a duty to do more in terms of leadership. Leadership was not just about caring about customers, business results and shareholders. It was about cultivating and advancing the people and our communities.

So this idea of blazing trails for me has been pretty natural in the sense that there haven't been a lot of people who look like me or who sound like me or who have a background like me in the various roles. And I've orchestrated my career over 32 years and 17 jobs doing that. It's been driven by this desire to learn and this desire to impact people and cultures and make a difference. It's really about influence and impact and legacy. And that's how I think about what a trailblazer really should be doing anyway—showing others that it can be done and blazing new trails.

I have something that I call the 7 Cs, which are character, competence, collaboration, communication, curiosity, courage, and caring. I view leadership to be character and competence because that is how trust is built. And I think one of the biggest fallacies, especially in corporate America, quite frankly, is that we confuse the two: character and competence. And really in any situation, we need both. Communication and collaboration, because ultimately leadership is about the power of connection. It's about connection with people at an individual level, as well as at a broader skill level organization. Curiosity, to me, has also always been a cornerstone because I find that curious people ultimately have some level of humility—they're always interested in continuous learning, which is absolutely vital to today's world.

And then caring is one that I've always had within my DNA that was brought more to the forefront by Covid. I have always gravitated to leaders who are caring. I fancy myself a caring leader. Of course I care about the shareholders, of course I care about business performance, of course I care about my customers—those are the obvious ones. But I care deeply about my people. I care deeply about the community. I care deeply about the planet. And I think that if you were to look at how leaders around the world defined leadership pre-Covid, caring would not be in the top ten. Now it is. Because we've learned through what has occurred in the world over the last couple of years that caring matters. So caring, for me, is a significant hallmark of great leadership.

My view on courage is very much aligned with my view on authenticity. When people hear the word “authenticity” or they hear the word “courage,” it's almost like a binary thing because our human brains like to compartmentalize. So either I'm courageous or I'm not; either I'm authentic or I'm not –totally not true. It's situational, it's episodic. What it means to be courageous at age 15 is different than at age 25 and is different at age 35 and at age 55.

Also, I've realized that if I'm feeling really comfortable, I have to start challenging myself. Comfort is not necessarily always a good thing. To be uncomfortable means that you are growing or you're putting yourself in a situation where you can grow. Comfort is the opposite of courage. I think sometimes when we think about courage and risk, we think it's this big, giant, bold thing when it's really not—we make courageous decisions every moment of every day. We all have courageous moments. I would just challenge people to think differently about courage.

Life is about learning; it's about growing. This is another “Chow-ism”: “There's no such thing as failure; there's only success and learning." You choose not to let it set you back, but you choose to make it a learning moment.

One of the most foundational “Chow-isms” throughout my career has been, “Life is all about relationships; be sure to seek and foster meaningful ones.” So I pride myself on the fact that I am a relationship-based type of leader. For me, the roles of community, relationships and connection have been paramount. When I think about legacy, it is all about culture and community.

There's a business case to be had for it. Diversity is defined by not just gender, not just race or culture or age, but by background, by skill set, by geography—all the above. A more diverse team can develop more innovative solutions. A more diverse team can come up with more solutions to problems. A more diverse team can see a world in its possibility, not in its past. And I think we need to spend more time talking about that. The fact that humanity and we as a human race and we as Americans are becoming more and more diverse is such an opportunity – and it’s a fact. One of my favorite stats is that women of color will be the majority of all women in the United States by 2060 depending on which study you read. So who is the majority and who is the minority, and actually who cares?

¹Catalyst., Women of Color in the United States. 2023, February 1

One of the programs and efforts I am most proud of when I look back on my legacy at AT&T is that I wanted to champion something for women of color. I saw the Asian women networks were quite strong, I saw there was a Black sisterhood like no other, I saw the Latina community was really tight—but I saw no thread across. And you have to be careful, when creating a community, that you're not actually building more silos and barriers, as opposed to breaking down those barriers.

And I was committed to creating something for women of color. So over the course of a couple of years, we created a program called Women of Color Connect Program. Hundreds of women have gone through it. Their supervisors have gone through it. It took communities, which already existed, and connected them. And what was so powerful about that program was that it wasn't just for women of color, it was for their supervisors, so there's a supervisor track on how to support these women of color, so that people like me can get better representation, better involvement, better engagement, different thinking. So that’s one of the things I am most proud of that is part of my legacy.

And I remember the way we started: we invited women to participate in focus group conversations, and we asked, “What is it that you need? What is it that you want? What is it that's lacking?” And it was cathartic; it was like therapy. To hear colleagues say to each other, “You experience that, too?” and to learn that there were shared biases enabled us to more effectively unleash our power and establish relationships where we could support each other much more systemically and engage those supervisors. Not a hundred percent of the supervisors were really all in, because they just weren't. But this has always been my view about leadership and legacy: you change one person, you can change everything.

Another initiative I created was what I called Candid Conversations. The first one was catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement. I pulled together four Black leaders in my organization, and I wanted them to talk about their journey—the good, bad, and the ugly, and what it meant and what it felt like.

We did 16 of them since the very first one, and we have tackled some very sensitive topics. We talked about families, about communities, about the changing demographic of America, of the world. We talked about the fact that all of us have something beneath the surface of what we all see, and are we not better colleagues with each other if we just go a little bit further to better understand each other?

I'm so proud of my Candid Conversations and my Women of Color Connect programs. Even though I'm retiring or “rewiring,” I know that the tone of the culture that I set propagated. It's that force multiplication effect. That's why changing one person can change the world. That's what I think leadership should be.

What I am most optimistic about is the fact that we now know that instead of “minority,” this is really about the underserved, the underrepresented. And somehow we need to get representation and leadership and involvement and engagement to a place where it's reflective of where the world is and needs to be as opposed to where the world was. And it's in our hands to do.

Well, I don’t consider my career over, rather, I’m entering a new chapter. And as such, the best is yet unwritten. I’m aspiring to continue my influence and inspiration of others – especially, women, diverse communities, and next generation leaders. My hope is to have an even greater positive impact on leaders across different industries across roles through my new portfolio of endeavors for the next 20-30 years! As for others, my number one recommendation is to utilize your power and platform, which means using your voice and taking action. Each of us can drive change and transformation – no matter how small or narrow a step forward is, it is a step forward. Together, we will change the world.

This article was written by Marianne Schnall, a widely published journalist, author, and contracted Deloitte writer.

This article is part of an ongoing series of interviews. The individual’s participation in this article is solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This article should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

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