I've spent years excelling in leadership development. While the space was not built with a Black woman in mind, I have successfully navigated the industry with perseverance, diligence, and unflappable determination. 

This Black Business Month I want to celebrate Black women who are meeting the moment and building thriving businesses, despite not always being seen and heard. The businesses we build, the organizations we run, the leadership we practice, they are successful because we keep going—even in the face of bias.

Stepping out on my own

For a long time, I looked for approval in spaces that didn’t give it to me freely. I tried to fit into leadership development as it existed, to earn a seat at tables where the criteria for "ready" or "credible" had already been quietly defined by people who didn't look like me and hadn't lived what I'd lived.

At some point, I stopped waiting for that approval. I made the decision to step out and co-found and step into being a CEO, not because someone finally gave me permission, but because I decided I didn't need it anymore.

That's not a comfortable decision. It means building without the built-in networks, the automatic credibility, the mentors who look like you and have walked the exact path before. It means knowing that some doors simply won't open the way they open for others and choosing to build your own door instead. But it also means leading in a way that's fully yours, not shaped around someone else's comfort or someone else's definition of what leadership is supposed to look like.

Caught between two movements

Here's something I've lived, not just observed: Black women often get lost in the very movements meant to lift us up.

The women's empowerment movement has done real work opening doors, but too often, when I've been in those spaces, the version of "woman" being empowered doesn't quite include mine. The conversations, the leadership models, the networks, they're frequently built around a default that isn't Black.

Then you turn to conversations about advancing Black voices, and the focus tends to center Black men. Black male leadership, Black male entrepreneurship, Black male excellence, all of it necessary, all of it worth championing. But somewhere in that important work, Black women get overlooked again. We're not quite centered in gender conversation, and we're not quite centered in the race conversation either. We're standing in the gap between two movements that were each supposed to include us.

There's actually a term for this: legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw called it intersectionality back in 1989, the idea that race and gender don't stack as separate problems, they compound into something distinct. I didn't need the term to know the feeling. I'd lived it.

I call it a double barrier, some call it a concrete ceiling, because that's what it feels like from the inside, not two separate walls you can tackle one at a time, but one wall built from two different materials, reinforcing each other. You don't get to set the race part down while you deal with the gender part, or vice versa. You carry both, every time you walk into a room. The statistics reflects what so many of us feel: recent research on corporate advancement found that for every 100 men promoted into their first management role, roughly 93 women get promoted overall, but for Black women specifically, that number drops to around 60. That's not a coincidence. That's the double barrier showing up in the data.

Why this matters beyond my own story

I know my story isn't unique. I hear versions of it constantly from the women I work with through Grow Black Leaders, women who are brilliant, capable, and exhausted from having to prove it twice: once as a woman, and again as a Black woman. Women who've been mentored plenty but rarely sponsored. Women who've been told to "wait their turn" in rooms where their turn never quite seems to come. It's part of why Black women still hold only around seven percent of C-suite seats nationally, despite years of public commitments to change that. The talent and the ambition have never been the missing piece. Access has.

If you lead an organization, in any industry, this isn't just a story to nod along to. It's worth asking yourself some honest questions. Who gets developed for leadership in your organization, and who gets overlooked? When you think about "advancing women," does the picture in your head include Black women specifically, or a default that quietly excludes them? When you think about "advancing Black leaders," are you picturing men, women, or both?

Representation isn't just about who's in the room. It's about whether the room was built with you in mind at all, and if it wasn't, whether you're willing to help rebuild it, or make room for someone else to build their own.

The point of telling this story

I'm sharing these sentiments because Black Business Month should be more than a celebration, it should be an honest reckoning with why so many of us had to step outside of existing systems to lead in the first place. And a call for everyone to ensure their industries are inclusive, fair, and welcoming.

While it is my sincere hope all people will have equal access, Black women cannot wait for a seat at the table—we must build our own.

Original article here.