Does Your Definition of Leadership Exclude Women of Color?

This week, Kamala Harris will take the oath of vice president and step into one of the most powerful jobs in the world, marking a historic moment in our nation’s conception of leadership. As the face and style of leadership changes on the national stage, the pressure for corporate leadership to follow suit will only continue to mount. Although organizations have promised to “do better,” many have also struggled to identify where to begin. It’s an understandable problem. Dismantling systemic racism and sexism can feel like a daunting, overwhelming endeavor — these issues are deep and pervasive, and they’re much bigger than any one organization.

Still, companies have no choice but to reconsider the policies, processes, and cultural norms that have perpetuated systemic inequalities. If you want to change who ends up at the top of your org chart, reevaluating the skills and values that shape your hiring and promotion process is an essential first step.

As practitioners and consultants of diversity and inclusion, we’ve seen first-hand how narrow perceptions of leadership and “fit” can reinforce the status quo. As women of color, we’ve also experienced first-hand how these systemic inequalities can take a toll. But we’ve also learned how leaders can be proactive in ensuring that how they define leadership doesn’t circumvent marginalized groups. In this piece, we discuss: (1) how our current ideas of leadership often ignore the value underrepresented groups bring to business, (2) how to adjust our systems to recognize those contributions, and (3) tactical steps to make progress towards systemic change. This doesn’t mean getting rid of what works — it just means expanding our definition of who “fits.”

Traditional leadership criteria leave qualified people behind.

The first step is to recognize that our systems — how we hire, why we promote — are optimized to value and advance a certain archetype. While the generic image of a leader can vary based on the level of management we’re discussing, the industry in question, and the demographic distribution of the field, models of leadership in the U.S. tend to be Eurocentric, favor Western thought, and center on straight, white men. More to the point, the attributes companies often look for in leaders, such as competitive, dominant, objective, self-confident, aggressive, ambitious, are overwhelmingly masculine. This leaves women of color (WOC) at a double disadvantage: They often don’t fit companies’ measures for leadership, because those measures were developed for someone else.

This status quo in business culture has real and tangible effects on WOC: Native American women suffer from one of the largest pay gaps, Black candidates are more likely to be rated as unprofessional when they don Afrocentric versus Eurocentric hair, employers are less likely to hire a Middle Eastern woman who wears a headscarf, Latina women are twice as likely (compared to non-Hispanic white women) to say they must work twice as hard as their co-workers because of their cultural background, and Asian-American women are often considered less fit for leadership than white women.

Changing how your organization thinks about hiring and promoting doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, however. There’s a wealth of academic scholarship to lean on. As scholars and practitioners of this work, for instance, we often lean on Dr. Tara J. Yosso’s model of community cultural wealth, which highlights the cultural capital, or “array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged.” While the model was developed around students of color in higher education, organizations can apply it to WOC in the workplace to recognize how the various forms of cultural capital (resistance, social, linguistic, navigational, familial, aspirational) WOC bring directly affect the bottom line. Here’s how companies can consider these strengths in hiring, advancement, and leadership decisions.

Recruiting & Hiring

Resistance capital refers to the skills communities of color acquire through actively challenging inequality and oppressive systems. Coming from a legacy of opposition gives WOC the fortitude to shake up the status quo and improve conventional processes that may be hindering a company’s growth.

For example, Minoo Ayat, vice president of talent at the membership-based primary care practice One Medical, says her resistance capital has been critical in helping her scale high-growth teams at companies like Amazon and Yahoo. As an immigrant who lived through the Iranian Revolution, Minoo has a history of questioning existing systems. Because of her experience, she feels comfortable expressing when she notices conventional models aren’t working.

Resistance capital allows employees to combat conventional methods that can ultimately hinder business goals, including key areas like hiring. “I combat conventional ideas of what we need to find strong talent — including looking beyond the Ivy League and recognizing how bias might be affecting talent evaluations,” she said. Through training and directly working with department leads, she helped create processes that opened up the talent pipeline and allowed the organizations to use more accurate proxies for skills than educational background or culture fit. “Sometimes we have to feel comfortable reassessing what we’ve been doing for years in organizations,” she explains. “My comfort in doing that — and fighting barriers — has been critical to my leadership career and ability to make an impact in my roles.”

Minoo also models through her own experiences (Iranian woman, immigrant, accent, non-Ivy League background) that people who don’t fit the typical leader model can be successful. “Coming from a culture where I had to fight against expectations of what women could do, I am well-equipped to combat conventional ideals that may be problematic for an organization’s long-term growth.”

She applies that social justice framework to her work, pushing back on structures where 43% of C-Suite executives believe the best performers graduated from highly reputable institutions, and decision-makers tie candidates’ intelligence, competence, and socio-economic status to their accent and speech pattern. Given factors like institution type are uncorrelated with workplace engagement and wellbeing, it’s time we question the proxies many companies have used to measure success.

Promotions & Advancement 

Navigational capital refers to the skills acquired through maneuvering social institutions that “weren’t built with communities of color in mind.” This form of cultural capital translates well into WOC’s ability to navigate tough corporate environments, and relay that information to the next generation — increasing the retention of underrepresented talent.

As one of the few Black women executives in tech, Dara Treseder, senior vice president and head of marketing at Peloton, works to actively challenge structural barriers, and pay it forward by helping the next generation of WOC navigate the unspoken rules.  Dara applies the navigational capital she gained when immigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria to navigating corporate boards, opening the door for more WOC. In doing so, she has advanced the R2P2 method – a organizational philosophy focused on not only recruiting diverse talent, but putting in measures to retain them. 

For many WOC, navigating corporate spaces is challenging, especially as it relates to  promotions and advancement. Whether it be a result of double standards, microaggressions, and/or stereotypes, research has shown that women of color get less support at work, and Black women in particular are less likely to be promoted. As Dara explains, “Companies need to take a more systemic approach to anti-racism work; there are serious challenges for promotion and advancement, which affect Black women more acutely.”

Read more