Michael R. Anastasio
Laboratory Director and President, LANS
Corporate Headquarters: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Website: www.lanl.gov
Primary Business: National Security Science
Employees: 10,608
2011 CEO in Action
In assessing the health of diversity at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we have several statistics that might tell a very positive story – namely the strong representation of Hispanics in our workforce. However, as the new director at the Lab several years ago, I found unsatisfactory answers to many diversity-related questions that I posed. Most notably, I was concerned with the paucity of women and minorities in management positions.
As the Laboratory’s director, I understand the unique leadership position I hold to set diversity-related priorities and influence organizational behavior. I knew the progress in diversity required me to take visible, demonstrable actions and establish clear expectations for my senior managers. And I embraced this challenge with gusto. With the support of our Equal Opportunity Office, I established and agreed to chair the Lab’s executive diversity committee, which set clear goals and strategies and championed diversity initiatives to achieve measurable results.
We shaped diversity initiatives using proactive and consistent processes to not only increase underrepresented populations, but also to drive better performance, products, and employee satisfaction. To set us on a path to greater diversity among management ranks, we introduced specific initiatives including the establishment of a new manager “on-ramp” to provide a fair and unbiased screening process to assess management potential; a protégé/ mentor program to provide a diverse and inclusive group of protégés with high-level contacts and the skills required for success; and a management hiring process review board to ensure hiring processes are not only fair and consistent but also utilized to maximize applicant pools in terms of both quality and diversity.
Outside of workforce initiatives, I am also responsive to the Laboratory’s position as one of the largest employers in Northern New Mexico. I support the bolstering of regional impacts through strong diversity supplier and economic development programs as well as community giving campaigns and educational outreach initiatives that support underprivileged populations, which in New Mexico too often include Hispanics and Native American Pueblo peoples.
Overall, I believe that sustaining a strong diversity and inclusion program is helping our Laboratory reach and exceed its goals by bringing together the best and brightest of ideas and perspectives to enhance creativity, problem-solving, and innovation—all of which are imperative to resolving the nation’s most critical security issues, and all of which are hallmarks of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Education: BA in Physics, with honors, from Johns Hopkins University; MA and PhD in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from State University of New York, Stony Brook
First Job: Paper route in DC suburbs; clerk typist for Dept. of Health, Safety and Welfare
What I’m Reading: The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
My Philosophy: Appreciate and value other’s perspectives.
Best Advice: Appreciate and value other’s perspectives.
Family: Married to wife, Ann; two daughters, Alison and Alexandra
Interests: Music and sports
Favorite Charities: Numerous
I’m glad to see that the former Director of LANL and President of LANS had been relatively progressive on human resources (HR) policies and procedures regarding workforce inclusion and diversity issues. Unfortunately, while federal EEO and AA programs do not in principle make distinctions among the various demographic categories of ethnicity/race, gender, age, or disability (for ex.), from a practical standpoint corporate hiring at large employers such as LANL in north central New Mexico does do so, via an unrecognized built-in bias and concomitant ‘stealth’ discrimination against the disabled worker, especially workers with a mental disability or with a major recurrent disability acquired in the workplace at LANL. This is done, for example, by using traditional measures of what the “essential job functions” are such as stated in or underlying the job descriptions used by the employer during the job-bidding and other recruitment processes or of whom managers consider as the “best and brightest” employees and job candidates are. Historically speaking, these measures were developed by non-disabled managers, staff and other workers. To reduce this unrecognized bias, a job’s essential functions could be redefined to correlate much more closely with the “essential life functions” that are codified in U.S. federal disability law (viz., ADA, 1992; ADA Amendment Act, 2008), such as thinking and working, plus derivative functions such as problem solving and writing. The objective of such redefinition would be to level the playing field for ALL diversity categories. This would require a major effort at rebuilding the strategic foundations of HR practices for recruitment, development, promotion, salary/wage determination, retention, and so on of employees so that they have become disability blind, just as they supposedly now are blind to race, for example. This is particularly important for a STEM-based employer like LANL. To return explicitly to the profile article: For the present new Director of LANL, “right now” offers a next-step opportunity to take the initiative to the next level if he has not already done so, forming a new LANL-wide executive committee which he chairs, too, but now to research this new matter, prepare position papers, and then staff and benchmark them with the national workforce disability and inclusion/diversity policy community (as at DoL and in OPM at the federal level) as a means for eventually reaching a LANL consensus and implementing new policies and procedures in which the disabled worker is more universally treated as an essential element of its human capital This staffing process would validate or correct as needed the model chosen by LANL to redefine the essential functions of a job, in such a way that the work LANL is provided by federal agencies such as the oversight NNSA of the U.S. DOE can still be completed at the high performance and achievement standards expected while also being more respectful of everyone’s basic human rights to think and work (for ex.) and thus more inclusive of all worker heuristics, perspectives, philosophies, and experiences including those of the mentally disabled. A powerful, even transformative benefit for doing this includes a better positioned, more agile and more timely response to the major, often unpredicted challenges facing it in an increasingly chaotic world, including faster, less costly, and more comprehensive and effective solutions to showstopper problems and acknowledgement of the reality that some very creative and productive scientists and engineers are so-called “late bloomers” who, in adding indispensible value to their employer’s bottom line late in their careers, far surpass former colleagues in their own age group who decades earlier had been considered as the ones who were the employer’s “best and brightest” workers. Such late bloomers within the LANL workforce can even become indispensible to accomplishing its mission, as just one of them may be the only one who comes up with a crucially needed idea at the time it is needed to deal with and resolve a major programmatic or line-management crisis. Thank you for listening. Harold M. Frost, III, Ph.D. (physics), Vermont, March 8, 2012