The exclusion costing you talent is not in the handbook. Here is how to see it before it spreads.
Your policies say the right things. Nobody in your organization has been told a promotion is off limits because of who they are. And yet, in a study of more than 3,500 new parents for the UK Government Equalities Office, 26 percent of fathers were promoted or moved to a better job within five years of becoming parents. For mothers the figure was 13 percent. The rules were the same for both, the practice not so much. The trend, Borzini says, is similar across the world, with few notable exceptions.
Elisabetta Borzini has spent four years looking at the gap between what an organization writes down and what happens to its people, first as a safeguarding investigator and now as the founder of Maloza Consulting, a women-led organizational development firm. She calls that gap submerged exclusion, and her point is that most leaders cannot see it because nothing about it looks like overt exclusion.
Here is how it works, why “I doubt it would happen here” should raise your antennas, and what a process that finds it looks like.
From the Diary of Elisabetta Borzini
Elisabetta Borzini is a Madrid-based organizational development consultant and the Founder and Director of Maloza Consulting. Maloza supports organizations, through change management and a participatory, people-centered coaching approach, in creating a safer, healthier and more inclusive environment for all. She spent 15 years in the international development sector across Africa, Asia and Europe, including four years as a global inclusion and safeguarding adviser, and now guest lectures on NGO fundraising at Hochschule Osnabrück. “We tell our clients that we want them to remember us not because they see us all the time, but because they don’t see us again.”
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The no that arrives dressed as a yes
Borzini’s first example travels across every culture. She calls it the Cinderella effect. “In the famous Disney movie, Cinderella, heavily bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters, is never forcibly prevented from going to the ball, but her freedom to go is subject to the completion of a list of tasks that are incompatible with a day of work,” she says. “It’s not a ‘no’ but it’s a no masked as a yes.”
In many workplaces this is the norm. You can be promoted if you meet expectations and go above and beyond, displaying proactiveness and leadership. Often, that proactiveness or leadership is simply the willingness to pick up extra work from colleagues who cannot deliver.
Look at who can afford to say yes to that.
“The submerged exclusion here targets all those people whose lives don’t allow them to be ‘proactive’: single parents, people with disabilities, people caring for elderly relatives, people whose financial conditions require they live far from the office or are dependent on public transport, people who can’t afford to work from home,” Borzini says. The old kind, which she calls emerged exclusion, is easy to name and often illegal. “But in the Cinderella-effect, the submerged exclusion is implicit: opportunities are granted to those who naturally conform or can afford to conform.”
The numbers follow the pattern. The recruiter Robert Walters found that professionals with a disability in North America are 23 percent more likely to be stuck in junior or entry-level roles than colleagues without one. Nobody wrote a rule producing that result. It is what the unwritten rules produce.
“I doubt it would happen here”
In 2020 the State of California sued Cisco Systems and two of its former managers over the treatment of a Dalit engineer, born into the lowest tier of India’s caste system. What made the case explosive, Borzini says, was the discovery underneath it: no US federal law named caste as a protected characteristic, and the company’s own investigation had concluded caste discrimination was not unlawful. For her, the case shows how ignorance of how far caste segregation and discrimination extend can let an organization enable it. Similar cases, she says, followed across Big Tech.
“At Maloza we bring up this case a lot, because it’s such a perfect example of how harm and exclusion can be perpetrated and perpetuated due to bias, ignorance and lack of curiosity. We work with managers and leaders to learn new ways and create new cultures where the possibility of exclusion and harm is always considered. When leaders tell me ‘I doubt it would happen here’ my antennas get raised: because the disbelief that something negative could happen in one’s own surroundings is exactly what prevents them from seeing it when it does.”
She recognizes that reflex from her years investigating sexual misconduct reports. “I know from experience that people who are not experiencing something are less likely to consider its existence and its magnitude,” she says. “It’s (also) a defence mechanism.” Men are less likely to believe harassment reports because they experience harassment less. Those who consider caste a thing of the past often assume migration trumps culture, and that people from the same country will stick together rather than antagonize each other over a structure that does not exist in their host country.
Keeping a culture alive, she argues, is not only about its beautiful and poetic parts. Within privileged groups the caste system creates a sense of identity, order and privilege, so it is not hard to understand why those in a higher position fight to maintain it even after they move abroad. “What we find fascinating in our work is to see how people who think something like the caste system is outdated and wrong, often perpetuate other forms of discrimination that are more ‘accepted’ within their own culture, e.g. towards people coming from different regions of their own country, assuming people with an accent are uneducated, etc.”
The same blindness shapes buildings: a breastfeeding room but no crèche, a wheelchair-wide bathroom but nowhere private to change a stoma bag, no quiet room for anyone who gets overstimulated. “Workplaces that don’t factor in diversity by design, are workplaces that will never meet employees’ needs,” she says. People who overcome obstacles every day are a goldmine for critical thinking and problem solving, and a company that believes catering for their needs is too complicated gives up that knowledge.
Ask all the questions
Maloza’s method starts before the engagement is scoped. Every client gets an identity scan: an anonymous survey open to all staff, key informant interviews across levels, and focus group discussions, triangulated into a picture leaders usually do not have. The scan is never charged. The reason is not generosity.
“We use this approach because we believe that when change falls from the sky and people aren’t given the chance to understand what led to it or to propose alternatives and see them adopted (or rejected, but with a solid reason), the social contract between employer and employee starts collapsing. It may not be sudden, but when trust begins being eroded, it’s very hard to revert the trend. We tell our clients that we want them to remember us not because they see us all the time, but because they don’t see us again.”
“I don’t want to tie you to me, because every year we’ll have to come back and fix something,” she says. The scan lets her team judge independently whether what a client asked for is what the client needs, and whether the fix will hold.
Take a Code of Conduct. Many organizations need one for a grant or a registration, and often that is all it is. Borzini’s first meeting is always about why. “If the reason for drafting a Code of Conduct is simply to meet the requirement for a grant/loan, registration, endorsement, etc. AI does a much faster job and at virtually no cost,” she says. Maloza takes the work when the document is going to do something: what it should focus on given the scan, what mechanisms make it operational, what sanctions apply, and who will be trained as its custodians.
She has made a choice not to work on cosmetic changes. That is the test for whether you need her.
The company nobody was leaving
One recent client came to Maloza with a puzzle: productivity was low, but almost nobody was leaving. The identity scan explained both halves. “The company maintained a good position on the market as the salaries were between Q2 and Q3 and the work-life balance was hard to beat. So, no one has an incentive to leave,” Borzini says. “But a new C-suite member, who was hired to lead the culture evolution journey, came in aggressively with their own ideas, and very little patience to listen to people who had been in the company for a long time.”
The new leader’s strategy was not inherently bad, she says, but the approach disconnected people from the company. “People felt they had gone from being valued for their ideas to being rewarded for their output, and so they gave up on trying to innovate or explain why certain processes worked well even if perhaps they appeared outdated.” The more disengagement the leader saw, the more cosmetic fixes arrived, weekly office drinks and a yoga class among them, while important decisions were made behind closed doors. The engagement took a long time, because it needed a culture shift inside an already running culture program, “but it was necessary to ensure that ultimately the leadership maintained the influence needed to lead and grow.”
What a coffee machine costs
Clients ask why Maloza asks so many questions. The questions are where the numbers come from.
“You’d be surprised at how many leaders cannot quantify the monetary cost of a two-months burnout leave,” Borzini says. The salary is the smallest part. There is overtime for whoever picked up the work, lost motivation among colleagues who are never told what is happening, leading to a dip in productivity and potentially other resignations, and reintegration or recruitment, “which many people believe is integrated into HR, but can actually be a mosaic of other costs.”
Her favorite illustration is small on purpose. At one client, disgruntled employees mentioned that the coffee machine was always unstocked, so they either walked outside, paid for coffee with their own money and lost working time before meetings, or went straight into meetings without a coffee. Nobody leaves a job over a coffee machine. But the message, in her words, is “your well-being is secondary to us, and your time not valuable.” The thought put into small things, she argues, predicts the dedication an organization gets back.
Why Elisabetta
Borzini did not start in human resources. She trained in transport economics, spent 15 years in international development across three continents, and moved into inclusion and safeguarding, where for four years her job was to find out what had really happened when someone said something had gone wrong. Over the past years she has conducted more than 50 investigations and developed reporting mechanisms rolled out in multiple countries.
She also knows what it costs to speak up without cover. Early in her career she worked alongside a senior, well-connected colleague who regularly made sexist jokes and inappropriate remarks about the people of the host country. “I was young, and when I gathered all the courage I could muster to report them, I was told that that would likely be the end of my career, so I gave up and left soon afterward,” she says. She does not regret choosing herself over what many would call the greater good, “because it gave me the tangible taste of what it feels like to make a decision from a place of privilege versus from a place of vulnerability.”
At Maloza, the homework she gives every client is what she calls a privilege scan: where does your psychological safety come from? Financial security, other opportunities, a skillset the employer cannot do without, position, gender, age, sexual orientation or expression. “We all have privilege, and it’s contextual: knowing that should help us define the boundaries of our psychological safety and those of other people, who may be in a vastly different situation.”
She founded Maloza in 2025 with a second purpose: a paid, enabling space for young people from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America to learn and work in DEI, safeguarding and coaching. A former colleague describes her as “very skilled in creating an inclusive environment and making meaningful exchange.”
The connection between the investigator and the consultant is the one she draws herself.
“I brought into Maloza the same mindset: we can’t prepare for what we can’t imagine. And I’m not naive to the fact that, despite education and open mindedness, no human can possibly think or imagine every threat and every obstacle. That’s why diversity is so crucial for me, within my team and as I promote change acceptance with my clients, because every person brings in a different perspective if we give them the space and safety to express it.”
The basic work, she adds, can be done by anyone. It can only be done exceptionally “by those who enjoy remaining curious and are able to know the limits of their imagination and identify who can be brought on board to expand them.”
Where Elisabetta Is Now
Borzini works from Madrid. Maloza’s tagline is “Shifting narratives. Elevating voices. Reframing impact.” and its work covers change management, leadership development, onboarding design, executive coaching and training for HR and People and Culture teams. Outside the firm she coaches people through career transitions, especially those living outside their country of origin, and teaches fundraising to master’s students in Germany.
She is direct about what she wants next. “What I hope this article can do in the next 12 months is increase the visibility of the company and its products, and spark curiosity among people who can sense there’s a missing piece in their strategy but can’t quite identify it,” she says. “That’s our job.”
The Elisabetta Borzini Playbook: finding the no inside the yes
- Read the conditions, not the policy. A promotion that requires “proactiveness” is only open to people whose lives can afford it.
- Treat “it wouldn’t happen here” as a signal. Disbelief is the thing that stops you seeing harm when it does happen.
- Scan before you scope. Survey everyone, interview across levels, run focus groups, then decide what the organization actually needs.
- Refuse cosmetic changes. Change is hard, and it is imperative to avoid people feeling like they are going through a constant restructuring. A leader must be able to share a vision and an implementation roadmap, which can be slow to enable change absorption, but it needs to be clear.
- Put a number on the small things. Cost out a burnout leave in full, and notice what an unstocked coffee machine tells your people.
Elisabetta Borzini leads Maloza Consulting at maloza.org. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
