Changemakers: Nick Deakin

When Dr Nick Deakin MBA2017 joined Citigroup as a post-MBA investment banking associate in August 2015, he quickly realised he was the only LGBTQ+ hire in the cohort. Despite the bank’s leading stance on inclusion and diversity and existing LGBTQ+ networks, more had to be done to attract diverse or LGBTQ+ talent and make sure these individuals felt confident being visible.

The medical doctor, who had grown up in a conservative working class town in the UK’s West Midlands with a paucity of LGBTQ+ role models, realised there was a role for him to play to move the agenda forward. 

“It’s a question of looking around and not seeing your face and having a strange sense of unease. It’s like feeling that you don’t belong,” he says. 

A natural leader who as Co-President of London Business School’s Out in Business Club transformed the School’s EUROUT conference into a global business event featured in the Telegraph and El Confidencial, Nick is not the type of person to stand by and be frustrated by the status quo. 

This is what led him to do an MBA in the first place: to “be able to get the skills, framework and networks to influence the setting of the cogs in the machine (of healthcare delivery) and so have a bigger impact on people’s lives.”

Connecting the dots

Like the medical system, workplace culture is a big, complex machine. In some sectors and industries, it has evolved over decades, if not hundreds of years. This is particularly true in investment banking, a 500-year-old industry that, despite recent progress, is still far from being as diverse as it should be in many firms. 

This didn’t phase Nick, who helped to secure in perpetuity the first London Business School scholarship for an LGBTQ+ student, and is determined to help change attitudes around diversity for a more accepting – and more productive – working world. 

For Nick, the direction of travel was obvious. It was about connecting the dots. “I spoke to HR at Citi and together with the leaders of the Pride network we set up an LGBTQ+ Insight evening for applicants to our analyst and associate programmes who identified as being LGBTQ+,” the Financial Times LGBTQ+ Top 5 Future Leader (2016) explains. “We asked people from the Citi Pride Network to come and talk to prospective candidates – to tell them they are welcome here. At the time, I believe it was the first such initiative in any investment bank in Europe.”

Now, those Insight evenings, together with a number of LGBTQ+ recruitment webinars that he also instigated, and presence at EUROUT, Student Pride and other initiatives, reach more than 400 potential candidates a year and are attended by the bank’s most senior executives. 

“That sends a powerful signal to LGBTQ+ graduates who may have been wary of investment banking’s reputation. That level of commitment from the bank to those people, particularly those who attend our Insight events, says something about our culture. It says that our top priority is making sure we get top talent from every community. And more than that – there’s huge buy-in from our leaders. They just want the best people.” 

Sending a message from the very top

So how did a pilot recruitment initiative in London for a relatively small number of candidates gain buy-in from the bank’s leadership team?

“The Financial Times interviewed me for an MBA supplement in January 2018 about how companies can attract the best talent. I said that if your employment policy and working environment is diverse and open, you won’t miss out.”

Days later, he received an email from the global head of investment banking asking what he could do to help promote the bank as a top workplace for diverse talent.       

That is a strong message and underpins Citigroup’s ongoing commitment to increasing inclusion and diversity. This is evidenced by the bank’s improved position – seventh – in Stonewall’s 2020 rankings of the 100 most welcoming employers for LGBTQ+ employees.  It was the top ranked finance firm on the influential list.

Just five banks made the cut at in the report by the UK equality charity, which praised Citigroup for its advocacy of marriage equality in Northern Ireland, the strength of the network and Nick’s “outstanding” recruitment and awareness-raising events for LGBTQ+ graduates. He was designated an ‘Inclusion Champion’ in the Citi UK awards this year.

Meanwhile, Nick, who got the bug for being able to effect change during an internship at McKinsey & Company, has this year had an accelerated promotion to Vice President in the bank’s EMEA Healthcare division. 

In this role, he works with pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical technology companies in locations in the US, Middle East and Africa where being LGBTQ+ is either illegal or much less acceptable than in most of Europe.

He explains that despite being delighted to be a poster child for LGBTQ+ for Citigroup and comfortable being his “authentic self at work”, his priority is to be “an excellent banker first and an excellent LGBTQ+ banker second”. As a result, he won’t necessarily disclose his LGBTQ+ identity unless this is relevant and he knows the client.  

“Coming out is not a one-time thing,” he says. “It’s a fluid process and sometimes you have to pick your moments. The first time I speak to a client from the Middle East, I’m probably not going to mention that I’m gay. They’ll be focused on what I can do for them, and I’ll be more concerned about delivering.”

High-performance culture equates to an inclusive culture 

Much has been written about how productivity rises when employees feel they can be themselves at work without having to hide aspects of their identity

“I’ve seen estimates of a spike of 10% to 30% productivity improvement if someone feels comfortable and included in the office. Yet nearly half of LGBTQ+ employees in the US aren’t out at work,” says Nick, who as a junior doctor worked for St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London.

He highlights a multi-country, multi-industry survey of more than 3,000 people for Vodafone in 2018 which showed that more than 40% of 18-to-25 year olds actually “go back in the closet” when they started their first job in order to avoid discrimination from managers and colleagues. The situation for trans workplace equality is even worse.

Nick says the dearth of visible LGBTQ+ senior leaders within businesses and organisations across industries and geographies reinforces that sense of “something’s not right here” and “I’m not sure if this place is for people like me”.

With just three openly LGBTQ+ Fortune 500 CEOs and one openly LGBTQ+ FTSE 100-listed CEO (Apple boss Tim Cook), Nick says this represents a “yawning aspiration gap”, which can be really demoralising.

One solution is London Business School’s new LGBTQ+ Executive Leadership programme, launching in July 2020 – a first within Europe and a programme that Nick helped to shape, working with School faculty to set it up. It’s only through such initiatives from credible institutions that he believes the pink ceiling can be broken. 

“The most powerful thing an organisation can do to support inclusion and LGBTQ+ retention – apart from creating a strong ally network – is to offer the best training and coaching for ambitious LGBTQ+ professionals so that they have the confidence to embrace their true selves at work, realise their true potential, be a better leader and create that ‘trickle-down effect’. 

“The idea of the LGBTQ+ programme at LBS is that you’ve got a cohort with a critical mass of management experience – they ask for eight years – so participants are quite senior in their companies. It’s a signal from their organisations that they want them to come back with the confidence and self-awareness to own their identity in the workplace, understand how to leverage networks and lead their team to deliver better results. 

“And of course this is underpinned by the unparalleled business knowledge you get from having been at one of the world’s top business schools under the purview of world-class faculty doing cutting-edge research on the topic of workplace diversity and inclusion.

“For the businesses sending their high-achievers on this programme, it’s not just a fantastic message to those fortunate enough to be selected, but to the whole organisation. The PR message to the wider world is that the next Tim Cook could be sitting within their walls.”

But you don’t have to be as loud an LGBTQ+ ambassador as Nick to make a difference, he insists. “Simply be yourself. That’s enough to help change the world.”    

Dr Nick Deakin was the 2017 winner of the Bain Student Impact Award & Graduating Student Award for his impact through the London Business School Out in Business Club. This included delivering the EUROUT conference and being a strategy teaching assistant in the Masters in Management (MiM) programme. He is an FT LGBTQ+ Future 50 Leader and was included in Poets and Quants’ 2017 ‘Top 100 Brightest and Best MBA Rankings’.