Kim Langers

Through her corporate rise, Kim Langers noticed a lack of mentoring for LGBT employees

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

Kim Langers is COO of Rastegar, a “technology-enabled real estate company specializing in recession- resilient commercial property” and based in Austin. She’s also a lesbian who believes LGBT employees throughout the business world have been held back by a lack of mentors. In her company, she’s out to change that.

In her position, Langers oversees acquisitions, marketing, technology and business strategy, and she coordinates the activities of the asset management and development team. While her corporate profile says she is “also instrumental in fostering the growth of the company and building a team that takes it to the next level,” she is determined that her team shows diversity in observable traits such as race and gender and internal traits like gender identity and sexual orientation.

Langers moved to Texas from California in 2019 and sees her goal of mentoring a diverse workforce in Austin as very attainable because she calls her new home progressive and inclusive. But how does she find the time? She said because it is important, she deliberately sets aside time to work with her team. And, she said, when she teaches them to share common goals, they make their goals together.

Langers said she gives her team members the opportunity to grow in their own job as well as opportunities to gain experience outside their current area. “Someone might start in property management but want to become a financial analyst,” she explained. So she helps provide them with those opportunities for personal growth with training on topics that interest them. She said her company has opportunities in underwriting and acquisitions.

If a team member shows willingness to learn, Langers said, her goal is simply to give them the tools they need. “I’ll guide them and give them opportunity,” she said.

Throughout her career, Langers said she has seen young white men being mentored. But “younger women don’t get the same attention to groom them to reach top management,” she said.

Women with a certain, more corporate look” will get attention in their 40s and 50s and may eventually be promoted. But by that time, they have fewer work years left and are less likely to reach the top of the corporate ladder.

And, Langers added, she hasn’t seen many LGBTQ people climbing the corporate ladder either. “Where is my community?” she said she asked herself. As an LGBTQ person in the corporate world, “You don’t see yourself.”

In her case, Langers took it upon herself to gain the experience she needed to move steadily upward in terms of the positions she held with Herbalife Nutrition, Coca-Cola and Merle Norman Cosmetics.
“I wanted to be an executive,” she said, adding that she knew to do that, “I’d have to work hard, dedicate myself to my career.”

And, she said, she knew she needed to seek out a mentor. So she found someone who identified her talents.

Langers believes it’s important to be open about who you are at work so you can bring your whole self to work. She said the best way to do that is through informal conversations.

“Those moments are your opportunity,” she said.

When someone asks about a partner or spouse and misgenders them, she suggested simply noting, “’No, I have a girlfriend,’ or ‘I have a wife.’”

But just being out at work isn’t true diversity; diversity is something you have to be able to see, Langers said. “As a leader,” she added, “I have to be authentic.”

Leading isn’t about authority, Langers continued. It’s about influence and trust. If you’re not out, you’re not a leader because you’re not honest, she said.

In her first job, she said, she was scared of the unknown, and in her quest to always be better at her job and always have the answers, she tended to “overcompensate for my sexuality.” That overcompensation grew out of a sense of insecurity and fear.

And she did get called out when she was young — but not for flaunting her sexuality; she was called out for hiding who she was. “They wanted me to take a risk,” Langers said.

When she was the only one in the room, doing things a little differently — usually the only woman, almost certainly the only lesbian — she received criticism, Langers acknowledged. But she took the criticism as constructive, using it to grow and learn to open up about herself. She took being different from the straight white men in the room as a challenge.

“I made it better the next time,” she said.

Women are more detail oriented and organized, Langers said, and she used that to her advantage. LGBT people often may be more creative, and she used that to her advantage, too. She’d take the extra training offered and work harder and has been rewarded for her efforts.

Now Langers is passing on the lessons she has learned by mentoring her team. And, she added, encouraging people to be themselves brings more creative and diverse solutions to business and is resulting in some of the biggest growth her company has seen, despite the stresses of working through a pandemic.