Dr. Steve Yacovelli is the owner of TopDog Learning Group, LLC, a learning and development, leadership, change management, diversity and consulting firm based in Orlando.
“We work with organizations to help them maximize their human talent,” says Yacovelli. “It’s a lot of consulting, a lot of talking to see what the client really needs. Then using the tools that my team has to kind of get those problems solved.”
Basically, Yacovelli helps make leaders. He has worked with many organizations and companies, including big corporations like Disney and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, to provide the tools that make good workers into great leaders. His work in this field has earned him the nickname “The Gay Leadership Dude.”
The name not only comes from the fact that Yacovelli is openly gay, but also because he noticed key competencies needed in leadership that seemed to be naturally found within the LGBTQ individuals he worked with through his day-to-day work.
“As I was working in leadership and organizational development I saw the patterns that work and the ones that don’t for somebody to be successful,” he recalls. “It hit me as I was watching my fellow LGBTQ leaders in different advocacy groups be super effective, I couldn’t help but wonder if LGBTQ people actually have some natural skill in the competencies that I’m seeing the general leadership population excel at.”
This “Carrie Bradshaw moment,” as Yacovelli refers to it, led him to consider if LGBTQ people have a leg up in the leadership game because of skills naturally developed growing up LGBTQ and coming out.
“You see people in the general population who are really good leaders,” Yacovelli says, “and they are really great at having empathy for their team members, for the people around them. So I thought do LGBTQ people tend to have an opportunity to flex their empathy muscle because of who we are as a community? I wouldn’t broad stroke that we all have the same experience, of course not, but by the benefit of us being an ‘other’ does that lead us to have empathy for other people in different situations?”
This led Yacovelli to write his new book, “Pride Leadership: Strategies for the LGBTQ+ Leader to be the King or Queen of their Jungle.” The book is part informative and part instructive.
“The book was for me to really force my thoughts together,” Yacovelli says. “There are books out there on leadership, and I cite other people in mine because there are some amazing people who have their research out there, but there are not a whole lot of books that focus on leadership for LGBTQ people specifically, and that’s a big omission. While you can get the same message in those mainstream books, there’s just that gorgeous nuance to filter it through the lens of someone in our community.”
Before Yacovelli could sit down and write his book, he first needed to come up with a list of the areas of leadership he wanted to cover. He started off with 26.
“I knew I had to process through the list and get it down because I was not going to be able to write a 98,000 word book on leadership,” Yacovelli says, laughing.
Yacovelli elicited the help of friend and colleague Wes Wagaman to whittle down the list to a more manageable number.
“We just started pulling things together where we saw patterns, like having integrity and being authentic are in the same bucket so we can kind of weave those together,” Yacovelli says. “Then we took a step back and we said ‘these are the six big things that people are talking about.’”
Six key competencies is what Yacovelli, with an assist from Wagaman, came up with for LGBTQ individuals who are serious about developing into great leaders should focus on. They are:
-Being Authentic
-Having Leadership Courage
-Leveraging Empathy
-Using Inclusive Communication
-Building Relationships
-Shaping Culture
“These are the things that I’ve not only seen people rock at as good leaders but I have seen people who absolutely do not do any of them and they crash and burn. So six seemed like the right number,” Yacovelli says. “Then as I was halfway through the book I realized there’s six stripes in the rainbow Pride flag. So that kind of fell into place quite serendipitously.”
That Pride in the rainbow flag and the community in general is in part what led Yacovelli to name his book “Pride Leadership.”
“The phrase ‘Pride Leadership’ is threefold for me,” he says. “First, it is a reference to our history with Pride since ours is the target audience for the book and for who it is specifically written. The second is having pride in yourself to develop to be a more effective leader. People wouldn’t be in the positions they are in if they didn’t already have some of these skills, but to have pride enough to say I could be better, I could be even more of a rock star.”
The third part is a nod to the community that “we got this.”
“I hate to sound like an old man,” Yacovelli says, “but I see this especially with a lot of younger LGBTQ folks, they don’t maybe have that much confidence in their skill set and they should. Maybe you might have to refine it and nuance it, and maybe get some ways to develop it, but you’ve got this already by nature of who you are.”
“Pride Leadership” was released on June 5 and has already received praise from within the community; including from National LGBT Chamber of Commerce President Justin Nelson, Out Leadership COO Wes Werbeck and Equality Florida Director of Transgender Equality Gina Duncan, as well as fellow authors Rhodes Perry and Jennifer Brown.
“Pride Leadership: Strategies for the LGBTQ+ Leader to be the King or Queen of their Jungle” by Dr. Steve Yacovelli is available in print and in digital format on Amazon. You can purchase your copy and leave a review at SteveOnAmazon.com.
