Nobody in the firm would have said they were treating Rasheed unfairly. In fact, if you'd asked them, they'd have said the opposite. He was well-liked and respected. A capable solicitor with a sharp legal mind and a growing client rapport.

But his caseload over twelve months tells a depressing pattern. Routine conveyancing and straightforward wills. These cases, while necessary, offered him little opportunity to develop, or to build the kind of client relationships that lead to progression.

His colleague, John, who had qualified the same year, was handling the complex commercial disputes. These were high-value clients, and the type of cases that get talked about in partner meetings.

It wasn't as if the supervising partner had sat down and made a decision to hold Rasheed back. There was no agenda, and no conversation that anyone could point to as the moment it went wrong.

It was the supervising partner who had simply made an assumption he had not examined:

That's what the supervising partner told me - not immediately, but after some reflection. It took a conversation and the right questions to get there.

The supervisor wasn't a malicious person. He was an experienced, well-intentioned leader who had made a series of small decisions over time, each of which felt entirely reasonable in the moment, that had accumulated into something that was neither reasonable nor fair.

Rasheed, had started to notice. he was being sidelined. He had begun to gradually withdraw. This played out in him being less energetic in meetings, offered fewer ideas. He had a growing sense of not quite belonging in a place he had worked hard to be part of.

The enthusiasm he had arrived with slowly slipped away. After two years he left, and with him client relationships he had quietly been building.

The supervising partner had viewed the world through his own reality, his prism. His assumptions about what clients wanted, about who would make the right impression, about where Rasheed would ‘work best’ - all of it filtered through his own experience, his own background, his own unconscious sense of what a senior solicitor looks like.

We all have a prism. Every leader, every manager, every person in a position to allocate work, assign opportunity, or open a door - they all see the world through one. The question is whether they know it's there.

This is what I mean when I talk about the PRISM Lens. Not a theory. Not a diversity policy. A practical way of helping leaders see that their perception of a situation - however confident, however well-intentioned - is only one wavelength of a more complex picture.

Rasheed had his own prism. The firm, as a whole, had one too. None of them were wrong. But only one of them was being used to make decisions - and it was costing the firm more than it realised.

A conscious leader - one who has learned to look through the PRISM Lens - would have hesitated before allocating that first case. Not for long. Just long enough to ask: am I making this decision based on what Rasheed can do, or based on what I assume a client will think?

And if Rasheed can handle the case expertly, what is actually stopping him? The assumption that the client won't want to work with someone who looks different to them. But that assumption belongs to the leader - not the client. And more importantly, it's the leader's job to help clients work with the best person for their case, not the person who looks most familiar. Shielding clients from difference isn't protecting them. It's limiting them - and it's limiting Rasheed at the same time. And it's costing the firm money.

That hesitation is where the shift should have happened. From assumption to conscious choice. From one reality to many. From managing people who look and sound like you, to managing the person who is actually in front of you. Someone the firm recruited, invested in, and needed to retain.

It sounds simple. But managing people who are different to you is a skill - and like any skill, it can be learned.

The firms that understand this are not just more equitable, but also more competitive. The evidence is consistent - diverse, well-led teams outperform. They retain the talent their competitors lose.

Rasheed's story is not unusual. I have seen versions of it in professional services firms across Scotland - different names, different cases, the same pattern playing out below the surface of a firm that believes it treats everyone fairly.

The good news is that awareness is the beginning, not the end. Once a leader can see their prism, they can start to lead beyond it. That is what the PRISM Lens makes possible - helping leaders recognise that every person they manage sees the world through their own prism, shaped by their background, identity and experience, and that leading across difference means learning to work with that complexity, not around it.

Many organisations are getting better at hiring for diversity. The intention is solid. But intention at the recruitment stage is only half the story - and in my experience, it's the second half where things fall apart.

I was recommended to a Scottish local authority by a senior leader who had noticed things weren’t quite right.

"There's tension," he said. "I think it's more than personality clashes. I'd like you to come in and take a look."

The organisation had made real progress on diversity. Their hiring reflected it. But when I looked at what was actually happening day to day, they told a different story.

The line manager at the centre of this wasn't a bad person. He had welcomed Abdul and Priya onto his team. He was proud, in fact, of the team he had built. But nobody had ever helped him think about what it actually means to manage people whose background, culture and experience are different to his own. That is the gap the PRISM Lens addresses. Not intentions - most managers have good ones. But the awareness to see that every person on your team experiences the workplace through their own prism, shaped by their background, identity and experience. And that leading across difference means learning to work with that, not around it.

Abdul had been with the organisation for six years and was managing a small team. He was diligent, well-regarded, and had never had a formal complaint raised against him. When a process error occurred in his department - the kind that happens in busy teams - he was called into a meeting within the week. A formal written record was made of his error. Similarly, a month later, another error had occurred followed by a second written record and meeting.

But three months earlier, a white colleague in an equivalent role had made a similar error. There was a conversation. No written record.

When I raised this with the line manager, his response was immediate. "Abdul's team is higher profile. The stakes are different." When I asked him to explain what made the stakes different, he couldn't. The work was comparable. The error was comparable, but the response was not. He genuinely believed his own explanation. That is how an unexamined prism works - it doesn't feel like bias. It feels like judgement.

Priya had raised a concern - not formally, just a conversation with her line manager. She didn't use the word racist. She said she didn't feel she was being taken seriously.

When I spoke with her, she described three separate conversations with the same colleague. After Kashmir appeared in the news following a bombing, he had turned to her in the office and asked what she thought about India-Pakistan relations - as if her ethnicity made her a spokesperson for a geopolitical conflict. On another occasion he raised the topic of arranged marriage, and had asked whether she would have an arranged marriage. Was she seeing someone? On another, whether she prayed five times a day.

The colleague almost certainly thought he was being friendly, curious, and interested. But the cumulative effect was clear - Priya was being treated as a representative of her background rather than as a colleague doing a job. Every interaction reminded her that she was seen as different first, and as a professional second. This is what happens when someone has never been helped to look beyond their own prism. The colleague wasn't hostile. He was simply unaware that his curiosity was landing as othering - and nobody had ever given him the tools to know the difference.

She had told her line manager, she was uncomfortable with the questioning. He told her that was ‘James, just being James’ and to take it with a pinch of salt. “I just wanted someone to take it seriously the first time. I didn't really want to be known as the person who makes complaints,". The organisation had hired Priya because it wanted people like her. It just hadn't thought about what it would take to keep her.

Every Friday, the team finished at 5pm. Most people headed to the pub but Abdul stayed until 6pm to answer the phones.

Nobody had asked him directly, it had simply become assumed, he wasn’t drinking so he could stay on.

When I asked the manager who had decided Abdul would cover the phones, he looked genuinely puzzled. "He's always just done it. He doesn't seem to mind."

He had never asked Abdul whether he minded. Abdul minded a great deal. But he hadn't said so, because he didn't feel he could and didn’t want to cause trouble and have people annoyed with him.

Meanwhile, the in-crowd left for the pub at five. And the social connections, the informal conversations, the relationships that lead to opportunity - all of that was happening in a room Abdul was never in.

The organisation had invested in recruiting Abdul and Priya. It had done the work to build a more diverse team. And then it had placed them with a manager who had never been given the tools to lead across differences - and left them there. Small assumptions accumulate. And what accumulates eventually costs.

Abdul was disengaged. Priya was close to leaving. The recruitment cost of replacing either of them would have comfortably funded the kind of leadership development that could have prevented all of it.

This is the gap I work in. Not diversity recruitment - there are people who do that well. But what comes after. Because bringing people in is only the beginning. Keeping them - and getting the best from them - is a different skill entirely. And like any skill, it can be learned.

I know Hasan. And when he told me what had happened at his place of work, I wasn't surprised. I had heard versions of this story before.

Hasan had been with the firm for six years. His work was excellent and partners requested him by name on complex assignments. His client feedback was strong.

And yet, when he looked around at the people being put forward for the senior accountant review, being mentored, being sponsored, having doors opened for them - he wasn't among them. Nobody had said anything. It had simply happened that way.

When he first joined the firm, he would join colleagues for soft drinks at the pub and the Friday lunches. He laughed at the same things his colleagues laughed at. Nobody thought of him as particularly different - he was just Hasan, good at his job, easy to be around.

That began to change about two years in. He grew a beard. He began praying during the working day. He stopped going to the pub and started fasting during Ramadan.

Nothing about his work changed. His commitment, his quality, his client relationships - all of it remained exactly as it had been. But the Hasan his colleagues saw every day looked and lived differently to the one they had first met. And they didn't know what to do with that.

Some colleagues simply became awkward. A few people who had previously sought Hasan out for a chat began finding reasons to be elsewhere. Nobody said anything, they just quietly withdrew.

Others handled it differently - which is to say, worse.

"Is this a recent thing?" one colleague asked him, nodding at his beard. "What happened to you, can't be bothered shaving?"

Another, when Hasan declined to join them for after-work drinks, said in front of the team: "Gone a bit holy on us, have you?" Someone laughed. Hasan said nothing.

A third, during Ramadan, announced loudly at a working lunch: "I don't know how you do it mate, I couldn't last five minutes. Are you sure you don't want some pizza?" Some laughter and teasing. Hasan sat there and said nothing.

Each of these moments was small. But taken together, they sent a clear message - your difference has been noticed, and we don't know what to do with it. This is what happens when people see the world only through their own prism - their own frame of reference, their own experience of what is normal. Hasan's colleagues weren't cruel. They were simply unable to see past their own reality to understand what his looked like.

In his first two years, Hasan had attended every client dinner, every team celebration, every informal gathering after a long week. After his faith became more visible, the invitations became less frequent. Then rarely.

Hasan assumed the partners no longer wanted him there. Or had the partners assumed that Hasan wouldn't want to come, that it wasn't really his thing anymore.

This is the PRISM Lens in action - or rather, the absence of it. A conscious leader gives it thought before making assumptions on someone else's behalf. They consider what the situation looks like from the other person's reality, not just their own.

"I would have gone," Hasan told me. "I liked being part of things. I just stopped being asked."

The relationships that matter in a professional services firm are rarely built in the office. They are built at those dinners, those drinks, those informal moments where people let their guard down and find out who each other actually are. Hasan had been quietly removed from all of them - with the best of intentions.

Hasan prayed during work hours. In a busy accountancy firm with back to back client meetings and open plan offices, that required thought and planning. He had found a quiet corner - a small unused meeting room on the second floor - and had been using it discreetly for two years.

The firm had never thought to ask if he needed anything.. The question had simply never occurred to them because Hasan's needs were outside their frame of reference. That is what an unexamined prism does. It doesn't just shape what you see - it shapes what you don't think to look for.

Hasan handed in his notice recently. He had been approached by another firm - one where a partner had actively sought him out, sat down with him, asked him about his ambitions and what he needed. He took the offer without hesitation.

The partners in the old firm were surprised. They hadn't seen it coming. One said he hadn't realised Hasan was unhappy - he had always seemed fine, always delivered, never complained.

That was precisely the problem. Hasan had spent six years being professional, capable and undemanding. In the first two years he had felt part of something. In the last two, he had been quietly managing a growing sense of not belonging and becoming increasingly invisible.

When Hasan left, the firm lost more than they had realised. He took with him client relationships he had built - relationships the firm hadn't thought to protect, because they had never fully seen the person who built them.

Nobody had ever helped them think about what it means to keep someone in your circle when their life looks different to their own. That gap - between good intentions and conscious leadership - is where the distance grows. The PRISM Lens is not about eliminating difference or pretending it isn't there. It is about developing the awareness to see it clearly, and the skills to lead across it.

A friend told me about Emeka recently. He had joined an English law firm as one of three new graduates. He was privately educated, the son of Nigerian parents who had worked hard to give him every advantage. He had a girlfriend, she was ‘white’ they had met at law school. Recently, they announced their engagement to a lot of congratulations from colleagues. All is good in his life, but his work, but at work he is unsure about where he stands.

His manager, let’s call him David, is in his late fifties. He had been at the firm forever. But there is something about Emeka that doesn't sit right with him. My friend couldn't pinpoint exactly when it had begun - but it seemed to increase since Emeka had announced his engagement.

David makes comments about crimes that involve black people. Remarks about immigration being too high and causing high unemployment in the country slipping into conversations about the news, and about miscegenation. Nothing is ever directed at Emeka specifically - just opinions, offered. The other graduates laugh along or say nothing. Emeka doesn’t say anything either.

One of the other graduates had been invited to shadow a senior partner within his first month. The other had been given a complex research assignment that got talked about in the right rooms. Emeka had been given the filing, then a piece of routine drafting that any paralegal could have handled.

When Emeka asks about his development opportunities, he’s told he’s still finding his feet, and there's no rush.

He arrives early and stays later. He goes over his work twice before submitting it, he knows the scrutiny he is coming under. He laughs at David's jokes in team meetings, engages with commentary he finds uncomfortable, and tries to remain neutral when uncomfortable remarks are made.

He has told his friend he wants to make it work. He has worked too hard, his parents have sacrificed too much, for him to walk away from something he has earned.

He thinks he just needs to figure out what his manager wants from me,and that if he does good work, he’ll impress him and change his behaviour.

His friend, listening, doesn't know whether this is the systemic problem encountered by Black and ethnically diverse communities.

It seems that David sees his own behaviour through his own prism - as reasonable, as normal, as just the way he is. Nobody at the firm has ever helped him understand that his prism is shaping every interaction he has with Emeka, and that Emeka is absorbing the cost of that every single day.

This is what an unexamined prism does at its hardest edge. It doesn't just create distance. It creates a working environment where one person has to work twice as hard, absorb twice as much, and still smile across the table at the person making it difficult.

Emeka is still there. But there is a limit to how long anyone can sustain working in that environment. The energy it takes to manage constant uncertainty, to second-guess every interaction, to perform competence and composure while absorbing hostility dressed up as opinion - that energy runs out.

And when it does, Emeka will leave. He will take his grades, his client potential, his determination, and everything his parents worked for to give him - and he will take it somewhere that deserves it.

Undoubtedly, the firm will be surprised. They will say he seemed fine. They will say he never raised anything formally. They will wonder what they missed.

What they missed was happening in plain sight. In team meetings, over lunch and in the corridors.

A senior leader who looks through the PRISM Lens - who understands that every person in that firm sees the world through their own prism, and that it is leadership's job to notice when one person's prism is shaping the experience of another - would see it. Would ask questions. Would understand that Emeka's silence is not contentment.

Take our free quiz, Discover Your Leadership Blind Spots, and find out where your own prism might be shaping decisions you haven't examined yet.