Introduction
René Carayol MBE remembers the exact time of day he stopped being himself. Seven thirty in the morning, at reception, on his way into the office. He would leave his personality there, the same way he'd pick it back up on the way home at half past six. He dressed differently, spoke differently, even laughed differently, because that was the price of getting on in a Britain that had not made space for the son of Gambian immigrants. Decades later, sitting down for Everyday Leadership, Carayol traces the line from that daily act of self-erasure to the boardrooms of Marks & Spencer and Pepsi, and lands on one conviction that runs through the entire conversation: nobody gets there alone, and the people who do get there owe something to the ones still trying to get through the door.
Leaving Yourself at Reception
Carayol's parents left Gambia for London in the 1960s, giving up middle class lives so their children could get a university education that didn't exist at home. What they found in London was a life savings that bought them the worst housing and, by extension, the worst schooling. Carayol describes the response as a "sacrifice culture": children who ran as fast as they could and jumped as high as they could, because their parents hadn't given them many other options.
That pressure shaped how he showed up at work. "I need it, I didn't want it, I need it," he says of the drive to get on. The need came from watching his parents become what he calls "prisoners of hope", people who had made an enormous bet on a new country and wouldn't know for years whether it had paid off. Succeeding wasn't a personal ambition. It was, in his words, "a far more important petrol."
Prisoners of Hope
The choice, as Carayol frames it, was stark: keep being who he was at home and go nowhere, or code switch and try to succeed. "It was black and white. You fitted in or you didn't." He's careful to separate his generation's experience from today's conversation about authenticity at work. Younger people who reject code switching, he says, have that choice only because of what his generation sacrificed. "We are nothing if we are our history. Please forgive me. We are our future. It's a future that counts."
The Mentor Who Changed Everything
The turning point in Carayol's career came when Pepsi offered him a board director role. He almost talked himself out of taking it. "I knew I wasn't the best merchandise. I hadn't been to the best university, I didn't have the best degree." He nearly refused a job he badly wanted because of how he'd been conditioned to see himself.
What changed everything was a chief executive named Larry, who introduced him to the board on his very first day. Carayol expected a brief, generic welcome. Instead, Larry spoke for several minutes without notes, working through Carayol's parents leaving Gambia for London, his schooling, his degree, and ten years of jobs in chronological order. "He'd memorised. He'd researched," Carayol says. "This was the first time in my life I felt wanted. Not needed." He calls the effect immediate: the impostor sitting next to him got "booted out the window." Colleagues nicknamed him Mission Impossible, because whatever Larry needed done, failure wasn't an option.
Larry and Carayol had almost nothing in common on paper, white, Protestant, Republican, West Coast American against a Black British son of Gambian immigrants. What they shared, Carayol says, was humanity and humility. Larry told him plainly: stop talking about what makes us different, embrace where we're the same. Carayol worked six days a week for three and a half years under him and says he would do it again without hesitation.
Game Changers Who Were Changed by the Game
Not every mentorship story in the episode ends well. Carayol recounts calling a senior BT executive's office to arrange a meeting, only to be told he wasn't in the client's top thirty accounts by revenue, so a meeting wasn't a priority. It stung, but he draws a distinction between that disappointment and something worse he witnessed later: a room of Black professionals he'd once held up as role models, who told him plainly they weren't. "We were told these were the game changers. What we found in actual fact, they're not the game changers. They were changed by the game." People who'd made it but wouldn't open doors, mentor, or take a risk on anyone coming up behind them.
Carayol's answer to that pattern is blunt: "It costs nothing for a cannon to light another cannon." Wanting to help the people coming up isn't automatic. It has to be chosen.
The Maths of Mentoring
Carayol cites research suggesting mentoring relationships accelerate careers for both sides, not just the mentee. He's spent much of his own career on both ends of that exchange, and says the bigger growth came from being the mentor, not from being mentored. Working with people from backgrounds entirely unlike his own forced him to change his own language, build spaces where people felt safe to speak up, and sharpen his emotional intelligence so he could read what wasn't being said. "It changed me as a leader. It made me so much better."
Building an Environment Where People Can Thrive
Whatever he'd had to leave at reception, Carayol resolved that nobody working for him would have to do the same. "No one who joins my team, I feel as though they couldn't flourish. I don't care what background, I don't care gender, faith." The line comes directly from lived experience: "No one ever understands or appreciates the power of inclusion until they've experienced exclusion. I'd lived the exclusion. No one working for me was going to be excluded again."
What Leadership Actually Is
Asked to define leadership, Carayol rejects the idea that it's a set of tasks, a job title, or a management qualification. "There's no university on the planet today that has a degree in leadership. It's all management." Leadership, in his framing, is the ability to influence and persuade people who don't want to do something, illustrated with a story about two colleagues organising the same work social a month apart, one poorly attended, one packed out, because the second person knew how to bring people along.
His clearest example is Nelson Mandela visiting a South African office Carayol happened to be working in. Mandela arrived, skipped the building, and spent the first several minutes talking to the cleaners, security staff and car park attendants in the courtyard, remembering their first names. He did the same on the way out. Weeks later, nobody in the building was talking about what happened in the two hour meeting inside. They were talking about the fact that Mandela remembered the courtyard staff by name. "That is leadership."
Fighting the Right Battles
The conversation closes on where Carayol is putting his energy now: a book about race in the UK, written deliberately as an optimistic one, after publishers pushed him toward something angrier. He describes Brexit as a coded expression of hostility to difference, and argues that some fights are beneath the people capable of winning bigger ones. His closing advice, aimed squarely at listeners: find a mentor, and go be one. "Both grow."
