By Rani Dhanda, Director, Inclusion Junction · April 2026

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. Respected, even. A capable solicitor with a sharp legal mind and a growing client rapport.

But look at his caseload over twelve months and a pattern emerges. The routine conveyancing. The straightforward wills. The cases that, while necessary, offered little opportunity to develop, to shine, or to build the kind of client relationships that lead to progression.

His colleague - same year of qualification, similar experience - was handling the complex commercial disputes. The high-value clients. The cases that get talked about in partner meetings.

It’s not as if the supervising partner had sat down and made a calculated decision to hold Rasheed back. No agenda, and no conversation that anyone could point to as the moment it went wrong.

It was quieter than that. And in some ways, that makes it harder to address.

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

He 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 quietly accumulated into something that was neither reasonable nor fair.

Rasheed, meanwhile, had started to notice. Not dramatically - there was no confrontation, no formal complaint. Just a gradual withdrawal. Less energy in meetings. Fewer ideas offered. A growing sense of not quite belonging in a place he had worked hard to be part of.

He left two years later. And with him went the client relationships he had quietly been building - relationships the firm hadn't even realised existed, because they had never given him the cases that would have made them visible.

The supervising partner was seeing 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.

What conscious leadership looks like instead

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.

That hesitation is where the shift happens. 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.

It sounds simple. But it is a skill - and like any skill, it can be learned.

The firms that understand this are not just more equitable. They are more competitive. 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 quiet 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.

If you recognised something in Rasheed's story - whether as a leader reflecting on your own decisions, or as someone who has been on the receiving end of them - I'd like to talk.