Leading under the microscope: Clarity, accountability, and authenticity in LGBTQ+ leadership

https://youtu.be/IzhzXnUOJQQ

 

Leading with integrity under pressure: lessons from Lauren Stoner’s time at Mermaids

In a candid and deeply personal session hosted by Claire Ebrey of Pride in Leadership, Lauren Stoner – former CEO of Mermaids – shared her experiences of leading one of the UK’s most high-profile LGBTQ+ charities through a statutory inquiry, intense media scrutiny and sustained public hostility. The conversation offered invaluable insights for LGBTQ+ leaders and aspiring leaders on resilience, values-driven leadership and the unique pressures of leading while queer.

Finding leadership through queerness

Lauren’s path into charity leadership was not a planned one. After graduating in Aberdeen during the aftermath of the 2008 recession, she took an admin role at a charity, discovered a talent for writing and bid development, and steadily climbed into senior positions. But she was clear that her queerness has always been central to her leadership practice, not incidental to it.

“My queerness is what has always given me the courage to stand up for things that don’t feel right, for things that feel challenging,” she said. “It’s always given me that sort of core backbone to say, actually, I think we can do this differently.”

This is a powerful reframe for LGBTQ+ professionals at any stage of their career: queerness is not something to work around in leadership – it can be the very thing that sharpens your instincts and your courage.

Lauren encouraged attendees to reflect on what their own LGBTQ+ identity brings to their leadership practice, noting it was something she herself had not fully considered until preparing for this talk.

The weight of being “the representative”

Before joining Mermaids, Lauren led organisations outside the LGBT+ sector, including a sexual violence charity in Derbyshire. It was there that she first felt what she described as “that double weight of organisational responsibility and identity” – the burden that falls on LGBTQ+ leaders who become the sole representative of their community in their workplace.

“We are seen as the representative. If we are the queer person, the trans person in our organisations, that can feel like an incredibly heavy weight to hold.”

She also spoke about the compounding effect of holding multiple marginalised identities at once: “I was queer and young and female in a space where many of the leaders were older, were women who really disagreed with the concept of queerness, or were men.” Being the “and” – queer and young and female – can be a triple-edged sword, she noted, but also something leaders can learn to lean into.

Stepping into Mermaids: leading through crisis

Lauren joined Mermaids on 14 December 2022, just two weeks after the charity had been thrust into the national spotlight over governance concerns and a statutory inquiry had been launched by the Charity Commission. In the short window between her appointment and her start date, a critical EDI report had been leaked to the press, and the organisation was under enormous strain.

She walked into a team of around 40 staff, most of whom were cisgender, with a disproportionate concentration of trans staff in junior and frontline roles. Those frontline workers were bearing the worst of the public backlash – receiving hate crime-level abuse on the helpline.

“We reported something like 10 or 12 hate crimes in the space of the two weeks before I started,” Lauren recalled. “People felt entitled to call an organisation and call mostly young, mostly trans frontline staffers terrible names and pedophiles and child abusers and everything, all the terrible things you can imagine.”

The charity took the decision to temporarily close its helpline and remove volunteers from the service while new protective processes were put in place.

Lauren did not take the role expecting it to be easy. “I took this role because I thought that the skills I’ve gained in governance, in leadership, in managing crisis in other organisations and other completely different sectors would enable me to lead this organisation through what at that point we were told would be maybe a six to nine month inquiry.” The inquiry ultimately took nearly two years.

Leading under regulatory scrutiny

One of the most striking parts of Lauren’s account was her description of what it actually means to lead an organisation through a statutory inquiry – something rarely discussed openly in the charity sector.

When under inquiry, the constraints are severe. Lauren explained that she could not share details of conversations with the Charity Commission with the vast majority of her staff. Only a tiny group – trustees, the leadership team and lawyers – were permitted to know what was happening. Even the communications lead was excluded.

“All you can say is, we met with them, we’ve got another meeting with them in a few months. Or, we met with them, we’re not sure what the next steps are. That’s incredibly difficult.”

The human cost was significant. Roughly 10% of staff resigned between late November and the end of January, most of them trans employees who could no longer sustain working in an environment where their identity was politicised alongside their work every single day.

The financial impact was equally stark. Income dropped 48% in the first year of the inquiry. Grant funding and corporate partnerships ground to a halt. The charity could not appoint new auditors, communicate freely with funders, or negotiate insurance premiums because the Commission’s report – which ultimately made no regulatory requirements and confirmed all recommendations had already been acted upon – sat unpublished for five months after they received the draft.

“We knew there was no action being taken in May and the report wasn’t published till the very end of October,” Lauren said. “We had something like £200,000 of funding that had been paused that we were just sitting on.”

Building foundations while weathering the storm

Despite these constraints, Lauren’s approach was to focus on what she could control: strengthening organisational foundations. She commissioned NCVO to conduct a governance review, brought in external consultants to follow up on the EDI audit, and worked with staff and trustees to establish clear strategic priorities.

“Organisational foundations are the absolute bedrock of keeping your organisation out of trouble and getting it out of trouble once it gets into it,” she said. “That’s the really unsexy side of organisational design and delivery and of leadership. We don’t think about policies and procedures until they break.”

One of the earliest and most impactful decisions was made just two weeks in, when her head of communications asked whether they could stop reacting to every press query about anything trans-related. Lauren agreed immediately, and the charity shifted from reactive media engagement to proactive, youth-led communications.

“That was probably the biggest decision that I made in that organisation,” she reflected. “We could stop reacting and we could start being really proactive about the ways that we wanted to work and the people that we wanted to speak to.”

Letting young people lead the way

A golden thread through Lauren’s leadership at Mermaids was the decision to centre youth voice. In early 2023, the charity consulted with the young people it served and asked what they wanted Mermaids to speak about. The answer became the organisation’s guiding star: health, education, changes to the Equality Act and matters directly relevant to trans young people’s lives.

This meant Mermaids did not weigh in on every trans-related news story or international development. “What we didn’t talk about was the latest case, the latest bathroom ban in the States. We didn’t talk about Trump coming into power again, because it wasn’t relevant to the work that we did and it wasn’t relevant to what our young people wanted us to talk about.”

This approach also gave Lauren a clear framework for managing internal pressure from staff who wanted the organisation to speak out on a wider range of issues. “The reason was that it wasn’t what young people said we should be talking about. And that made that really easy.”

Passion versus compassion

Lauren spoke powerfully about a distinction the organisation developed between passion and compassion – a concept that emerged from a whole-staff day and became one of Mermaids’ core values.

“Many of us in the charity sector, many of us as LGBTQ+ leaders, are really passionate about the work that we do and really passionate about the intersection with our own identities. But that sometimes means that we find it really difficult to hold boundaries. We find it really difficult to say no.”

This, she argued, creates a vicious cycle of burnout, vicarious trauma and people leaving the sector entirely rather than taking a step back. Compassion, as Mermaids defined it, meant recognising the need for care towards oneself, one’s colleagues and the people the organisation exists to serve.

Resilience: no quick fixes

Lauren was refreshingly honest about resilience, pushing back against the idea that there is a simple formula for sustaining yourself as a leader.

“I would love to say that there is one simple tip or a list of TikTok slides that will tell you how to boost resilience and model sustainability in leadership. I’m afraid there isn’t. And if anyone tells you there is, they are talking absolute nonsense.”

Instead, she offered three practical pillars that worked for her:

Model good practices visibly. Lauren stressed the importance of leaders demonstrating healthy boundaries. “The schedule send button is always your friend, because nobody needs to see an email from the chief exec at two o’clock in the morning. Just send it in the morning.”

Build an inner circle of trusted peers. Having a coach was vital to Lauren’s ability to sustain herself through the inquiry. Equally important was her network of peers across the charity sector and beyond – particularly other LGBTQ+ leaders. “The LGBTQ+ leaders I’ve developed the strongest relationships with are some of my strongest allies, my peers, my confidants. They are people who I will still pick up the phone to a couple of times a week.”

Separate your identity from your role. This was perhaps Lauren’s most emphatic point. Even when your identity is deeply intertwined with the mission of your organisation, you must be able to step away and be yourself outside of work. “I couldn’t have done what I did at Mermaids without being able to step away and be Lauren.”

She spoke movingly about planning her wedding in six weeks following the Supreme Court ruling, recognising that she might have gained and lost the right to marry her (trans) wife as her wife within her own adult lifetime – all while leading Mermaids through one of the most challenging periods in its history.

On trans inclusion: practical steps matter

In response to a question about what organisations can do to support trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people, Lauren was characteristically practical. Staff networks and reference groups are a start, she said, but they need real power: executive sponsorship, a budget and the ability to recommend meaningful change.

“My next question is always, okay, and what have you changed as a result?”

She pointed to her current organisation, Nourish Hub, as an example of how simple, practical decisions can make a difference: “We only have all-gender toilets because that’s the way that our building works. At one point they had some signs on them and some said men and some said women and we went, you know what, we can just take all of those away.”

On the broader political climate, particularly within the NHS, Lauren was clear-eyed. “That transphobic behaviour and language is something that we are going to have to continue to campaign against.” She urged cisgender allies to step up: “We should not be making trans voices make all of the noise.”

Key takeaways for LGBT+ leaders and aspiring leaders

1. Your queerness is a leadership strength. It builds courage, empathy and the instinct to challenge the status quo. Reflect on what your identity brings to your leadership practice.
2. Organisational foundations are everything. Governance, policies, procedures – the “boring” stuff is what keeps organisations resilient when pressure hits. Invest in it before things break.
3. Centre the voices of those you serve. Whether that is young people, service users or your community, letting their priorities guide your strategy provides clarity and integrity under pressure.
4. Know the difference between passion and compassion. Passion drives us into the work; compassion – including self-compassion – is what keeps us in it sustainably.
5. Model the resilience you want to see. Schedule send your emails. Take your leave. Show your team that boundaries are not just permitted but expected.
6. Build your circle before you need it. Invest in peer relationships, find a coach or mentor, and nurture connections with other LGBT+ leaders who understand the specific pressures you face.
7. You are not your role. However personally meaningful the mission, you must be able to step away and be yourself. Done is better than perfect, and good enough is good enough.
8. Choose long-term integrity over short-term comfort. There will be moments when the noise is overwhelming and the easy option is to compromise. Hold your course.
9. Trans inclusion does not have to be complicated. Practical, visible steps – all-gender toilets, inclusive language, executive-sponsored networks with real influence – make a tangible difference.
10. Cis allies must show up. In the current political climate, cisgender colleagues and leaders have a particular responsibility to speak up for trans rights and not leave trans people to carry the burden alone.