For over twenty-five years, Dr. Janet Lockhart-Jones has worked inside Fortune 500 organizations and executive classrooms where future leaders are identified, trained, and prepared to advance. One pattern kept repeating: in many of those rooms, Black leaders were simply absent.

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The Unseen Leaders examines how leadership pipelines in corporate America continue to reproduce inequity, even in organizations that publicly value diversity. Drawing on decades of firsthand observation, Dr. Lockhart-Jones looks at the invisible structures and institutional habits that reward familiarity with dominant norms and leave capable leaders overlooked.

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The book asks why merit-based advancement so often falls short in practice, what it costs organizations to exclude diverse perspectives from decision-making, and what real structural change actually requires.

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Written for executives, HR professionals, educators and policy leaders, this is not abstract theory. It is grounded in lived professional experience inside some of America's largest corporate environments, and it challenges readers to look past the public commitments and ask whether their leadership systems genuinely create equitable paths to growth and influence.