‘That’s real progress’: KKR’s Ken Mehlman on the fight for equality, the value of thinking laterally, and why this month was particularly significant

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This article is also part of the LinkedIn News series #OutOnLinkedIn during June, which is Pride Month. Join the conversation using #OutOnLinkedIn and #ConversationsForChange.

Ken Mehlman is not your average private equity executive.

Before joining the industry in 2008, Mehlman spent a dozen years as a government wunderkind. In his mid-30s, he was picked to lead President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, and a few months after the election he was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee. Five years later, in 2010, Mehlman also became one of the few prominent Republican Party figures to come out as gay.

Today, Mehlman wears many hats, including as a partner at KKR and the private equity giant’s global head of public affairs. Leveraging his geopolitical insights, he is also co-head of the firm’s impact investing platform, which identifies and funds companies addressing global challenges associated with climate change, education, and inclusive economic growth.

On top of it all — or more accurately, integrated with it all — is Mehlman’s now-decade-long fight for marriage, workplace, and overall equality around the world. His many board positions include director roles at Teach for America, the United Negro College Fund, and more.

I’ve known Mehlman for almost a decade and am always intrigued by what he calls lateral thinking — drawing on insights from many different areas in order to solve a problem in one. We had a chance to catch up last week as Pride Month was in full swing, and below are excerpts from the conversation.

When and why did equality work become important to you?

It’s in large part how I was raised. Growing up, my parents both believed that each of us has an obligation, in addition to what we do for a living, to work to be a contributing part of the communities where we live.

I think that each of us, depending on what we do, has an opportunity to take what we have learned, who we know, what we know, and put it to work for the betterment of other people. In my case, I’m fortunate that both what I do at work and what I’m able to do outside of it can contribute to those efforts.

How is this priority reflected at KKR?

George [Roberts] and Henry [Kravis] are tremendously committed leaders when it comes to equality issues.

George founded an organization in 1997 called REDF, which focuses on helping provide employment opportunities for individuals who are outside of the economic mainstream, particularly individuals who are the furthest outside of the economic mainstream — people who perhaps have been incarcerated, individuals who don’t have a home, people who have faced addiction issues or mental health challenges. Through a social enterprise model, it has provided employment for tens of thousands of people.

Henry has also been very active. Recently, he’s the chairman of SEO, on whose board I serve, which is a fantastic education equity organization. [Co-president] Scott Nuttall has, for years, been involved in Teach for America, an organization on whose national board I now serve. [Co-president] Joe Bae was one of the founders of The Asian American Foundation, TAAF, which is focused on expanding opportunity and fighting discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islander populations in the United States.

So, the four individuals who lead KKR each has a serious commitment to this space. The opportunity to work in this organization and to add my own commitment is awesome.

Within KKR, we’ve also worked in a number of ways to build this into how we operate — from our ESG efforts, to our investments in companies that solve critical societal challenges, to reexamining how we hire and promote within KKR and who we put on our portfolio-company boards, to our strategic philanthropy work.

Our ability to invest in companies that are offering solutions to challenges regarding opportunity or equity is critical. Through our impact fund, for example, workforce development and lifelong learning is an important theme.

We can also contribute in this space by how we manage companies. If you look at the work that Pete Stavros and colleagues have done regarding shared ownership with employees outside of the C-suite and management, many of us have learned from that and built it into our own governing approaches across investments. That’s another way you can build both shared value for employees and shareholder value for investors.

How much progress has been made on LGBTQ equality? How much remains?

I think that we are very fortunate to live in a country where amazing progress has been made.

The ability to marry the person you love. The right — thanks to last year’s Supreme Court decision — to be judged at work on your merit, contributions, and efforts, rather than the risk that someone is removed from his or her job based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. That’s real progress. Significant important work remains to be done, of course — for example, for people in the transgender community.

We had a Pride event at KKR last week and hosted a fantastic leader, Amit Paley, the CEO of The Trevor Project. The incidence of young people who are LGBTQ who think about or take their own lives is a horrific tragedy. Critical work always remains to be done to make sure that people understand they are loved, they are valued, and help is available. That work continues.

Equally important is the work that needs to be done overseas. I’ve been involved over the last several years in a network called Equality Without Borders. I was honored to be asked to be a producer for the HBO film Welcome to Chechnya, which recounts the heroic work of individuals who are helping rescue women and men who happen to be gay in Chechnya from, literally, risk to their lives as a result of the discrimination that exists there. The global work is a critical component of what needs to be done.

Within KKR, we thought: How do we use our business model to promote equality? In 2010, after the Supreme Court invalidated DOMA but before the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, there was a question of how companies could treat employees who were gay. We brought in the Human Rights Campaign, which produces the Corporate Equality Index, and invited our portfolio companies so that they could understand the best practices with respect to benefits during that period of time. We have also worked very hard with organizations like Business for Social Responsibility and others to develop a manual that focuses broadly on equality and to make sure that’s built into how the workplace operates. And we have added more than 100 diverse directors to boards across our portfolio.

The point is that if each of us looks around in our lives and says, “What can my contribution be to equality and equity?” there is so much that we can do.

You have one of the more interesting career paths in the investment business. How did it happen?

I think that in whatever business you’re in, the ability to think laterally — to think about how other areas outside of your industry can create value for your organization — is an incredibly valuable asset to bring to work.

A designer, for example, can be incredibly helpful in figuring out not just the traditional type of design one might think about, but also organizational operation and design questions. In today’s world, if you are conversant in public policy, in geopolitics, if you think about the world with a stakeholder lens — which is to say, “How does my operation affect different constituencies, not just those inside my company?” — then, in my experience, you can add real value to a firm involved in investing.

That’s been the focus I’ve had for the last 13 years. I had the wonderful opportunity to spend 12 years of my life in government at a pretty young age and have some interesting experiences. At the end of that, I said, “How do I re-pot myself in new soil? How do I make sure that my roots keep growing? How can I create value in a different space?” That’s what I’ve tried to do.

What’s top of mind for you as Pride Month comes to an end?

This year’s Pride Month is particularly notable because of the fact that it coincided with the establishment of a Juneteenth federal holiday. It seems to me that in both cases, we are celebrating the same underlying values: freedom, equality, opportunity, unity.

If we learned anything over the course of the last year, when many of us were shuttered in our homes, it ought to be to recognize how critical these values are.

The last year also showed us how much work remains to be done to make sure that the promise on which our country was founded — all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable rights — is true for everybody.

It showed, for example, how vulnerable people who don’t have a health-care safety net are. It showed how individuals, because of their skin color, can too often be treated differently by our law-enforcement system. It showed how so many individuals, based on their socioeconomic status, fall behind in their learning in school. It showed — whether with the Asian American community or, more recently, with some of the antisemitism we have seen — how ancient hatreds that we thought were gone actually remain.

So, I think that not just this month, but always, we need to appreciate the work that we all have to do for equality, opportunity, and unity.

Join the conversation with your own take on these topics in the comments below.