How Magic Johnson changed the way I think about diversity in business

Setting goals, having a plan for creating value, understanding when and how to get recognized for your contributions, and building a powerful personal brand are all key steps that drive your career forward. But there’s one last step you’ll need to complete: learning to bring your authentic self to work every day.

No matter how well you perform or how much recognition you receive, you won’t achieve your full potential if you can’t be who you are — who you really are — at work, day in and day out. People of color (POC) know this all too well.

A few years ago, Jopwell was raising a round of funding, and my cofounder, Ryan Williams, and I were taking meetings with a variety of potential investors. One day, we found ourselves in a New York City hotel waiting to meet with NBA Hall of Famer, entrepreneur, and investor Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr. In case you’re not a basketball fan or maybe just too young to remember, he’s kind of a huge deal. He won five NBA championships and three league most valuable player awards during his thirteen-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, not to mention a gold medal from the 1992 Olympics.

Following basketball, he became an accomplished entrepreneur. For a lifelong basketball fan and burgeoning entrepreneur myself, meeting him was like a dream come true.

Like countless other die-hard basketball fans, I’d spent hours as a kid watching Mr. Johnson play, all the while daydreaming about having the ball while the clock ticks away. At the last second, I — as he so often did — would drain a game-winning fade-away jumper. Now I was actually going to meet one of my childhood heroes. I still remember what went through my head when he opened the door:

He is so much taller than I thought.

This is actually Magic Johnson. I’m meeting with Magic Johnson.

Am I dressed appropriately?

What do I call him? “Magic?” “Earvin?” “Mr. Johnson?”

The meeting began with Ryan and me explaining our backgrounds and why we had started Jopwell. We spoke about our upbringing, the time we’d spent in finance, the barriers we had experienced being recruited as two African-American males, and the need that Jopwell serves.

We also went into detail about the previous year — growing the business, hiring employees, building the brand, raising money, and partnering with amazing companies. We got into the nitty-gritty of the business, explaining how we make money, how user growth works, and our employees’ backgrounds. At no point in the conversation did he ever ask why Jopwell was important. He already knew.

After chatting for about forty-five minutes, Mr. Johnson asked me a question that no other investor had ever asked us before. It was simple, but it sparked a conversation that I’ll always remember and cherish.

“What’s been the biggest obstacle or barrier that you’ve had to personally overcome?”

My answer came instantly: “I’ve been an athlete all my life,” I said. “I was always the stand-out athlete in my circle of friends and at school. It was who I was. It was how I identified myself. I played basketball in college and enjoyed a successful career. I was a three-year starter, played on several nationally televised games, and enjoyed all the fruits that came with being an athlete on a college campus.

“However,” I continued, “during my freshman-year Christmas break, while at a party in my neighborhood, an older neighbor asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale. His next question was, without any hesitation, ‘What sport do you play?’

“I was taken aback, angry that because I was a young Black Yale student, he assumed I had to play a sport to attend the school. So from that point on, whenever anyone asked if I played a sport, I told them I didn’t. I wanted them to see my intelligence and my other accomplishments. I didn’t want people thinking I was only an athlete.”

Mr. Johnson listened intently and nodded along.

I went on to explain that after graduation, I’d had a really difficult time adjusting to life outside of sports. I’d spent my entire life working to be the best athlete I could be. And then, all of a sudden, I was ashamed to identify as one. Even worse, I didn’t know how else to identify myself. That changed when I started Jopwell. I now identify as an entrepreneur, but even that is a new concept to me. It’s an identity that I still work at managing.

Now Mr. Johnson was smiling. Little did I know that what he was about to say would help reshape my perception of myself and how I viewed the world.

He started by explaining how his entire life people had identified him as “Magic” Johnson, and not Earvin Johnson. Everyone knew him as the athlete before they knew the whole person. Being one of the best basketball players of all time, living in Los Angeles during the tumultuous eighties and nineties, and being an international celebrity, he had had to accept that the world viewed and knew him as Magic.

Following his time in the NBA, he wanted to do more. He knew he had the background to be as successful off the court as he was on the court. He’d always wanted to be a businessman, even in college, so he applied his experience growing up in the hardworking town of Lansing, Michigan, his fame as a basketball player, and the values he had learned during his career — discipline, adaptability, hard work, confidence, competitiveness, and teamwork.

Those character traits allowed him to carve out space in the crowded business landscape of Los Angeles and eventually to become the mogul he is today. He knew there were plenty of great businessmen and women, but he had the confidence to realize that none of them could bring what he could bring to the table.

This eventually led to a highly successful partnership with Starbucks. Mr. Johnson explained that through research he conducted in the late nineties, he learned that most Starbucks stores experience peak sales before noon. Once the afternoon hit — especially in suburban towns, where Starbucks were almost exclusively located at the time — virtually no one was purchasing coffee.

With Mr. Johnson’s intimate understanding of urban America, he saw an opportunity not only to develop Starbucks in new communities but also to drive afternoon and evening sales. He presented a proposal to Starbucks’ senior leadership detailing his plan for franchising in urban communities, despite the fact that Starbucks did not allow franchises. He identified robust areas for store placement, leveraged relationships with local community-based organizations for hiring, and designed an environment where people could gather for meetings, to socialize, or both. In 1998, the senior leadership team decided to take a chance on his plan and allowed him to open or purchase more than a hundred franchises in urban communities.

Starbucks also allowed him to adjust the menu and add picnic tables outside to provide a welcoming atmosphere for chess and card players. Those key elements made his stores local favorites, allowing him to sell more coffee and food items. In 2010, he sold his franchises back to Starbucks and cashed in around $70 million through the divestment.

By the time Mr. Johnson finished his story, I no longer felt the need to continue hiding my own past as an athlete. After all, that experience had given me the discipline, drive, leadership, and team-oriented mentality I needed to excel professionally. Hearing his story also made me realize that each of us has our own unique gifts and talents, and we can apply those abilities to deliver value at work and grow our careers.

POC in the workforce are reminded daily that we’re different from most of our coworkers. The vast majority of those reminders are unintentional, and the speakers rarely intend to be insensitive. Often they’re cloaked in positivity. I’d need a few dozen hands to count the number of times I’ve been told how “articulate” and “well-spoken” I am. But even though the speaker thought they were paying me a compliment, I felt as if they’d assumed I wouldn’t be articulate, which is alarming.

Every time it happened, it chipped a little piece of me away. It made me a little less engaged at work. It made me a little less likely to go above and beyond. And it kept me from referring diverse professionals from my network to positions at my company. Instead of bringing in more people from my community, I felt as if I was doing my friends and relatives a favor by keeping them out.

From my conversations with countless other professionals of color, I know my experience is not unique. But the vast majority of the companies we work for and the colleagues with whom we work aren’t deliberately trying to make us feel like outsiders. After all, companies around the United States spend billions of dollars every year on diversity hiring initiatives. But these programs are rarely effective, leaving people like me — and quite possibly you, too — with workplaces in which we’re a very underrepresented minority.

And it’s not just POC who suffer when diversity programs fail. Companies suffer as well. Their reputations as employers can be tarnished, they can make costly messaging mistakes when trying to reach our communities, and, perhaps most important, they underperform financially.

If we’re going to help businesses and ourselves, we’ve got to disrupt this process. We’ve got to change how businesses grow. We’ve got to convince the decision-makers at our companies that they need to actively search for diverse talent, rather than expecting a qualified POC to magically float to the top of a crowded applicant pool.

We have to show them that we are here. We’re marketers. We’re software developers. We’re CFOs. If we can work together — and I believe we can — we have the opportunity to change the face of the American workforce for the better.

It’s time to let them see you.

Porter Braswell is the author of Let Them See You: The Guide for Leveraging Your Diversity at Work, from which this article is adapted.