Ready to Be a Thought Leader: How to Increase Your Influence, Impact, and Success by Denise Brosseau

Author:Denise Brosseau [Brosseau, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-12-12T14:00:00+00:00

Case Study: Zoe Dunning

When Commander Zoe Dunning joined the U.S. Navy, she was seventeen years old. Her class at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis was one of the first to include women. She selected the Naval Academy because it stood for honor, integrity, and service and she felt their honor code was consistent with her own. When she entered the academy, she told me she would have “identified myself as asexual,” but once she was there, she came to realize she was a lesbian. She also quickly grasped that she needed to hide that fact, as she watched other suspected lesbian midshipmen investigated and discharged.

Dunning found herself in a situation where she “had to lie in order to maintain a relationship with the organization” she had joined. But she “so badly wanted to serve [her] country, [she] was willing to pay the price” by keeping her personal life a secret. After graduating from the academy, she stayed in the military for six years and then applied and was accepted to Stanford Business School. While there, she maintained her reserve status because “I felt I had something to contribute,” and the small sum she earned in the reserves helped to pay her tuition.

Around this time, Bill Clinton was elected president, and one of his campaign promises was to lift the ban on gays serving in the military. Dunning was “very excited about that; having seen the damage and destruction the policy had done to friends and colleagues, I thought that was the right thing to do.” Unfortunately, Clinton immediately came under pressure to retract his commitment; rallies were quickly organized across the United States to bring publicity to his campaign promise.

When Dunning was given an opportunity to speak at one of these rallies, “The speech just started composing itself in my head,” she told me. “I wanted to talk about what my experience was like, and what the experiences of others around me were, and why the policy was wrong.

“The thing that was so frustrating to me was if you look at any current issue—whether healthcare reform, financial reform—those who are impacted by the decisions have the chance to speak up for themselves. They can lobby Congress, they can talk to the media, they can tell their story. But in this case, the folks who were impacted, the gays and lesbians in the military, could not speak on their own behalf. They were forced to be silent in this debate. So, you had politicians talking, you had the media talking, you had gay rights activists talking, but you didn't actually have people whose lives were on the line participating in the conversation.”

At the time she was invited to speak, Dunning was in her final year of business school and already had a job lined up with Deloitte Consulting. She had a stellar military record and she was a graduate of one of the most prestigious institutions in the military. She knew she risked being discharged if she spoke out,

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