Why gay executives
who choose to open up
about their personal
lives become better managers
By ANDREA SACHS, TIME
Magazine, Posted Sunday August 6, 2006, From the Web, August 30, 2006
Tim Kincaid, an analyst at American
Airlines, was tired of hearing about the wedding plans of the woman in the next
cubicle. "You would have thought it was the Von Trapp wedding from The
Sound of Music," he recalls. But it rankled for reasons other than gossip
overload. Kincaid was a closeted gay man, living under a "self-imposed
silence. My assumption was, 'Don't ask, don't tell.'" Although he
was openly gay in the rest of his life, he was afraid to let anyone in his
office know. "I had worked a long time to get to this dream job," he says.
"I thought, Do I want to risk it? I was really unsure of the atmosphere."
But Kincaid finally felt that he needed to come out to his boss. "I went
in and said, 'I need to tell you something: I'm gay.' He was a busy
guy, and multitasking while we were talking. But he noticeably focused on
me and listened. It was a powerful moment."
Kincaid is now American Airline's manager of corporate communications, living
what he describes as a "more authentic life. I'm bringing my whole self to
work. I'm not spending any energy hiding or shape shifting into something
I'm not. What they see is what they get." It's a transition that
more executives are choosing to make.
Gay managers work differently than straight managers, and they may be better in
some respects, says University of Southern California teacher and researcher
Kirk Snyder, author of The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as
Leaders ... and What Every Manager Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass). Snyder who
personally interviewed 150 gay male executives who have come out in the
workplace, the largest study of its kind. His theory is that such gay
corporate leaders show higher levels of seven desirable management skills, such
as creativity, intuition and collaboration.
The cornerstone of Snyder's findings and the message of gay business advocates
is that gay workers should be willing to come out. Says Bob Witeck, CEO of
Witeck-Combs Communications, a marketing and public relations firm in Washington
that specializes in the gay market: "The sea change that he reflects is
that he found enough openly gay managers to study."
Snyder and many other gay executives and leaders (all the people quoted in this
article are openly gay) believe those superior skills are born of the challenges
that gays must overcome. Says Snyder: "It wasn't as though gay
executives all said, 'Oh, let's go to Fire Island [a beach resort in New York
with a substantial gay enclave] this weekend and decide what kind of managers we
should be.' This emerged independently of any kind of organized effort.
It's the experience of being gay in a straight world that has manifested itself
in these characteristics when you get in the workplace."
As rancorous as the debate over gay marriage has become, gay executives are
increasingly being welcomed in corporate America, which is to say that they are
as hassled as all the other wage slaves. According to State of the
Workplace 2006, a new study by the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, a
majority of FORTUNE 500 companies -- 254 -- now offer health benefits to
domestic partners.
As corporate policies have become more gay-friendly, more executives are being
supported by their companies in their decision to come out. Says Daryl
Herrschaft, who is in charge of workplace issues at the Human Rights Campaign:
"What we've been seeing is a very real acknowledgment from businesses that
allowing diversity in all of its forms to flourish ... is the right thing to do,
not because it feels good but because it's going to make them money." But,
cautions Herrschaft, that reaction is far from universal. "We have a lot
of anecdotal evidence that it is still not safe for gay or lesbian executives to
be open about who they are." Employers in 33 states are free to fire
people for being gay.
Sexual orientation influences your paycheck too, says Gary Gates, a senior
research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. "Gay men in
particular have earnings similar to other men, but partnered gay men have
earnings quite substantially below men who partner with women." Gates has
a theory about the disparity: "Being gay has impact, particularly on the
executive level. You can't go to the golf club with your wife. Your
wife can't entertain the spouses."
For lesbians, the story is somewhat different. "They still don't do as
well as men, but lesbians tend to do better than women with male partners," says
Gates. "They are less likely to have children and are in the labor force
more consistently."
For Cynthia Martin, coming out didn't stand in the way of a financial boon. "I
was given a very substantial promotion after that," she says. Martin went from a
high-profile job at Kodak as the chief aide to the CEO to president of global
customer service and support, supervising more than 3,000 people worldwide.
"Coming out was really frightening, to be honest," she admits. "I had
never done anything like that in my life." She feared that her credibility
with colleagues would suffer. Martin, now the vice president of corporate
marketing for Blue Shield of California, says the reaction from her Kodak staff
was "very, very positive and kind. One woman said that I was the first
lesbian she had ever met. We worked on it, and it turned out fine."
Even when the transition isn't smooth, money is a great equalizer, says Mitchell
Gold, a co-owner of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, a furniture manufacturer with
revenues of more than $100 million a year. Both owners are gay, and
although the factory is located in Taylorsville, N.C., a small, conservative
city ("there are 14 traffic lights and 135 churches," jokes Gold), there has
been little friction with employees. It's not a mystery to Gold: "We
pay better than anyone [else] in the area, with better benefits." There
have been small problems along the way, says Gold. "There have definitely
been times that I've heard about when people haven't come to work for our
company because we are gay." A self-described "redneck" once called Gold
"faggot" after he was fired, but overall, Gold has 18 years of business success
to crow over. "I've heard from a lot of people that there's a lot of
tolerance because of economics."
Is there a "pink ceiling" that holds gays back? Yes, say workplace
experts, but it's fading. "I don't think all of corporate America has
jumped into 2006 yet," says p.r. expert Witeck. For the gay executives
themselves, the challenge continues. "Coming out in business is something
we do every day. It's not a one-time event," says Claudia Woody, the
managing director of IBM's Nokia account worldwide. Author Snyder is ever
optimistic, though. "Within the next five years," he says, "we will see
the first openly gay CEO of a FORTUNE 500 company." By which time it
should shock absolutely no one.
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