Making INROADS into Corporate Culture

By David Theis • Photography by Tommy LaVergne

You might expect that an evening training and orientation session for high school seniors and their parents held just days before Christmas would not draw a heavy turnout. Everybody should be out doing that last-minute shopping.

But the INROADS Talent Pool orientation session held last December at the University of Houston–Downtown nearly filled a large ballroom. About 100 students—almost all African American or Hispanic and drawn from schools across the Houston area—ate Domino’s pizza with their parents while the INROADS team made its presentations.

Sonja Gonzales ’94, then managing director for the Houston INROADS affiliate and now regional director for Texas, Lousisana, and Oklahoma, gave the professionally dressed guests a low-key welcome before turning the microphone over to a speaker who described the INROADS mission. “We’re here to prepare minorities for corporate management,” the speaker said. “But nobody’s going to give you anything just for being a minority. When you go out into the corporate world, you’ll be competing against other minorities!”

Sonja Gonzales

Looking on as the new Talent Pool members stared in rapt attention at the speaker, Gonzales thought back to her own beginnings with INROADS, a nonprofit organization that exists both to help minorities find their way into the corporate world and to enable corporations to recruit the minorities on whom they depend more and more. One of the exercises the high school students go through during orientation is the mock job interview. Gonzales remembers the intimidation she felt during her first “interview.” “I was a shy kid,” she says, “and uncomfortable talking about myself.” But with the organization’s trademark combination of encouragement and insistence, her INROADS counselors and mentors taught her to open up and assert herself.

INROADS led Gonzales into the corporate world and to corporate success, and then it called her back to run the Houston office. Now she’s the one helping sometimes-shy, first-generation university kids reach for the gold ring.

Today, INROADS is open to students of all races, but as in the beginning, the students usually are the first in their families to attend college. The organization traces its roots directly to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Chicago corporate executive Frank C. Carr was on the Washington Mall that day in 1963 when King spoke, and he came away inspired to do something to help integrate minorities into corporate America. In 1970, he quit his job and began working on his own dream. Holding down night jobs to support himself, Carr spent his days teaching inner-city youth corporate survival skills. He approached this metaphorically at first, teaching the kids such skills as urban rappelling, which is using ropes to descend the faces of buildings.

Carr soon decided to take a more direct approach by founding INROADS, with the goal of getting corporate internships for minorities. He began by teaching students about the ways of corporate culture, such as business etiquette and how to present themselves during interviews. He also helped them polish and augment their personal potential through extensive training in job-performance skills like critical thinking. It’s not an easy program for the students. Talent Pool members, for example, are expected to attend daylong training sessions every Saturday during their summer internships, and INROADS counselors work with them to help solve problems specifically related to their internships.

But INROADS could not be successful without corporate buy-in. Carr called on corporate leaders not just to interview INROADS applicants but to fund the program by paying the organization $4,000 per intern. He met with quick success, in part because INROADS gives corporations a leg up in complying with the antidiscrimination legislation of the 1960s. But more importantly, the program offers corporations a proposition that makes good business sense: from its inception, INROADS has turned out highly qualified workers. In fact, interns often become permanent employees at the corporations.

INROADS is able to accomplish its goals because it attracts good students and trains them well. Only about 40 percent of high school applicants are accepted into the Houston Talent Pool. High school students must have a score of at least 1,000 on the SAT and show a history of extracurricular involvement. College students must maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA. Even so, only about one in three Talent Pool students actually lands a highly coveted internship. The number is low because INROADS recommends students only when their majors and abilities closely match the qualities the corporation seeks.

It’s little wonder that corporations have embraced INROADS. Gonzales says INROADS makes the corporate hiring process more efficient and cost effective. “Corporations view ‘cost per hire’ as one measure of success,” she says, “and new hires from INROADS need minimal training.” Corporations also are highly aware of the changing demographics of the American workforce, which makes minority hiring not only morally correct and legally mandated but also a business necessity.

In 35 years, the program has grown from 25 interns at 17 corporations, all in Chicago, to a current total of 5,200 interns in 700 corporations across North America. Some 17,000 INROADS alumni currently are pursuing corporate careers, holding positions as high as CEO.

INROADS in Houston, and at Rice, began in 1982. Current board member and native Houstonian Terrence Gee ’86 was probably the first Rice student to participate. While the university made its facilities available to INROADS for training during Gee’s sophomore year, he says the program was not generally known. He learned about it only when he ran into some high school classmates on campus who he knew were attending schools other than Rice. He asked them why they were on campus, and when they told him about INROADS, he decided to investigate.

Terrence Gee

Today, looking at the sweeping views from his 20th-floor office at Accenture, the Houston-based consulting and outsourcing firm where Gee is a partner, it ’s hard to imagine that he was ever in danger of not succeeding. But after his freshman year, Gee was floundering. As an African American, he found there was a lack of minority role models, and because he had no vision of how his studies would translate to personal economic success, he had a hard time fully investing in college.

But he discovered the role models he needed at INROADS. “You walk into an INROADS training session, and you find lots of others who are just like you,” he says. “You don’t feel like you’re out there on some island. You say to yourself, ‘Look, here’s a whole room full of people who are trying to do the same thing I am.’”

Inspired by finding a welcoming context for studying, Gee turned his academic career around, going from unmotivated freshman to achieving student. His INROADS internship at Conoco taught him tangible lessons about how he could apply his studies to corporate success while at the same time providing a number of role models. One, interestingly enough, was an Anglo, not much older than Gee himself. “I saw how he made things happen at the work place,” Gee says. Gee also found other minorities thriving in corporate America, including one who he says was, “a fantastic role model. He helped me aspire to achieve a similar level of success.”

After graduation, Gee went to work for the consulting branch of Arthur Andersen, which later split off to become Accenture. Within four years, he was promoted to manager of the Houston office. “The first thing I did,” he says, “was hire an INROADS intern.”

Gee believes INROADS and Rice are a good fit. Rice students are unusually talented and motivated, so they offer a great deal to a corporate employer. But because Rice does not offer an undergraduate degree in business and because, according to Gee, independent-minded Rice students “are not always easily shaped and molded to be attractive to industry,” the INROADS training is important in preparing students to fill corporate roles.

Diana Garcia, a junior majoring in economics and managerial studies, is a soft-spoken, quietly confident young woman whose goal is to become a CEO. She sees INROADS as her entry to the corporate world. As a freshman, Garcia already was looking for summer internships when a friend told her about INROADS. She applied and was accepted into the Talent Pool.

“The early training was scary,” Garcia admits. “Especially the practice interviews. I’m not the most outgoing person. I still get nervous in interviews.” From her training, though, she acquired the confidence to say, “I don’t know,” in answer to an interview question.

But she did have enough answers to land an internship with Cardinal Health, where she worked for a summer in the pharmaceutical contracting department, assisting the customer service manager. “It was helpful to get experience in the corporate world and work with a team of employees,” Garcia says. “You learn things they don’t teach you in school. But it was a challenge getting used to the atmosphere.”

She was evaluated halfway through the summer during a sit-down session with her corporate supervisor and her INROADS advisor and received good marks. Garcia also scrupulously attended what may be INROADS most challenging feature—the weekly, daylong Saturday training sessions. “They’re pretty informal and interactive,” Garcia says. But that doesn’t fully explain why surrendering all her summer Saturdays to INROADS was not too onerous—not many college sophomores are willing to live up to such a commitment.

Garcia credits the skills she honed during these sessions, especially that of critical thinking, for her faithful attendance. And later, she put her outside-the-box thinking to good use at Cardinal Health when she was assigned a special project. “They asked me to prepare a report card for their clients to evaluate their satisfaction with Cardinal’s performance,” she explains. “They didn’t tell me how to do it; they just told me the result they wanted. I used critical thinking there.” Her corporate supervisor was pleased with the results. Garcia doubts she would have gotten the internship, which she plans to repeat this summer, without INROADS. “Minorities don’t have the network of connections,” she says. “They have to look for jobs in other ways.”

After being a cheerleader at Bay City High School, senior mechanical engineering major Ashley Edison was not the shy type. But she, too, found the INROADS practice interviews very helpful. “I talk really fast when I get nervous,” she says. “INROADS helped me slow down and present myself to my best advantage.”

Edison’s first internship was with Anheuser Busch, where she helped track product loss. She also had a hand in preparing the 2005 maintenance budget. Things were going fine for her at Anheuser Busch, but she still wanted to make a change. She credits Gonzales with helping her find the confidence to decline Anheuser Busch’s offer to return and to pursue an opportunity at Shell instead, even when that company was a little slow in making a firm offer. “Sonja told me to be upfront with Anheuser Busch,” Edison says, “and tell them I needed to explore my options.”

Edison finally accepted an offer from Shell to work in its Los Angeles operation. Away from home for the first time, she wasn’t lonely. “INROADS creates a connection,” she says. “Everybody in the INROADS family hung out together. We still stay in touch by email.” Edison has accepted a postgraduation offer from Shell, and will be working in Houston again, at its Deer Park refinery. “INROADS and Rice make a good combination,” she says. “Corporations know we work really hard at school. They know that we’re professional and smart.”

Roland B. Smith

Rice associate provost Roland B. Smith has served on the INROADS board since 1998. He immediately recognized the benefits that INROADS participation offered Rice. The university’s direct involvement is low-key, mostly relating to the use of facilities. In return, Smith says, “Rice receives an introduction to minority communities and becomes a visible partner in increasing minority access to higher education.”

Smith feels particularly committed to INROADS because of the work that Rice graduates like Gonzales and Gee are doing in INROADS’s current rebranding process. “This is a time of change for INROADS,” Smith explains. “Its identity is evolving, changing from a focus on the individual affiliates to a concentration on the unified national brand.” INROADS also is changing its pitch to its corporate sponsors and is emphasizing the benefits the corporation itself receives rather than the social good the corporation does through its participation. Smith finds corporate benefits to be especially pronounced in Houston, where the diversity of the population virtually forces locally-based corporations to recruit heavily from minority populations. INROADS gives corporations the incentive to do this with confidence that their new minority hires are highly qualified, motivated, and familiar with corporate culture. “Terrence and Sonja are looking ahead,” Smith says, “and leading with energy and creativity.”

“We want corporations to realize a return on their investment,” Gonzales says, explaining the evolving INROADS philosophy. “Our interest is long term, and we want to make the corporations into long-term partners.”

Before she returned to INROADS to serve as managing director of the Houston affiliate and then regional director, Gonzales was enjoying corporate life, happily working in human resources at an American General subsidiary. But she looks back on her decision to return with satisfaction. “INROADS gave a shy kid like me a chance,” she says, “and I had an interest in giving back to the company that gave to me. I’m meant to do this job.”