Women and non-native employees are historically disadvantaged in leadership and remain underrepresented in management levels of organizations. While previous research has made strides in understanding and reducing societal inequality in leadership, I incorporate the developmental construct of popularity and preference (i.e., likability) as a lens to view and mitigate disadvantages women and minorities face in leadership. Indeed, teenage girls experience a negative correlation between popularity and preference which is thought to follow adult women into leadership and explain why women leaders face social barriers to leading (A. H. N. Cillessen, 2011). Additionally, this may shed some light how social ties in teams affect the team’s task-related decisions and behaviors. Gender and culturally diverse leaderless teams were interviewed using semi-structured interviews weekly over the course of a seven-week internship about popularity, preference, and leader behaviors in their teams. A double coder and I implemented Braun and Clarke’s (2006) method of thematic analysis to evaluate the interview data. A testable model and four themes resulted. First, we found that a popular individual’s ideas were valued more highly than ideas presented by others and that increased participation (i.e., talking) proceeded popularity. Next, we found that the popular individual would be considered the leader when they were also perceived as committed to the team’s goals and team-oriented. Cultural differences and the language barrier prevented non-Americans from emerging as leaders due to lower levels of participation and popularity. There were no gender differences in leader behaviors or evaluations of leaders, but women leaders were not called ‘leaders’ until further into the internship relative to men leaders. I then discuss the many theoretical and practical applications of my findings including combining popularity and preference to become a one-factor construct, as supported by Scott and Judge (2009), and allowing multicultural team members time to reflect before discussing a topic in a brainstorming session, as to reduce the inequality in participation levels due to cultural and language barriers.