Employee taskforce issues report on Asian/Pacific Islander concerns at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Contact: Jaqueline Paris-Chitanvis, jackiepc@lanl.gov, (505) 665-7779

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Feb. 2, 2001 -- A recent study by a taskforce at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory yielded a number of options for addressing concerns raised by Asian/Pacific Islander employees.

The Asian/Pacific Islander Career Enhancement Task Force's findings also conveyed an important message: For the Laboratory to maintain a world leadership position in science and technology, it must proactively embrace a diverse set of viewpoints and backgrounds in its workplace. In short, Los Alamos must make achieving diversity a very high priority.

Chartered last year by Laboratory Director John Browne, the task force was charged with providing the director and his Senior Executive Team options for increasing the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders in management positions at the Los Alamos. The 12-member task force included API employees from across the Laboratory. The taskforce spent about six months collecting and analyzing data and talking with API employees and managers at Los Alamos and its sister labs.

In late November, the task force presented its report to the director, including options Los Alamos could take to increase the number of APIs in management positions. Many of the proposed options are pilot considerations that can be applied to the Laboratory's total population. The options, which include short- and long-term strategic improvements, focused on three key areas: attract/recruit, retain and develop. "The task force believes the Lab needs to focus on all three areas to be successful in increasing the number of Asian Pacific Islanders in management positions," said Jasmine Pan, co-chair of the task force.

Options proposed by the task force include the following:

Attract/Recruit

• Select a senior-level "champion" for API employees, who will attract and actively help hire API employees.
• Allow Los Alamos's API community to share the task of recruiting new API employees with Laboratory organizations responsible for recruitment.
• Implement aggressive institutional recruiting of APIs by both the Laboratory's Human Resources Division and API personnel through participation in and recruitment at professional meetings, including meetings of API-specific organizations and at universities with significant API populations.

Retain

• Foster formal and informal mentoring relationships. Managers need to support and encourage minority members, including APIs and women, to participate in management training programs.
• Maintain basic research and healthy civilian programs; such programs will provide career enhancement for all API employees.
• Reexamine a "dual-career path" (management and nonmanagement career ladders) to recognize employees for their technical achievements and to lessen the pressure on employees to go into management positions for career advancement.

Develop

• Give high priority to placing more APIs in supervisory positions, including team-leader and project-leader positions. This will build a "pipeline" of future API managers.
• Aggressively encourage minorities, including APIs and women, to enroll in the Laboratory's leadership and management training programs, and career development workshops (effort led by SET and division-level managers).
• Develop and implement a formal succession planning.
  

The task force also suggested approaches for meeting its proposed options, including the following:

• Routinely advertise all division-level and program-level jobs externally through API web sites and in newspapers and magazines that have a high API readership;
• Widely inform APIs at Los Alamos about mentoring programs and encourage them to participate;
• Have each member of the Senior Executive Team and each division director and program director mentor an API employee or other ethnic minority or female;
• Encourage program offices and divisions to seek out interested APIs for team/project leader appointment and formally demonstrate consideration of minority candidates in the selection of each new team leader and project leader;
• Increase the number of participants in Los Alamos's management and leadership institutes by encouraging group leaders to nominate APIs for the classes;
• Identify two successors for each manager at the group-leader level and above.
  

The full taskforce report is available on the Web at http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/oeo/.

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