Coming out of the closet gave Talent CEO Mark Nielsen the courage to be a better businessman and the wisdom to know how to avoid the ‘Sunday Scaries’.
From the time he was a child, Mark Nielsen knew he was different, but didn’t quite understand why. It would later turn out that a lot of his friends growing up in the apartheid South Africa of the 1980s were gay too. But they were all hiding it from each other, he tells Forbes Australia.
“Bullying, homophobia, all of that sort of stuff was rough. Luckily, I wasn’t overly overtly gay. I did judo, I played rugby, but I was still a little more feminine than most of the rugger buggers.”
He feared telling his parents. “I thought to myself, rightly or wrongly, how do I make sure that I future-proof my life? So, when I finished school, I went to university, and I decided to become a chartered accountant. I knew that if I could get out of South Africa and become financially independent … I could be who I wanted to be.
“That was probably the beginning of my obsession for working hard and driving myself to be successful,” he says on the eve of this year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
“There might have been some people who had an issue with it, but most people probably wouldn’t have cared.”
Talent CEO Mark Nielsen
Nielsen started work at accounting giant Ernst and Young, still very much in the closet. “There were murmurings that other people had come out and it was quite damning on their careers,” he recalls. “This was the early-to-mid-90s.”
He moved to investment banking in London and found a whole new level of conservatism -three-piece pinstripes, pink shirts and strip clubs. He’d long ago come out socially, but work was different. And he suffered for it.
“I battled to have real connections with people at work because you’re hiding such a big part of who you are. I remember once we were standing around the water cooler: ‘What did you do this weekend?’ ‘I went fishing.’ ‘I went hunting.’ ‘I went down to my country place.’”
“I had a few drinks with mates,” was the best he would offer, wondering what they’d think if they knew he’d been crawling West End gay clubs.
Looking back, he can see it was fear of how people would react rather than the reality of how they likely would have acted. “There might have been some people who had an issue with it, but most people probably wouldn’t have cared. So that was a very turbulent time, and because of that, I was scared to take risks on my career.”
He was scared if he came out and made one mistake, they’d use it as a pretext to sack him when it would really be about his sexuality.
“I remember going to the Pride [the London LGBTQI parade and festival] and one of the secretaries saw me there, and I thought, ‘fuck it, everything’s over now.’ … But nothing happened because people didn’t really care.”
When a client offered him a new job in private equity, he decided it was time to come clean. “Sitting down at the last interview, I said, ‘I just want to tell you something. I’m gay. Have you got an issue with it?’ He looked at me. ‘Well, I’m Jewish and married. Have you got an issue with that?’ And straight away, it was just like this weight came off.”
Nielsen suddenly felt like he could be himself – what we’d now call “bringing our whole self to work”, as coined in a 2015 Ted Talk by corporate consultant Mike Robbins.
“I met my partner, who’s my husband now, and I’ve never really looked back.” Feeling safe gave him the courage to be bolder with his career. Instead of seeking safe accounting jobs, he went for “more aggressive, higher-risk type roles”. He ended up in Australia with a venture fund, Afro Pacific Capital. He was finding South African mining companies, investing with Chinese partners, then listing them in the UK. He put some of his own money in, he says. “Every role I’ve had where I can, I’ve put quite a bit of my own money into it and backed myself. That turned out quite well.”
Some prominent out business leaders
| Name | Position | Company | Market Cap (if applicable) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meg O’Neill | CEO | Woodside | $46 billion |
| Tim Ford | CEO | Treasury Wines | $8.9 billion |
| Mark Coulter | CEO | Temple & Webster | $1.7 billion |
| Richard Feledy | Managing Director | Allianz Australia | — |
| Alan Joyce | Former CEO | Qantas | — |
| Frank Costigan | Former MD | QBE and Safety Culture Care | — |
Nielsen eventually found his way to Talent, a contract recruitment firm now with 4,000 contractors on its books. It was founded in Perth by Richard Earl who was transitioning out of the business when Nielsen arrived. Now headquartered in Sydney, it has six offices in Australia, two in New Zealand and one in New York, with a revenue of more than $1 billion.
“A lot of the way we run the business [Talent] is because I’ve had those experiences,” says Nielsen. “It brings a lot of empathy. But it also, in some ways, allows you to look for opportunities and not be so scared of failing.
“One of the key things I preach to everybody in our business is career courage: just because you work with an organisation, it doesn’t mean you can’t be an entrepreneur. You’ve got to almost take risks on yourself to do things that you haven’t done before and that’s how you’ll be successful and how the organisation will be successful.”
Nielsen maintains that bringing your whole self to work does impact the bottom line. “Look at the 1970s, and the asset values of the largest organisations then. So, if you take the market cap, and then see the assets underlying that, the bulk of them would be tangible, like plant and machinery. You look at where we are now, the bulk of the largest organisations, probably 5% is tangible assets, so 95% is in intangibles: intellectual property, brand, IP. And where does that all come from? That comes from people. Your people will make or break the business.
“And my chairman taught me something very good, it’s called COF, calm, open, friendly. As a leader you’ve got to have a positive demeanour. You can’t be up and down because that creates anxiety in your people,” says Nielsen.
“Imagine you’ve got a boss: one morning she loves you, the next day, ‘What’s going on here, this is all wrong.’ And you don’t know where you stand. But maybe that comes back to the boss also being authentic and vulnerable with you. You know, ‘I’m going through a divorce at the moment, I’m grumpy, but you did a fantastic job and I love working with you.’
“You just flipped it. Your energy will be better. You’ll be excited. You’ll be engaged. People being authentic and vulnerable in the business, especially leadership, that takes away fear in the people that report to you.
“When you pull those all together, that’s how we believe, hopefully you get rid of the ‘Sunday Scaries’.” This, he has a staff member explain, is when people have a pit of anxiety in their stomach on a Sunday, dreading the return to work next day.
“So my goal is to make sure everyone in the business, on a Sunday evening is so excited about coming in the next week, growing, learning and doing an awesome job. Because then they’re going to be more engaged, obviously going to deliver more. That impacts the bottom line.”
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