Hasta La Creative!

We all know the discouraging stats when it comes to underrepresented groups in corporate leadership roles. Only 5 percent of the S&P 500 CEOs are women. There are just three black CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, the lowest figure since 2002, and only three CEOs from the LGBTQ community as of last July, according to the January 2019 Fortune 500 list.

As a gay C-suite executive, I consider myself lucky to work in an environment that celebrates diversity and inclusion. But I didn’t get here alone. Having strong mentorship early in my professional development helped propel me and prepare me for leadership in a way I couldn’t have designed for myself. One mentor, the late Don Harley, who had worked at the University of New Hampshire while I was a woefully unconfident sophomore there, gave me sage perspective whenever I failed, and kept me humble when I achieved. His fundamental faith in my nascent abilities ignited a self-reliance that laid the foundation of my career. And while I’ll always be a work-in-progress, I’m a far better leader because of the mentors, like Don, I’ve had along the way.

I’ve always believed in the old adage that success happens when preparation meets opportunity, and mentorship plays a big role in that formula. I was curious whether any correlation existed between feeling successful as an underrepresented leader and being mentored, so I worked with our in-house research organization, Origin, to field a study of more than 2,600 working Americans. After segmenting the results into various underrepresented groups (women, people of color and LGBTQ), a clear pattern emerged.

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