This summer, my family and I travelled through Piedmont and Liguria: from Alba’s rolling vineyards to Genoa’s busy port. Somewhere between wine tastings and gelato, I ended up looking for traces of my maiden name: Ballo.
In Alba, I spotted it on a glass door: Scuole di Ballo, a dance school. In Italian, ballo means “dance.” Later, in Genoa, the same word appeared again, 60 times, but this time on a computer screen at the Maritime Museum (Galata Museo del Mare). There, the database listed emigrants named Ballo who had departed Genoa for the Americas more than a century ago.
Names are not the whole story
Standing in Genoa, I wondered if those emigrants were my ancestors. But history complicates the story. In the Philippines, surnames like mine were often assigned in 1849 under the Clavería decree, which distributed 60,000 names from a catalogue. That means a Ballo in Italy might be a relative, or just a coincidence.
It’s the same with leadership. A name, a title, or a label never tells the whole story. Assumptions flatten people; curiosity restores them.
And research shows how costly those assumptions can be. Studies in multiple countries have found that job applicants are less likely to be called for interviews if their surnames signal an ethnic minority background. In the United States, résumés with African American–sounding names receive about 50% fewer callbacks than identical résumés with White-sounding names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004). Across Europe, field experiments reveal the same trend: applicants with “foreign-sounding” surnames are consistently disadvantaged in hiring (Quillian et al., 2019). Even in multicultural contexts like Canada and Australia, non-Anglo surnames reduce the chances of advancing past the first recruitment stage.
This tells us something vital for inclusive leadership: a name can open or close doors before someone even steps into the room. Leaders who are aware of these biases can intervene by making recruitment processes more equitable, blind to irrelevant signals, and focused on actual skills.
Identity as strength
Should we be afraid of our “foreign-sounding” identity? While it can be a site for bias, it is also a source of strength. As America Ferrera powerfully puts it in her TED Talk “My identity is my superpower” (2019), we thrive when we stop shrinking ourselves to fit stereotypes and instead bring our full identities into the room. For inclusive leaders, the task is to recognise that every person’s story, like every surname, carries both history and possibility, and to create spaces where those identities can flourish.
Leadership as a dance
Seeing Ballo on the Alba dance school offered a metaphor:
Leadership is like a dance. It’s not about pulling people into line, but about moving in rhythm together.
Every dancer has a style. Teams thrive when diverse steps are welcomed and woven into the choreography.
Dance requires listening. Just as no one person owns the floor, inclusive leaders create shared space where everyone belongs.
From archives to the dance floor
In Genoa, Ballo showed up in migration records, tracing people leaving Italy for the Americas. In Alba, Ballo was on a dance school door, reminding me that belonging isn’t only about where we come from, but how we move together.
In other words
Ballo taught me that identity is not fixed; it moves. In Genoa, it appeared in migration records. In Alba, it was the name on a dance school door. Identity doesn’t sit still: it travels, it changes context, and it takes on new meaning depending on who is looking.
For inclusive leaders, that is the challenge and the opportunity. We cannot assume that a name, a label, or a title tells the full story. Instead, we must listen, stay curious, and create the conditions where each person can bring their whole, shifting self into the room.#
References
- Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991–1013.
- Quillian, L., Heath, A., Pager, D., Midtbøen, A. H., Fleischmann, F., & Hexel, O. (2019). Do some countries discriminate more than others? Evidence from 97 field experiments of racial discrimination in hiring. Sociological Science, 6, 467–496.
- Ferrera, A. (2019, April). My identity is my superpower — not an obstacle [Video]. TED Conferences.
