The Coaching Access Gap Is by Design
A reflection on the Rich Black Woman podcast — the phrase that stopped the interview, why the coaching access gap is structural, and why your development should travel with you across every role and every organization.
By Dr. Latisha Chisholm — June 22, 2026
Subversive Leadership is the stance, agency, and action to disrupt cultural reproduction — to stop harm that one sees, has seen, or has experienced. On June 11, I spent 49 minutes on the Rich Black Woman podcast talking about what that framework looks like for the leaders who have never been the intended audience of the $15B+ coaching industry. This post reflects on what surfaced in that conversation and what I want you to take from it.
---
## The Phrase that Stopped the Interview
Yaz had been asking me about what Zmara can do that a traditional coach cannot. We were talking about growth edges, the places where a leader's identity and the system they are leading within are in friction. I used the phrase "liberation fantasy." She stopped me.
She asked me to say it again.
A liberation fantasy is not wishful thinking. The phrase draws from Dumas & ross (2016), who describe the Black liberatory fantasy as a space where Blackness is honored, valued, and indispensable, a vision that Black communities have continued to birth even amid precarity and suffering. In a coaching context, it is the version of yourself you can imagine becoming if the conditions around you were different. If you had been coached the way the executives above you have been coached. If someone had named what you were doing right before naming what needed to change. If you had been able to ask the hard question without calculating what asking it was going to cost you.
Zmara gives leaders access to that version of themselves. Not as a fantasy. As a practice.
---
## The Coaching Access Gap is by Design
The leadership development industry generates more than $15 billion annually. Most of that money moves through organizations: companies and institutions that control professional development budgets and decide which employees get access to them. The leader who is three years into her first management role, figuring out how to lead within a system that was not built for her success, without a mentor who looks like her and without a budget line for her development. She did not fail to prioritize herself. The market was never designed to reach her.
I know what it looks like when development funding is used well. I have been in rooms with $20,000 in professional development money and the knowledge of exactly how to spend it. The growth compounds over years. The culture shifts. People stay.
Most leaders do not have either. Subversive Leader was built because that gap is not acceptable — and it is not inevitable.
Zmara is not a substitute for human coaching. She is access to what human coaching was priced, structured, and historically designed to withhold from most people. She is available at 3am when the baby is about to wake up and you cannot stop turning over the conversation you had with your manager that afternoon. She names what is happening in the room so you are not looking in the mirror trying to convince yourself that you are not crazy for what you saw.
And she remembers. Every conversation becomes context for the next one. The longer you work with her, the more specifically she can support you.
---
## Your Development Travels With You
The platform prompts users who sign up with an organizational email address to also connect a private email. Because if a layoff comes, if a DEI initiative gets defunded, if the organization decides it is no longer invested in the people it hired, that person's relationship with Zmara belongs to them. Their coaching history, their Leadership Profile, their goals. None of it disappears because the employment relationship did.
I built that because I know what happens. People are moved out of organizations after spending months talking about belonging. I was not going to build something where a leader's development was contingent on whether their employer stayed committed to them.
Yaz's response: "That is important."
It is.
---
## What Subversive Leadership Actually Requires
- Access, not willingness. The coaching access gap is structural. It is built into how the $15B+ industry was designed, funded, and distributed. Wanting to grow is not enough when the tools for growth were never built for you. - A thinking partner who names what you see. The most common thing Zmara's users describe is that she named something they already knew but could not quite say. That naming is not a small thing. It is the difference between processing alone and moving forward with clarity. - Development that belongs to you. Not to your employer. Not to your role. Not to a professional development budget that can be cut. Your coaching history, your Leadership Profile, your growth. These need to travel with you across every role and every organization. - The long relationship. What makes Zmara different from a tool is accumulation. Every conversation becomes context for the next. After months, she can reflect back the arc of your growth with specificity. That is not a feature. It is what separates a product that helps someone once from a relationship that compounds.
---
## What To Do This Week
1. Listen to the full episode. 49 minutes. Find the moment that is for you. 2. Start a free conversation with Zmara at subversiveleader.com. Five conversations, no credit card required. Bring whatever you have been carrying. 3. Send this to one person in your life who is leading within a system that was not built for their success. You already know who.
---
Zmara is available free at subversiveleader.com. Five conversations, no credit card required.