By her own admission, Dr Karen Lange, Board Member for People and Culture at luxury car marque, Bentley, “could have ended up in finance.”

Starting out in her corporate life as an apprentice at a bank, it was while studying for her PhD that a module on business administration and labour economics came up. And that’s when she says her ‘light bulb’ moment occurred – where the link between people and business became crystal clear. Within a few years she’d side-stepped from a role she had in the finance department in VW (Germany) and moved across to the HR department. And, ever since then she says she’s never looked back. Starting out as an Executive Assistant in human resources between 2007-2020 her career took her to becoming Head of Europe Region and then Head of Global Assignments, before moving to the UK to head up HR in the UK in Crewe.

For the staff she now overseas, they can all be thankful HR became her true calling, because since arriving in the UK, Lange has been nothing short of determined in terms of promoting a cause that is clearly dear to her heart – DEI.

DEI maturity

“One of the very first things I did when I arrived here was to establish what level of maturity we’d reached around diversity and inclusion,” says Lange, whose appointment came on hot the heels of Bentley launching its Beyond100 initiative aimed at positioning the brand as a trailblazer in sustainable luxury motoring. To go with this Lange said her ambition was for Bentley to also become the most diverse luxury car company – with colleagues to be as extraordinary and eclectic as its customers and the cars they commission (which can be ordered in over 40 billion different configurations).

I used to think inclusion was about avoiding overt discrimination, but I’m now a convert to it being much more about the ‘belonging’ part

A business restructure in 2023 was just one of the ways this focus on diversity and inclusion has been visibly demonstrated (launched with a three-strong D&I team created as part of new communications and D&I function, reporting to Chairman and CEO, Adrian Hallmark, and Lange). But it’s all the bits that Lange is herself overseeing that is contributing to creating a business that really is practicing what it preaches. And – in an arguably very German way – it’s by applying actual metrics to this DEI that is guiding her work.

Lange says: “When we said we wanted to understand our DEI maturity, to me that required turning it into something specific, and so we turned to The Clear Company to actually audit this. It grades strategies along a scale of being ‘strategic’ to ‘integrated’ to ‘sustainable, and on many measures, such as recruitment – where we found the language we used was subliminally dissuading women from applying – we felt we could improve.”