HBR Presents.

I'm Muriel Wilkins, and this is Coaching Real Leaders, part of the HBR Presents Network.

I'm a longtime executive coach who works with highly successful leaders who've hit a bump in the road.

My job is to help them get over that bump by clarifying their goals and figuring out a way to reach them.

I typically work with clients over the course of several months, but on this show, we have a one-time coaching meeting, focusing

on a specific leadership challenge they're facing.

Today's guest who will call Diane to retain her confidentiality is an experienced leader

handing up a nonprofit organization as its

executive director. She's intensely mission driven, and over the span of her career, she's worked

really hard to infuse her organization with a culture of inclusion. And she now faces a common

problem, feeling caught in the middle between the person she reports to and those

she leads. Where I'm incredibly challenged right now is that because I have built an organization

where everybody's voice counts and everybody needs to sort of speak their mind and is encouraged

to share how they're feeling and,

you know, what they're experiencing. We're currently in this like very uncomfortable position

where my team is having issues with the founder, who is a very, very wealthy white man.

So Diane identifies as a white woman and has a longstanding commitment to being

an anti-racist leader. And here she finds herself caught in the middle between her staff and her

boss, with the added complexity of racial and power dynamics that exists between the founder,

a wealthy older white male philanthropist, and her team who are younger people of

color, all at a time of rising racial tensions that are too explicit to ignore and are playing

out in every workplace across the country.

...