Celebrating Women's History Month - The Value of a Diverse Workplace

Women’s History Month is a time for recognizing the central role of women in US history, for Cummins, it is also about highlighting the significance of diversity & inclusion. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’ve invited employees to share their personal stories, helping others to understand what this month represents, as well as the importance of an inclusive workplace year round.  

Employee Highlight: Anne McLaren, WW Reliability Engineering FE Associate Leader / Technical

Years at Cummins: 13

“Women’s History Month allows me to focus on the progress that has been made regarding diversity in our country.  Learning about how women from the past struggled to obtain civil rights really humbles me.  I enjoy learning and studying women’s history. Visiting museums and reading books helps me learn more about their stories. Unfortunately, since women were an underrepresented group, a vast majority of their stories were not recorded and we will never hear or learn from them.”

Understanding the value of diversity inside Cummins… 

“Diversity is something that is always on my mind and in many facets of my job. Understanding the value of diversity helps me excel in my roles as a manager, recruiter for my function, volunteer leader and sponsor of a number of great place to work initiatives. Additionally, understanding the value of diversity allows me to help create and manage the right environment. I attempt to be conscious of invisible diversity as well when I lead teams, to try to build inclusive environments and elicit diverse perspectives.  I have worked with the Indiana Women’s Affinity Group since I joined Cummins in 2003 and have led initiatives for technical women for the past 5 years.  The perspectives of diversity and inclusion, along with all of our other core values, really resonate with me.”

Feeling pride working within an inclusive environment…

“One moment that made me proud of the volunteer work Cummins does came a year ago, when we formally announced the technical women initiative to the company through a series of emails from John Wall, our former Chief Technical Officer.  I received an email from a fellow woman who said something like, “Congratulations!  In all of my 20 years at Cummins I would never have expected to receive such an email.  Way to go!”  Situations like that help me to reflect and step back to see that we are making a difference, even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes day in and day out.”

Living your values at Cummins…

"Some of the values that are most important to me include integrity, compassion, dedication, diversity, inclusion, equality, mentoring and coaching.  My day job is co-leading reliability engineering for the company.  I own several of the technical lane deliverables in common VPI, which are all about finding and fixing problems for our customers, identifying and reducing reliability risk.  So every day I am coaching teams to make the right decisions for Cummins and the customer to give them a product that works.  It’s often challenging to balance competing objectives, but it’s bringing those varying perspectives and objectives together to enable teams to make the best decisions they can.  For a women’s conference we had last year, I was asked to create a coat of arms that described my brand and leadership style.  My personal motto was “Focus on strengths, treat people as they would like to be treated, hold yourself to high standards, and persevere – you are making a difference!”  I feel privileged that I work for a company that allows me to use my strengths to grow, to learn, to help others, and also work to change our community and our culture.”

Learn more about how our employees make a difference and how you could make an impact at Cummins by visiting careers.cummins.com, and check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.