The Pursuit of Happyness
Les Miserables
Good Will Hunting
My Fair Lady
Every John Hughes movie
Parasite
Nomadland
Triangle of Sadness
Crazy Rich Asians
Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
Literature and Hollywood can’t stop talking about class…
…While it seems HR departments and business leaders don’t know how to start.
Yet ignoring socioeconomic status (SES) as an element of what makes a person who they are, especially if you are a leader, costs.
The challenges surrounding this topic are real. Many societies don’t openly acknowledge that class still exists, while others admit it does, but staunchly believe in class mobility (more of a myth than we think, by the way). It’s no wonder, in an age of having controlled for nearly every DEI variable we can think of, we might convince ourselves that the doors are open to at least upper-middle class for all. And why stop there? Why can’t you be the next Oprah Winfrey or Lamine Yamal or Jan Koum? For one thing, factors like race, gender or disability, for example, enjoy certain protections in most countries. Companies find themselves forced to address them and we have the quotas, programs and slogans to prove it. Social origin awareness, while on the radar in some places, including the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, doesn’t have the same teeth to press companies into action.
Even if it did, how awkward. Collecting such sensitive personal data about employees is complicated and depending on where a company operates, it may face legal or cultural constraints. We’re left to make assumptions from the information we can glean on our own, which isn’t reliable. Or is it? Research indicates that people can judge each other’s social class with above-chance accuracy using a simple Facebook photo or from just seven spoken words. That means we’re actually pretty good at it.
Much of that research, though, was Americans identifying other Americans, so we shouldn’t judge too confidently, especially the more diverse a group becomes. Our own familiar indicators may not translate well. Leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chinese authorities mounted a campaign to educate their citizens out of spitting on the street – perfectly acceptable in China, but seen as rude and low class in many other countries. The comedian Trevor Noah has discussed how the kind of insults Americans unleash on overweight people were reserved for the too-thin during his childhood in South Africa. Interestingly, both being overweight and underweight are associated with poverty and lower social class in the respective countries. How about eating with your hands? Uncouth or ancient Ayurvedic wisdom?
Another potential reason we don’t reach 100% status recognition accuracy could be that social mobility does happen, in both directions, even if it’s less common than we hope. The cues we read from a person who has learned to perform their current class say nothing about where they came from, what shaped them or what class they feel they belong to. Since 1990’s Pretty Woman, we all know which fork to use for which course. We could perform privileged, but would the performance synch with our internal sense of self?
Who we are on the inside matters. The lessons we absorb as children sit deep and can become mental models. This applies to both national culture and SES. Research shows (and I am not an expert in this, so take these as statistical tendencies and read up on it here, here or here) certain attitudes and behaviors associated with upper and lower classes. In short, the further up the class structure, the more you expect your efforts to influence situations, the more you attribute your own success to those efforts, the more comfortable you are going your own way and deciding things autonomously. You’re also less adept at reading the room or other people. Conversely, individuals with a lower class background prefer to check in with others and find the popular choice before making decisions; they feel safer with explicit instructions versus open-ended autonomy, read the emotional states of others well as a part of interconnected community and also credit that community more for any success they enjoy.
Crucially, individuals from lower SES have not had access to the same opportunities as upper class, lack the informal education that teaches them how to navigate certain (professional) situations and have not inherited the relevant networks. The mental model a person runs will determine how they respond to that disadvantage. Do they believe they can change it and dare to go their own way to get their needs met? Do they search for a community to slot into which will lift them up, have their back? Do they speak up at all?
In that way, class upbringing creates norms and values for a person in the same way national culture does. Those cannot simply be sloughed off because the person’s current role has placed them in a new social class. Regardless of which direction a person has moved – up or down – they may experience something akin to culture shock: disorientation, struggling to find the way forward when all the systems and signals are unfamiliar, feeling left out and wondering how to change that. In the case of moving between national cultures, we expect culture shock and (hopefully) have some grace for people we recognize are still adjusting. There’s a huge body of literature and plenty of coaches to help leaders learn how to deal with other national cultures. But again, we rarely have this data for our employees concerning socioeconomic class and there aren’t protocols for how to address it.
Leaders have no script. That means the familiar advice we’ve heard so many times that it feels empty is not only the only solution we have left, but also the only one that would work anyway: People-first leadership.
Progress Together, a body in the UK focusing on socioeconomic diversity in the financial services sector recently put out a report which includes some real, concrete practices. We can’t say, ‘Leaders, be attentive to your employees’ and expect the gaps to close without any guidance on what ‘people first’ means in this case. The report details the effectiveness of:
• storytelling, highlighting non-traditional career paths and thereby educating the workforce about what is possible
• reverse mentorship, where leaders sit at the feet of junior partners to learn about how things look from their perspective
• practices aimed at early-career interventions, helping employees get on track early on instead of trying to play catch up later
• initiatives like leadership listening sessions and training managers to recognize potential more than polish, which are especially useful where data is scarce.
Overall, the report concludes that socioeconomic diversity treated as a fairness issue was less effective than framing it as that which it is: a matter of productivity and competitive ability. Secondly, building socioeconomic diversity into many parts of business processes and metrics correlated with progress on this point. And finally, the report also notes that employees calibrate disclosure about their backgrounds based on the leaders’ behavior. If that’s not a convincing argument for people-first leadership, what is?
As Brené Brown, Adam Grant and Simon Sinek summarized it during this discussion at Brilliant Minds 2026 in Stockholm, they each believe care for and connection with the people you lead is required, but elite leaders go beyond that, to deep appreciation and deep loving relationship for the people you lead. Now that’s people first.
Comments are closed