Full disclosure: I’m no expert on what it’s like to navigate the career challenges that people from underrepresented groups face.
I have never walked an inch, much less a mile, in the shoes of a person of color, a member of the LGBTQ community, a neurodiverse person, or anyone else who is a part of an underrepresented group of people. I’m no expert.
But I care.
I’m a straight, white male without much that makes me appear “different” to anyone I meet. I’m not naïve. I’m confident that my lack of uniqueness helped me get roles and promotions because I fit the profile of what other people – those responsible for selecting the best candidates – believed they needed for those roles. I think about that all the time.
My roommate at UCLA, Ben (Benito, actually) was a Colombian-American. We had very little in common, yet we were genuinely good friends (and I share this with his prior consent). He never came out to his family. His grandmother did it for him. Fed up with the Donna Summer records played at full volume down the hall, she raised her hands one day and shouted, “God, why did you give me a gay grandson?” Just like that, he was out, and more liberated than any carefully planned conversation could have made him.
After UCLA, Ben took an entry-level retail job and worked sixty-hour weeks, absorbing everything he could until he’d outgrown the role and pushed his way into sales — where he promptly started setting records. Salesperson of the year, multiple times over. He brought his peers along, sharing sales strategies that lifted the performance of everyone around him. And yet despite all of that, despite the numbers and the recognition and the obvious capability, leadership roles stayed just out of reach. So he made a decision. He would never again subject himself to a hiring process designed to filter him out. He ventured out on his own, built a very successful business, and became someone else’s competitive advantage, while his former company was left without its best producer and a skilled leader it never had the sense to develop. Their loss, entirely.
The Williams Institute at UCLA Law reports that about one in five LGBTQ employees reported being not hired (23%) or not promoted (22%) because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Nearly half — 47% — reported some form of workplace discrimination or harassment during their lifetime. And 17% said it happened within the past year.[1]
The past year.
Every day, people across the full spectrum of diverse groups spend enormous amounts of energy managing perception, concealing identity, and dealing with bias that has nothing to do with their ability to perform. That’s not just a culture problem. It’s organizational trauma with a very real human cost, and it compounds quietly until the organization suddenly wonders why its best people keep walking out the door.
The hiring criteria at the core of this dilemma don’t just go unchallenged. They get reinforced. By the consultants, academics and self-appointed leadership gurus still selling ‘culture fit,’ ‘shared values,’ and ‘leadership presence’ as the most important evaluation criteria. None of these are inherently worthless. The problem is that they’ve achieved primacy in the selection process, becoming the filter through which every other evaluation passes. That means candidates who look, think, and feel like the interviewer don’t have to go through the same gauntlet on skills and qualifications as those who lack that sameness.
The difference isn’t complicated. “Tell me about a time you had to adapt to fit in with an existing group” is a comfort question. “Walk me through how you turned around an underperforming territory” is a skills question. One tells you how well someone blends into the background. The other tells you whether they can do the job.
If your interview methodology is more focused on whether a candidate resembles the existing members of your group than whether they can actually perform the job at a high level, you’re part of what’s wrong with leadership development. And your hiring practices need an overhaul. Not a policy update, an overhaul.
Ben’s story isn’t unique to the LGBTQ community, but it is uniquely Pride Month’s to claim, because the same courage it takes to live openly as yourself is exactly what organizations systematically punish when they decide who belongs.
And who doesn’t.
Pride Month asks something specific of us all, and it isn’t a rainbow on your LinkedIn banner or a performative company-wide email from the CEO that everyone reads and nobody does anything with. It’s an honest look at whether your hiring, promotion, and development criteria are genuinely skills-based, or whether they’re just a more polished version of the same filter that’s been keeping all kinds of capable people out for decades.
Ben built a very successful career in spite of the friction, not because of anything his former employers did right.
Imagine what becomes possible when the friction is gone.
