Who Gets Invited Into the Room? Familiarity, and the Hidden Path to Promotion

Most organizations would be uncomfortable admitting that promotions sometimes depend on how much an employee resembles the people who already hold power. So we rarely say it that way. Instead, we talk about executive presence, communication skills, professionalism, leadership potential, or culture fit. Someone is described as polished and ready for the next step. Someone else needs to work on their interpersonal skills. One employee is viewed as confident while another, communicating essentially the same idea differently, is considered difficult, awkward, blunt, quiet, or “not quite ready.” None of these judgments is necessarily malicious, and that may be precisely why they deserve more attention. Organizations can gradually develop an image of what a successful person sounds like, looks like, communicates like, and behaves like. Then, without anyone deliberately deciding to do so, they begin reproducing that person.

The result can look almost self-evident from inside the organization. The people who move ahead seem like obvious choices because they have already been visible. They served on important committees. They led special projects. Senior administrators know their names. They were invited into conversations where strategy was discussed. They represented the department, attended conferences, participated in searches, or were asked to assume temporary leadership responsibilities. By the time a promotion becomes available, they already have a résumé filled with evidence of leadership.

But there is a question we often fail to ask:

How did they gain access to all of those opportunities in the first place?

Familiarity Can Feel Like Competence

Recent research summarized by Harvard Business School gives us a useful place to begin. Kadeem Noray and Savannah Noray examined workplace communication and found that employees whose speech patterns matched the dominant communication style around them were more likely to occupy jobs involving high levels of social interaction. The relationship between social skills and socially intensive work was at least 2.5 times stronger when workers spoke like the culturally dominant group. The researchers caution managers against judging ability through familiar speech patterns and encourage organizations to question conventional notions of cultural fit when making decisions about talent.

The implication is not that communication does not matter. Of course it does. The problem is that we may not be evaluating communication as objectively as we imagine. Familiarity can feel like competence. Someone who communicates the way we communicate is easier to understand, easier to predict, and sometimes simply easier to like. Their humor lands. Their conversational rhythm feels comfortable. They know when to jump into the meeting and when to stop talking. We may find ourselves saying, “They really get it,” without stopping to examine exactly what it is.

That should make us reconsider a common workplace question: Does this person seem like a leader?

A better question might be: What have we been taught a leader is supposed to seem like?

Those are very different questions. The first assumes leadership has a recognizable appearance and that experienced leaders can identify it instinctively. The second forces us to examine where that image came from. If nearly every person who has historically advanced in an organization speaks confidently in meetings, enjoys networking, processes information quickly in conversation, handles office politics easily, and projects enthusiasm in recognizable ways, those characteristics can slowly become proxies for leadership itself.

Eventually, we stop noticing that they are preferences.

They become the default.

Before Promotion Comes Invitation

This is where the promotion conversation needs to move beyond the promotion itself.

Long before someone applies for a supervisory position, directorship, deanship, vice presidency, or other leadership role, hundreds of smaller decisions have already shaped who looks qualified. Someone decides who joins the strategic planning committee. Someone chooses the people for a new initiative. Someone asks an employee to represent the department at an important meeting. Someone decides who attends a conference, participates in a search committee, leads an accreditation project, works with a senior administrator, or joins an institution-wide task force.

Those decisions appear small.

Collectively, they can determine careers.

Committees and special projects are not merely additional service. They are places where employees gain institutional knowledge, demonstrate judgment, interact with senior leadership, build relationships across departments, learn how decisions are made, and become known beyond their immediate jobs. Someone invited to five important committees over several years may eventually appear to possess much stronger institutional leadership experience than someone who was never invited to any of them.

The résumé tells us what happened.

It does not tell us who was repeatedly invited to make it happen.

The Water Cooler Is Part of the Organizational Chart

There is another place where opportunity is distributed that rarely appears in policy manuals: the water cooler.

It may not literally be a water cooler anymore. It might be the hallway conversation after a meeting, the few minutes before everyone leaves a conference room, lunch with colleagues, a conversation while walking across campus, the group chat, the office doorway, the conference reception, or the informal discussion that continues after the formal agenda has ended.

These spaces matter because organizations have both a formal structure and a social structure. The formal structure tells us who reports to whom. The social structure tells us who knows what is happening, who hears about an opportunity early, who can float an idea informally, who gets advice before making a decision, and whose name comes to mind when something interesting becomes available.

An employee who participates easily in this informal environment can accumulate enormous amounts of organizational knowledge and social capital without anyone intentionally giving them an advantage. They hear that a committee is being formed before the invitation goes out. Someone mentions that a director will be leaving soon. They learn which proposal senior leadership is enthusiastic about. A colleague says, “You should talk to Susan about that.” A supervisor casually says, “You would be great on this project.”

None of these interactions feels like a promotion decision.

But they accumulate.

The person who is present for them becomes known.

The person who is absent from them can become invisible.

When the Organization Does Not Know What to Do With Someone

This is where the experience of some neurodivergent employees can become particularly painful.

What happens when someone is excellent at their work but does not participate naturally in the social life surrounding it? Maybe they do not linger after meetings. Maybe small talk is exhausting. Maybe they prefer written communication. Maybe noisy social gatherings are difficult. Maybe they speak directly rather than wrapping an idea in the expected amount of social cushioning. Maybe they need time before answering a complicated question. Maybe they do not intuit the invisible rules governing when to speak, how long to speak, or which disagreements are acceptable.

The organization can begin asking a quiet question:

What do we do with this person?

Not necessarily because the person has done anything wrong. They simply do not fit easily into the familiar social machinery.

And very often the answer becomes: leave them alone.

They are not invited to lunch because people assume they would rather not go. They are not pulled into informal conversations because they seem private. They are not asked to join the committee because nobody is quite sure how they would fit with the group. Their office becomes a place colleagues walk past rather than enter. Managers give them their assignments and allow them to work independently because that appears to be what they prefer.

Sometimes independence genuinely is a preference.

But there is an enormous difference between choosing solitude and being socially abandoned.

The danger is that exclusion eventually becomes self-confirming. The employee who is repeatedly left out knows less about what is happening. Because they know less, they contribute less to informal conversations. Because they contribute less, colleagues conclude that they are not very engaged. Because they appear disengaged, they receive fewer invitations.

The organization creates the distance and then interprets the distance as a characteristic of the employee.

That is a powerful cycle.

The Neurodivergent Employee and the Social Side of Opportunity

Many workplace behaviors treated as signals of professionalism or leadership are actually preferences for particular forms of social performance: maintaining expected eye contact, responding immediately in conversation, reading unspoken expectations, participating comfortably in group banter, navigating informal relationships, thinking aloud during meetings, understanding unwritten political dynamics, or displaying enthusiasm in socially recognizable ways.

None of these behaviors necessarily tells us whether someone can analyze a difficult problem, make an ethical decision, supervise colleagues, identify patterns, build systems, manage projects, develop people, or lead an organization. Yet they can strongly influence whether a person is liked, trusted, included, and eventually considered promotable.

That creates a particularly difficult contradiction for neurodivergent employees. An organization may hire someone precisely because they bring a different way of analyzing, organizing, questioning, or solving problems. Yet when opportunities for advancement are distributed, the same differences can become social liabilities.

The organization values the person's difference when it produces useful work.

It becomes less comfortable with the difference when deciding whom to invite into the room.

That is not meaningful neuroinclusion.

It is asking someone to contribute difference while rewarding sameness.

Inclusion at the Front Door, Assimilation on the Staircase

An organization can therefore become quite good at diversity at the point of recruitment while remaining deeply conventional in how people gain influence.

We can invite people through the front door because they bring different experiences and perspectives and then construct an organizational staircase that becomes easier to climb the more closely they resemble the people already upstairs.

That staircase is built from countless ordinary moments.

Who gets asked to lunch?

Who gets included in the hallway conversation?

Who hears about an opportunity before everyone else?

Who gets invited onto the committee?

Who is told, “You should really apply for this”?

Who gets introduced to someone influential?

Who receives the email that says, “I thought of you for this”?

Who gets another chance after making a mistake?

Who is considered “quirky but brilliant,” and who is simply considered difficult?

Who can skip the social event without consequence?

Who has to continually demonstrate that they belong?

The important organizational question is not whether every one of these decisions represents deliberate discrimination. That is too simplistic. The better question is whether repeated patterns of familiarity are concentrating information, relationships, opportunities, and eventually advancement among the same people.

If so, the organization has a design problem.

Ruha Benjamin and the Organizational Default Setting

This is where Ruha Benjamin's work gives us a particularly useful way to think.

Benjamin's scholarship asks us to examine systems that appear neutral but carry assumptions embedded in their design. Her work challenges us to interrogate the defaults we stop noticing because they have become ordinary. Benjamin is writing primarily about race, technology, and structural inequality, not specifically about committee membership or neurodivergence. But her conceptual question travels remarkably well into organizational life:

What have we built into the system and then forgotten was a choice?

Perhaps the default committee member is someone who enjoys meetings.

Perhaps the default emerging leader is socially visible.

Perhaps the default engaged employee speaks frequently.

Perhaps the default collaborator enjoys informal brainstorming.

Perhaps the default future manager attends optional social events.

Perhaps the default way to identify talent is for a leader to think:

Who do I know who would be good at this?

That last question deserves particular attention because “Who do I know?” is not the same question as “Who could do this?”

Nor is “Who do I enjoy working with?” the same question as “Who deserves the opportunity to grow?”

Once those habits become sufficiently familiar, we stop experiencing them as choices at all.

They become culture.

Appreciative Inquiry: What Works—and for Whom?

One response would be to focus entirely on what is wrong: Who is excluded? Who is ignored? Who has been passed over?

Those questions are necessary.

But Appreciative Inquiry offers something more useful than simply documenting failure. It encourages organizations to study the conditions under which people and systems function at their best and use those discoveries to create more of those conditions. Its familiar movement through Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny offers an especially useful framework here because the goal is not merely to stop excluding people. The goal is to build an organization in which more people can contribute and grow.

For this conversation, however, Appreciative Inquiry needs one additional question:

What works—and for whom?

Without that question, even a strengths-based process can reproduce the dominant culture.

Suppose we ask an organization to identify the characteristics of its most successful leaders. If everyone who reached leadership learned to communicate similarly, network similarly, participate socially, and navigate the institution in familiar ways, we might conclude that those behaviors caused their success.

In one sense, they did.

We created a system that rewarded them.

The more interesting Appreciative Inquiry question is:

When have people who thought, communicated, worked, or related differently made this organization better?

Now we are searching for possibility rather than replication.

Discovery: Notice the Person We Have Left Alone

Discovery should not only look for obvious organizational stars. It should also look toward the edges of the organization.

Who is doing excellent work quietly?

Who notices things other people miss?

Who produces thoughtful analysis after everyone else has stopped talking?

Who has improved a process without attracting much attention?

Who asks questions that initially seem inconvenient but ultimately make the work stronger?

Who works differently from the dominant culture and succeeds because of that difference rather than despite it?

And then ask something harder:

Who have we left alone?

Is there someone everyone agrees is talented but no one mentors?

Someone whose work is respected but who is rarely invited into institutional conversations?

Someone described as “private,” “different,” “hard to read,” “a little awkward,” or “not very social”?

Someone everyone assumes prefers to be left alone because nobody has actually asked?

Appreciative Inquiry allows us to approach that person differently.

Instead of beginning with, “How do we make this person fit better?” ask:

Under what circumstances have we seen this person at their best?

What were they doing?

What conditions allowed them to contribute?

Who were they working with?

How were expectations communicated?

What strengths became visible?

And how could we create more opportunities for those strengths to matter?

That is a solution-based conversation.

Dream: Imagine an Organization Where Opportunity Does Not Depend on Social Fluency

Imagine a workplace where participating in the informal social world is one way to build relationships, but not the only way.

The person who loves the water cooler should be able to enjoy it.

The person who does not should not have to stand beside it to have a career.

Imagine an organization where important information eventually moves through transparent channels rather than remaining confined to informal conversations. Where committee opportunities are visible. Where someone can express interest rather than waiting to be tapped. Where a quiet employee can be considered for a leadership project. Where a person who needs time to think can say, “I want to consider that and respond tomorrow,” without being interpreted as incapable.

Imagine also that when someone seems disconnected, the organizational response is not:

What do we do with them?

It becomes:

What would help this person participate in a way that works for them and for us?

That is a profoundly different question.

The first locates the problem in the person.

The second creates shared responsibility for designing the relationship.

Design: Change How People Get Into the Room

The practical solutions do not have to be complicated.

Do not attempt to eliminate informal relationships. That would be impossible and undesirable. Instead, make sure informal relationships are not the only pathways through which opportunity travels.

Advertise committee and project opportunities when possible rather than filling every opening through private invitation. Let employees express interest. Rotate desirable committee assignments rather than repeatedly turning to the same reliable people. Create simple criteria explaining how people are selected for high-visibility work. Track who receives stretch assignments, leadership opportunities, professional-development support, conference representation, mentoring, and cross-functional projects.

Then look at the names.

Who appears repeatedly?

Who never appears?

Who seems to be standing permanently outside the organizational water cooler?

Ask why.

Make the Informal Formal Enough to Be Fair

There is an important balance here. Nobody wants every hallway conversation recorded or every lunch invitation regulated. Informal life is part of being human.

But information that matters should not remain informal forever.

If an opportunity is discussed casually, make sure it is later shared more broadly. If a decision is shaped after a meeting, document what changed. If an employee is identified informally as having potential, create opportunities for others to demonstrate potential too.

Leaders can also become more deliberate about relationship building. Once a month, have coffee with someone outside your usual circle. Ask someone who rarely speaks during meetings for their thoughts afterward. Offer written ways to contribute. Check in with the employee you assume prefers being alone.

Do not begin by asking them to behave differently.

Begin with curiosity.

“What kinds of projects would you like to become involved in?”

“What are you interested in learning next?”

“Is there an institutional committee you would like exposure to?”

“What helps you contribute most effectively in meetings?”

“Are there opportunities you feel you have not had access to?”

These are small questions.

But they communicate something important:

I see you.

Sponsorship Should Not Depend on Chemistry

Mentoring and sponsorship deserve similar attention.

Leaders naturally mentor people they connect with. That is understandable. But if sponsorship relies entirely on chemistry, organizations risk reproducing themselves through generations of people who feel comforta