Introduction
Abi Adamson had hired seventy percent of the people in her company's office. She had improved staff retention by 230 percent. And when it came time to interview managing director candidates for the company's New York office, her CEO sent the manager she had personally hired instead of her. Of every difficult experience in a career that includes plenty of overt racism, this is the one Abi still names as the moment that hurt most, because it wasn't loud. It was just quietly, thoroughly invisible.
From starving artist to organisational change-maker
Abi's first career was in film, chasing a childhood dream of becoming the next Steven Spielberg. What she found instead, working as a runner and intern at production houses, was an industry that exploited the fact everyone wanted in badly enough to accept poverty wages for it. By twenty five, doing twelve hour days for barely any pay, she made a deliberate decision to leave rather than romanticise the struggling artist path any further.
That decision led her into HR, drawn by a simple idea: making people's working lives a little easier. She studied for her CIPD qualification and joined an organisation where, over several years, she rebuilt the hiring process from the ground up. At her peak there, looking out across an open-plan office, she realised she had personally hired seventy percent of the people in the room.
The confrontation that changed a company's hiring
Abi didn't get there by being quiet. She recalls telling her CEO directly to stop describing the company as committed to diversity and inclusion while every single intern the business had ever hired came from her own children's forty-thousand-pound-a-year private school, children of MPs, judges and hedge fund managers who, in her words, would land on their feet regardless because society had already arranged it that way. She asked to take over hiring outright, and the CEO agreed.
What followed was years of visible, measurable change: think pieces on diversifying organisations, a complete overhaul of recruitment practices, and a demographic shift the entire office could see. She built genuine trust with candidates by being transparent about what she was trying to build, and for years, it worked.
The moment that hurt more than the overt racism
The rupture came when the company was hiring for its New York office. Rather than sending Abi, the person who had built the company's entire hiring reputation, the CEO sent her own direct manager, someone Abi had hired into the business herself. Around the same time, a candidate she'd championed for a UK managing director role was overruled in favour of another candidate, who lasted six weeks before the CEO emailed to admit they should have listened to her. She didn't reply.
Abi is explicit that despite experiencing outright racism and microaggressions throughout her career, this particular moment remains her most painful, precisely because of how casually it was delivered. When she finally asked the CEO directly why he hadn't sent her, his answer was that she "wouldn't have been able to get that person over the line." She said nothing in the moment, deliberately, aware that any visible reaction would be read through the lens of the angry Black woman stereotype rather than as a reasonable response to being overlooked. Two weeks later, she resigned.
Choosing peace over a lawsuit
Abi's next two roles were markedly worse, including one she left after just nine weeks, marked by outright racism rather than subtler exclusion. Friends and family encouraged her to pursue legal action, telling her she had an easy case. She chose not to, concluding that months of legal proceedings, and the elevated stress and health cost that would come with it, weren't worth a payout from an organisation she had already decided to walk away from. She kept every email, every message, not necessarily to use them, but as a record for herself of what had actually happened.
What followed was eight months without work, compounded by the onset of the pandemic. She's candid that this period tested her seriously, and that a friend physically getting her out of bed, reminding her plainly of what she'd already achieved, was part of what pulled her back from a genuinely low point.
The video that changed her life overnight
On the 6th of June 2020, Abi posted an eight-minute video on LinkedIn describing what it had actually been like navigating the workplace as a Black woman, including an incident where a white manager stood over her desk and accused her, while she sat calmly, of being aggressive. She expected perhaps a hundred people, out of roughly two thousand connections, to watch it.
By the next morning she had over twenty thousand views, hundreds of notifications, and around a hundred and fifty direct messages, twenty five of them job offers, some explicitly telling her she didn't even need to interview. That single video became the direct route into the consulting career that has since taken her to work with organisations including Spotify, Google, Sony Music and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Nepotism, honesty, and pulling the ladder down
Abi offers a deliberately provocative take on nepotism: she doesn't think it can or will disappear, and admits she'd use her own connections to help her future children the same way any parent might. What actually troubles her isn't the advantage itself, it's the dishonesty that often accompanies it, colleagues who quietly omit that a parent's investment or connection secured them a role, rather than simply owning it. She's equally critical of a different pattern she's observed among some Black and Brown professionals: gatekeeping success by insisting others must struggle exactly as they did, rather than actively working to make the path easier for those coming behind them. Her own approach, she says, is to pull the ladder down toward the people climbing after her, not to guard the position she fought hard to reach.
Learning to own her own wins
Despite an impressive client list, Abi is candid that she rarely discusses her own successes publicly, and is currently working with a coach on the imposter syndrome she traces directly back to the New York experience. Friends have pointed out that she'll post extensively about anti-racism and systemic issues, but rarely mentions the household names she's actually worked with. She describes actively learning to "humble brag," treating public acknowledgement of her own achievements as a skill she has to practise rather than one that comes naturally after being so thoroughly overlooked once before.
What she's actually proud of, and how she defines leadership
Asked what she's most proud of, Abi doesn't point to client logos. She points to direct messages from people, often women of colour, telling her that her training measurably reduced microaggressions in their workplace, made promotion processes more transparent, or improved internal communication. That tangible, embedded change, rather than a one-off workshop, is what she considers the actual measure of success in her work.
Asked to define leadership, she keeps it grounded: the capacity to look inward, be genuinely self-reflective, allow yourself to be vulnerable, and communicate with authenticity and transparency, saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
