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When Bukola Adisa was at the top of her game, running more than 100 employees in a blue-chip company, she saw how rare it was to see black women and minority women in leadership positions. To eradicate this inequality, she advises and supports women, especially black women and minority women, to equip them with the skills they need to be successful in their careers.

A successful black woman who broke the glass ceiling in UK international financial organizations and banks, Bukola is now helping other women do the same. She discusses with Consultancy.uk why it makes sense to have more BAME women in boardrooms across the UK and how she has transformed her Business Career Masterclass into a company that provides career and training advice and development for successful corporate careers.

What inspired the birth of the Career Masterclass?

I remember sitting in a meeting room and having another meeting on the 12th floor of my office building at the time. I looked at my notes, but when I looked up I noticed that every face at the table looked similar in terms of gender and race and was different from me. This scenario was often the case.

I started questioning the lack of BAME representation in leadership positions. It became a sensitive question in the back of my mind as I interacted with more BAME women who were proficient in their jobs and wondered why they were struggling to get promoted or noticed at work. I decided to do something about it. And so the Career Masterclass was born.

At the beginning of your trip, what were the main drivers behind this career growth gap between ethnic minorities?

As time went on, I began to clearly see the gaps in my knowledge, and so the C-suite seemed elusive to many of them. In my spare time, I hosted career development sessions to help women, especially black women and minority women, by equipping them with the tools necessary to succeed in their careers. This has now grown into a lifelong passion and a growing business.

While the knowledge gaps are now being closed and many competent BAME specialists can be found at junior and mid-level in companies, companies are not reacting quickly enough to the demand for more integrative leadership at the top, despite the many advantages. It is also no secret that BAME professionals suffer from the “frozen center” phenomenon, where there is just no movement and no progress beyond the middle management level.

How would companies benefit from a diverse workforce with good representation of women and ethnic minorities? How does this affect the bottom line?

Several studies have shown that diversity has a positive effect on companies and contributes to company results. To illustrate this, a Gartner study predicts that by 2022, 75 percent of companies with diverse and inclusive decision-making teams will exceed their financial targets. The study also found that gender and inclusive teams outperformed their less inclusive counterparts by 50 percent.

However, diversity and inclusion are not sufficiently reflected in UK boardrooms. A recent study by the Green Park Business Leaders 2021 Index shows that for the first time in six years there are no black chairs, chief executive officers or chief financial officers in the UK’s 100 largest companies. These are really worrying trends.

In fact, data from BoardEx, which collects information on senior executives, shows that only about 3% of female board-level roles are held by women with black, Asian or ethnic minorities in the UK’s 350 largest publicly traded companies.

These are worrying statistics. How can we reverse these trends and address these issues in order to achieve greater involvement at the highest levels?

To eradicate this inequality and help BAME women get to the top in their chosen career, three things are crucial:

First, BAME women need to be actively encouraged, mentored and sponsored. I’ve seen women with top degrees held back not only by structural inequalities but also by a lack of knowledge of how to understand a company’s DNA. Hard work and great degrees are important, but you cannot succeed in a blue chip company without learning how to navigate the power structure. I worked very hard and it was my only strategy for many years and I was deeply disappointed.

I’ve learned that if you lower your head and focus solely on hard work, catching clues around you, understanding the power games, building important relationships, networking, and getting visible, you are missing out. These are all strategic activities that we need to combine with strategic hard work to get the results we want.

Second, we need role models. Having women in top positions more visible can open promotion pipelines and fuel other women’s aspirations for career success. It also reaffirms the belief and belief that success has many faces and that it is normal for BAME women to get to the highest levels of an organization. After all, it inspires Kamala Harris in the White House and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as head of the World Trade Organization to inspire everyone around the world.

After all, equality of opportunity does not become the norm until it is monitored and enforced. As we know, although both résumés are equivalent and sent to the same companies, the number of applicants called for interviews is much lower for people with names associated with ethnic minority groups than for white applicants. We need to challenge these structural and unconscious biases.

What advice would you give companies and the government to address this diversity issue and have a very diverse boardroom?

Diversity is essential to running healthy businesses. To nurture diverse talents at the top levels of organizations, we need concrete government and private sector action that can help bring more BAME women into boardrooms in the UK. We need to promote the enforcement of fair guidelines, open doors, provide proper training, offer mentoring, and challenge unconscious biases in the workplace.

I firmly believe that we need a democratization of opportunities in the corporate world. As mentioned earlier, diversity in leadership is good for business. For example, a Harvard Business School report on the male-dominated venture capital industry found that “the more similar the investment partners are, the less their investments will perform”. Diversity in boardrooms is not only fair, but also profitable.