Michelle Witherspoon

Michelle Witherspoon, Director, Chief of Operations, Culture and Talent at Cisco, is a senior business executive with extensive experience in the global technology industry, leading teams in diversity and inclusion, operations, human resources and talent acquisitions. Known as a transformational leader and catalyst for bold thinking, Michelle has a unique ability to ideate and build teams to innovate beyond traditional D&I programs and initiatives, leveraging thought leadership and design thinking to understand the businesses’ key challenges and opportunities within their geographies.

Her super-power is partnering with peer executives in the high-tech industry to create strategies around leadership accountability for diversity hiring, development, retention and employee engagement to create a global diverse and equitable work environment.

Michelle’s key achievements include:
• Global Diversity Business Stakeholder Review Scorecard providing executives with customized diversity intelligence and benchmarks to understand specific diversity gaps and opportunities.
• Designed “First Ever” Enterprise Next-Generation Diversity Leadership Program for senior level AfAm/His/Lat/Pac Rim talent and managers, 4.8 CSAT, foster disruptive thinking on culture and socio- economic issues.
• Redefining company employee resource organizations and networks with more than 20,000 members across multiple chapters.
• Devised Fair Share Framework and Benchmark process to study diverse external talent.
• Produced Diverse Talent Accelerators Suite of Solutions providing powerful analytics to better track talent market and revise searches to target diverse candidates improving chance to hire African-American/Black and Latino/Hispanic candidates by 100 percent and women candidates by 30 percent, plus 4.8-percent increase of women in director and manager roles.
• Designed global 15-minute Pit Stop webinars with 600-plus employees joining bi-monthly to engage on thought-provoking diversity topics.

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