Friday, August 10, 2012

Career Talk, from Grindr!

Talk about coincidences. Just as I have just finished that TLY talk, I see this Grindr FB wallpost (yes, I still have Grindr as an FB 'friend' but I don't have the app anymore. Defensive much?).



http://www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/gay-people-make-better-entrepreneurs.html

And I realize I am in pretty good company!:

The fact is: Sexuality remains a sensitive subject in big corporate environments, especially among C-suite executives. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that there's not a single openly gay CEO on the Fortune 1000 list. Even those who are widely reported to be gay, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, have never publicly admitted it, a phenomenon often referred to as "the glass closet."


But this portion, which I have always intuitively felt, articulated an amazing finding:

... but according to Kirk Snyder, a professor of management communications at University of Southern California, openly gay executives may make better managers than straight or closeted executives. Snyder came to this conclusion while writing "The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives are Excelling as Leaders." His five-year study, published in 2006, consisted of interviews with both managers and employees at 2,000 businesses. The results of the study showed that employees working for gay managers reported 25 percent higher levels of employee engagement.

"What I found was that gay leaders value their employees as a whole, because they, themselves have experienced what it's like to be judged for one thing, rather than valued for who you are," Snyder says, adding that this experience not only makes for good managers, but for good entrepreneurs, as well.


That made me feel good. But ultimately, the article drives home a point about gays being 'natural' at entrepreneurship. I think of Lobster Tony and I can only agree!

Read the article in full!

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