Just Work by Kim Scott
Introduction
We Can’t Fix Problems We Refuse to Notice
The fundamental premise of this book is that there are things each of us can do to eliminate injustice from the workplace. A dozen different catalysts could have brought you to this book. Perhaps you’ve been hired to create a more diverse and inclusive work culture. You may be concerned about the treatment of the only transgender person on your team. Or maybe you looked around and realized that everyone on your team is a white man, and this struck you for the first time as a problem you need to solve for everyone. Whatever reason you began this book, my goal is that you will finish it with an ability to parse problems you are confronting and with several strategies for how to address them so that you and the people around you can Just Work. Today.
PART ONE:
THE ROOT CAUSES OF WORKPLACE INJUSTICE
Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying
How to Confront Each Effectively
What gets in the way of basic fairness1 at work? In my experience, there are three root causes of workplace injustice: bias, prejudice, and bullying. Each is different and must be considered separately if we are to come up with the most effective ways to combat each. When a power imbalance is present, things get much worse quickly—discrimination, harassment, and physical violations occur. We’ll consider these problems in Part Two. Let’s start by examining how to root out the root causes.
PROBLEMS
Before we begin, let me offer some supershort definitions and a simple framework to help keep us oriented in a problem that can be very disorienting.
Bias?is “not meaning it.” Bias, often called unconscious bias, comes from the part of our mind that jumps to conclusions, usually without our even being aware of it.3 These conclusions and assumptions aren’t always wrong, but they often are, especially when they reflect stereotypes. We do not have to be the helpless victims of our brains. We can learn to slow down and question our biases.
Prejudice?is “meaning it.” Unfortunately, when we stop to think, we don’t always come up with the best answer, either. Sometimes we rationalize our biases and they harden into prejudices.4 In other words, we justify our biases rather than challenging their flawed assumptions and stereotypes.
Bullying?is “being mean”: the intentional, repeated use of in-group status or power to harm or humiliate others.5 Sometimes bullying comes with prejudice, but often it’s a more instinctive behavior. There may be no thought or ideology at all behind it. It can be a plan or just an animal instinct to dominate, to coerce.
RESPONSES
The most effective responses match the problem we’re trying to solve. To root out bias, prejudice, and bullying we must respond to each differently.
In my experience, when people’s biases are pointed out to them clearly and compassionately, they usually correct them and apologize.
Prejudice, however, is a conscious and ingrained belief. People don’t change their prejudices simply because someone points them out. Holding up a mirror doesn’t help—people like what they see. What’s important is to draw a clear boundary between people’s right to believe whatever they want and their freedom to impose their prejudices on others.
Bullying has to incur real consequences to be stopped. If bullies were swayed by being aware of the harm they are doing to the people they are bullying, they wouldn’t be treating other people badly in the first place. Usually they are trying to hurt someone. Pointing out the pain they are inflicting doesn’t make them stop and may even encourage them to double down.
Your degrees of freedom and responsibility when confronting bias, prejudice, and bullying depend on your role. Chapter 1 describes the different roles we all play, and chapters 2–5 describe specific things you can do to confront these attitudes and behaviors, depending on what role you play. No matter what role you play, though, it’s important to understand the perspective of the people in the other roles if you want your attempts to combat the problem to be effective. Also, the better you understand each role, the more skilled you will be if you later find yourself intentionally or accidentally in that role. The shared goal is to create an environment in which everyone can do better work and be happier while they are doing it.
1.Roles and Responsibilities
Who Is Responsible for Fixing These Problems? Everyone.
In any instance of injustice you encounter at work, you will play at least one of four different roles: person harmed, upstander, person who caused harm, or leader. Each of these roles has its own responsibilities.
ROLE: PERSON HARMED: CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE
ROLE:?OBSERVER?UPSTANDER : INTERVENE. DON’T JUST WATCH
ROLE: PERSON CAUSING HARM : LISTEN AND ADDRESS
ROLE: LEADER : PREVENT AND REPAIR
There are specific actions you can take so that you and your team can love the work and working together, so that you can all get sh*t done, fast and fair. And once you start taking these actions, you set in place a virtuous cycle.
2.For People Harmed
What to Say. When You Don’t Know, What to Say
Part of what makes it hard to respond in such moments is one’s uncertainty about where the person is coming from. Is this unconscious bias talking? Or does the person mean what they said? Or is the remark a power play of some kind, intended to intimidate?
RECOGNIZING BIAS
You don’t have to have done tons of research or nailed down a perfect definition of bias in order to recognize it and respond to it when you feel it somehow working against you at your job. To help you get started, here are some examples of how bias commonly plays out in the workplace:
RESPONDING TO BIAS
USE AN “I” STATEMENT TO INVITE THE PERSON TO SEE THINGS FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE. Quick rule of thumb: even if you don’t know what to say, start with the word “I.” Starting with the word “I” invites the person to consider things from your point of view—why what they said or did seemed biased to you.
RESPONDING TO PREJUDICE
USE AN “IT” STATEMENT Using an “It” statement is an effective way to demarcate this boundary. One type of “It” statement appeals to human decency: “It is disrespectful/cruel/et cetera to…” For example, “It is disrespectful to call a grown woman a girl.” Another references the policies or a code of conduct at your company: For example, “It is a violation of our company policy to hang a Confederate flag above your desk. It invokes slavery and will harm our team’s ability to collaborate.” The third invokes the law: For example, “It is illegal to refuse to hire women.”
RESPONDING TO BULLYING
USE A “YOU” STATEMENT TO CREATE CONSEQUENCES What is the difference between bullying and conflict? Here’s a simple way to think about it, adapted from the work of PACER, a nonprofit that leads a bullying prevention center.24
When someone is bullying you, the person’s goal is to harm you. Telling the person you are being harmed is just going to result in more bad behavior. Ignoring bullies doesn’t work, either. The only way to stop bullying is to create negative consequences for the person doing the bullying. Only when bullying stops being practical or enjoyable will bullies alter their behavior. When you’re the victim of bullying, though, you often feel powerless to stop it.
One way to push back is to confront the person with a “You” statement, as in “What’s going on for you here?” or “You need to stop talking to me that way.” A “You” statement is a decisive action, and it can be surprisingly effective in changing the dynamic. That’s because the bully is trying to put you in a submissive role, to demand that you answer the questions to shine a scrutinizing spotlight on you. When you reply with a “You” statement, you are now taking a more active role, asking them to answer the questions, shining a scrutinizing spotlight on them.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE FACING BIAS, PREJUDICE, OR BULLYING?
TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS
DECIDING WHETHER TO RESPOND: DO NOT DEFAULT TO SILENCE
SOME COMMON RATIONALIZATIONS FOR SILENCE
3.For Observers
How to Be an Upstander
USE AN “I” STATEMENT TO HOLD A MIRROR UP TO BIAS. An upstander’s job is to hold up a mirror, inviting others to notice what the upstander notices. Something as simple and direct as “I think what you said sounds biased” can be surprisingly effective. Upstanders can use a version of the “I” statements described in chapter 2.
USE AN “IT” STATEMENT TO STAND UP TO PREJUDICE. If you can approach the whole person instead of this one prejudiced part of the person’s thinking, you’ll be better able to view the conversation as an act of compassion and bridge building rather than one of judgment and punishment. And when you can do that, you’ll maximize the chances of the conversation’s being productive.
USE A “YOU” STATEMENT TO STAND UP TO BULLYING On a practical level, upstanders are in the best position to intervene because the nature of bullying is to isolate the target and separate the individual from the pack. The minute an upstander stands up to bullies, they know that they’re facing two people, not one.
Sometimes it may be your fear of the person doing the bullying that gets in your way; other times, you may wonder if it’s appropriate to insert yourself into this situation. Might it be seen as patronizing to act on behalf of the bullied? Hollaback!, a nonprofit that develops training for upstanders, offers an effective “5D” approach to be aware of the different things you can do to shine a spotlight on bullying.
DIRECT. Challenge the person doing the bullying in the moment.
DISTRACT. While it may be more satisfying to confront bullying directly—Hey, why are you talking so rudely?
DELEGATE. By?delegate, I don’t mean ask someone below you in a hierarchy to do the work; I mean get help from another colleague who is in a better position to intervene.
DELAY.Sometimes uncertainty about the risk of retribution may make you reluctant to intervene on the spot. But you can still check in later.
DOCUMENT. Your ability to act as an observer of situations, and to document them, can be an invaluable service to victims of bullying.
THE UPSTANDER’S ADVANTAGES. The upstander’s voice is crucial because upstanders may have advantages that none of the other players possess:
There is strength in numbers.
4.For People Who Cause Harm
Be Part of the Solution, Not Part of the Problem
We all harm others from time to time, often unintentionally. Exhibiting bias, prejudice, or bullying does not make us evil people incapable of redemption. These are attitudes and behaviors we all exhibit—and things we can all do less of if we make a conscious effort. Still, like it or not, we all need someone to hold up a mirror for us, to point out when we are not behaving in a way that reflects who we really want to be. Of course, some people want to be evil.
INTERRUPTING YOUR OWN BIAS
There are a number of paths to becoming more aware of your thought patterns and unconscious biases: meditation, religion, therapy, novels, the arts, travel.
FIND YOUR BIAS BUSTERS
If you don’t want to unintentionally harm or anger your colleagues, if you don’t want to contribute to making your workplace an unfair or unreasonable environment, the first and perhaps most difficult part of your job is to become aware of your biases. As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out, “acquisition of skills requires a?… rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”
GROWTH MINDSET
No matter what your role is, confronting workplace injustice is difficult. Success requires that we adopt and foster what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset view failure and criticism in any context as an opportunity to learn and improve themselves. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, which views failure and criticism as signs of a fixed/negative trait.
BE AWARE OF HOW “SMALL” THINGS ADD UP TO BIG THINGS
Sometimes the things you’re called on to do to make amends feel disproportionate to the thing you did wrong. Be aware that your biased comment or action may be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
MANAGE YOUR DEFENSIVENESS
When you mess up, as we all are bound to do, it’s natural to feel defensive
AAA: ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR MISTAKE, APOLOGIZE, MAKE AMENDS
When it becomes routine for us to notice our biases, they feel less threatening.
CORRECT THE BIAS
The best way to make amends is to correct your bias. Changing biased behavior can be hard if that behavior has been your default.
LETTING GO OF YOUR PREJUDICES
To see clearly, one needs to get out of these ruts; these vague notions of superiority, inferiority, and equality that have distorted all discussions must be discarded in order to start anew.” Let’s all just try to become our best, truest selves and break free of these prejudices!
How can you do it? How can we make sure our biases don’t harden into damaging prejudices? Here are some of the things that helped me.
QUESTION FALSE COHERENCE
Our brains love to sort the chaos of life into various boxes and buckets and patterns. That’s what the brain does—automatically but not necessarily wisely. Daniel Kahneman teaches us to challenge the kind of false coherence our brain serves up by reminding ourselves and one another, “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes from the way your mind works.” Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow describes how our brains process information along two tracks, which he defines as System 1, fast thinking, and System 2, slow thinking. “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”6 System 1 tends to look for “coherence” where there is none.
BEWARE OF STEREOTYPING/ESSENTIALIZING
People who hold prejudiced beliefs often open a conversation by saying, “Men/white people/straight people are this” and “Women/Black people/gay people are that,” then degrading what they consider to be feminine/Black/gay. It’s “dichotomize and degrade” prejudice
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
The fundamental attribution error, a flawed thinking pattern described by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, fuels prejudice. This happens when we use perceived personality attributes—“You’re an idiot”—to explain someone else’s behavior rather than considering our own behavior and/or the situational factors that may at least in part have been the cause of the other person’s behavior. It’s a problem because (1) it’s generally inaccurate and (2) it renders an otherwise solvable problem hard to solve because it invokes a fixed mindset.
DON’T EXPECT EVERYTHING TO CONFORM TO AVERAGE
Ask yourself, Even if it is true on average, does it apply to the specific situation at hand? It is true that.
HOW TO REALIZE WHEN YOU ARE BULLYING OTHERS—AND STOP IT
SOME USEFUL TIPS FOR RESPONDING TO FEEDBACK
f you’re getting feedback that you’ve been biased, that one of your beliefs is prejudiced, or that you’ve bullied someone, first take a deep breath. This is hard to hear. A few things are always helpful to keep in mind:
DON’T USE AN APOLOGY TO DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM A DIFFICULT SITUATION
Sometimes we offer a quick apology in an effort to avoid feelings of discomfort or shame. When we do that, we fail to hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes and lose an opportunity to learn and grow.
5.For Leaders
Create Bias Interruptions, a Code of Conduct, and Consequences for Bullying
If you think bias, prejudice, and bullying don’t exist on your team, you’re kidding yourself. No, it’s not your fault that these attitudes and behaviors are so common in every society on the planet. But you’re the boss and so it is your problem if you ignore them. To make things more challenging, you can’t take them on alone.
You’re going to need your team’s help. And getting that will require you to make it safe for them to help you, because they are even more reluctant to address these issues than you are.
Get started! Don’t wait for reports of incidents and problems to come to y
LEADERS AND BIAS
BIAS HARMS INDIVIDUALS & COLLECTIVE RESULTS
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. —R. D. Laing
STEREOTYPE THREAT AND FEEDBACK
One’s awareness of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs can actually harm one’s performance: fear of confirming the stereotype raises that person’s level of anxiety and makes it harder to perform at one’s best. This can occur in people at all levels of organizations, including at the top, so leaders must manage it in others and be aware of it in themselves.
REMEMBER THAT UNCONSCIOUS BIAS TRAINING IS ONLY A START
Interrupting bias is not something leaders can simply outsource. Leaders must be personally involved with both helping to educate the team during the training and, crucially, figuring out how they and their teams will interrupt bias when it shows up afterward in conversation, in meetings, in business processes.
CREATE A SHARED VOCABULARY TO INTERRUPT BIAS
Simple bias interruptions—words or phrases that everyone uses to point out bias—can help a great deal.
MAKING BIAS INTERRUPTIONS WORK
Once you’ve established a norm, you’ll find that people learn pretty quickly and increasingly catch themselves before making a biased comment. But that only happens when you establish language and norms that recognize and correct bias and ensure that everyone is doing their part. None of that will happen without conscious leadership and proactive intervention from you.
BUILD BIAS-INTERRUPTING NORMS
How can you teach your team to interrupt their own biases so that they can treat one another with respect; make more rational, impartial decisions; and collaborate in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
LEADERS AND PREJUDICE
Remember, bias is your brain serving up stereotypes you are not aware of and wouldn’t agree with if you stopped to think or became aware. Prejudice is, at some level, your conscious brain rationalizing stereotypes and biases.
In cases of both bias and prejudice, you have to intervene. In the case of bias, you hold up a mirror, and usually the person self-corrects. But in the case of prejudice, if you hold up a mirror, the person is likely to say, “Yeah, that’s me, aren’t I good-looking?” Pointing out the prejudice probably isn’t going to change it. In the case of prejudice, your job is to prevent that person from imposing it on others.
As a leader, you’re overstepping to try to control what people believe. People are free to believe whatever they want. But they are not free to DO whatever they want. At the same time, it is your job to prevent people from imposing their beliefs on others. Everyone is free to believe whatever they want, and everyone should be free from other people’s prejudices. This is really seriously tricky. If you don’t want to deal with it, don’t become a leader.
CODE OF CONDUCT: A RULE BOOK FOR RESPECT
Leaders are responsible for setting and communicating clear expectations about the boundaries of acceptable behavior. A code of conduct is one of the best tools for ensuring expectations are clear and fair. A code of conduct does not tell people what to believe but instead what they can and cannot do. Most people will respect boundaries—if they know where they are.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE A CODE OF CONDUCT, WRITE ONE
Below is my first draft for the team at Radical Candor, the executive-education company I co-founded.
1.Act with integrity. Honesty and ethical behavior are the bedrock of productivity. If we cannot trust one another, we cannot collaborate or innovate. Lying, cheating, stealing, acts of violence, and other ethical violations are grounds for dismissal.
2.Show common human decency. Remember, even if your relationships at work are not friendships, they are still real human relationships. Everyone you interact with deserves to be treated with respect. This is especially important when you have a disagreement. When you treat people with disrespect, you hurt both your long-term work and our collective efforts. Collaboration is more effective than domination for you as an individual and for our company as a whole. Bullying behavior is grounds for dismissal.
Seek to understand when there are differences.?Do not merely tolerate differences; seek to understand the other person’s logic and emotions. Do not rush to condemn people wholesale.
Do not impose your beliefs on others.?You have a right to believe whatever you want, but you do not have a right to do whatever you want. When your words hurt your team’s ability to get things done, you don’t have the right to say whatever you want, either.
Care.?You are more likely to do great work and to help your team do great work when you care about the people you work with not just on a professional level but on a human level.
Be aware of the impact you have on others.?If you hurt someone, saying “I wasn’t aware” or “I didn’t mean to” is not good enough. It is your responsibility to be aware of the impact you have on others and to make amends when you’ve hurt them.
3.Challenge directly.?If you disagree with people, say something directly to them rather than talking behind their backs. Gossiping, backstabbing, and political behavior will have a negative impact on your performance evaluation and on your career.
Correct bias.?If people say or do something that seems biased to you, correct them without attacking them, in the spirit of helping them learn, not punishing them. We are all biased in our own ways, and we will move in the right direction only when we correct one another’s biases.
4.Respect consent.?It is the responsibility of the toucher to be aware of how the other person feels about being touched. If the other person doesn’t want to be touched, don’t touch. If you’re not sure, don’t touch. Unwanted touching is grounds for dismissal. Dating in your chain of command, even when consensual, is also grounds for dismissal. The power dynamic can make it hard to express consent.
5.Honor checks and balances.?Unchecked power corrupts, and we have put in place a structure that ensures none of us are corrupted by it. Nobody here has unilateral authority, and nobody is above the rules. If you notice a problem, you have multiple escalation options. Click here to read what they are. Behaving as though the rules don’t apply to you or seeking to avoid the checks that have been put upon your authority is grounds for dismissal.
FAIR PROCESS AND CONSEQUENCES FOR VIOLATING THE CODE OF CONDUCT
There must be consequences for violating the code of conduct. And coming up with fair and reasonable consequences in response to the kinds of difficult situations that inevitably arise is much easier if you have thought through the principles and communicated them to employees before you try to figure out what to do about someone’s unexpectedly awful behavior.
LEADERS AND BULLYING: ENFORCE CONSEQUENCES
If you don’t keep a keen eye out for bullying behavior, you probably won’t notice it; people who bully often “kiss up and kick down.” That is why it is all the more important for your intolerance of bullying to be widely understood throughout your team.
CREATING CONSEQUENCES FOR BULLYING: CONVERSATION, COMPENSATION, CAREER
Conversation: Create consequences without becoming a bully yourself
Compensation: Don’t give raises, bonuses, or high performance ratings to people who bully.
Career advancement: Don’t promote people who bully
PART TWO: Discrimination, Harassment, and Physical Violations
How to Manage Power So It Doesn’t Manage You
Power is bad. That is a debatable statement, but I’m going to say it because I believe what Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”1 Powerlessness is also terrible. But the solution to powerlessness is not power. It’s agency, accountability, and justice. When managers have too much power, things quickly get even more unfair and inefficient. Bias and prejudice give way to discrimination. Bullying gives way to verbal or psychological harassment. Unchecked power, whether positional power or physical power, paves the way for the full range of physical violations ranging from the creepy hug to the violent assault
6.A Leader’s Role in Preventing Discrimination and Harassment
Apply Checks and Balances; Quantify Bias
I’ll define discrimination as excluding others from opportunities.1 Discrimination happens when you add power to bias or prejudice. Harassment is intimidating others in a way that creates a hostile work environment.2 Harassment happens when you add power to bias or bullying.
CHECKS AND BALANCES
Every workplace gives managers up and down the org chart authority to make decisions that have profound consequences for those who work for them. Traditionally, managers dole out or withhold resources; they decide who gets hired, fired, or promoted; they determine bonuses, who gets the plum assignments, who gets stuck with the grunt work, and so on. This makes it risky for employees to report harassment or discrimination. When managers make all these decisions unilaterally, they have too much power. They can use this power to harass or bully employees, and there’s not much their employees can do about it if they want to keep their jobs. Employees are disempowered.
None of this is inevitable. It happens as a result of the choices we make about management systems and processes. You can bake checks and balances into your organizational design, or you can design a system that creates mini-dictators. If you do the latter, the unchecked power you’ve given people makes harassment much more likely.
When leaders create checks and balances in their organizational design and in their work processes, they help prevent power from corrupting their teams or themselves.
QUANTIFY YOUR BIAS
If your goal is to create a just workplace, proactively look for discrimination—for signs that your organization is systematically discriminating against some people while overpromoting others. Do so with the same energy you’d use to investigate a decrease in profitability, research a competitor, explore a new opportunity, launch a product, or enter a new market to grow your business. Think of discrimination as a virus in your operating system. It will eventually kill your system if you don’t proactively identify it and fix it.
APPLY BOTH CHECKS AND BALANCES AND BIAS QUANTIFIERS TO KEY OPERATIONAL PROCESSES
领英推荐
Just Work is about fairness. It’s also about enlightened self-interest. What follows are specific ideas for how to make your operational processes more fair and more successful: hiring, retention, compensation, performance management, coaching and mentoring, psychological safety measures, exit interviews, NDA’s and forced arbitration, and organizational design.
HIRING COMMITTEES MAKE BETTER HIRING DECISIONS THAN INDIVIDUALS
HIRING COMMITTEES ARE NOT A SILVER BULLET
HOMOGENEOUS COMMITTEES HIRE HOMOGENEOUS TEAMS
QUANTIFY BIAS AT EVERY STEP OF THE PROCESS
CHALLENGE BIASED COMPARISONS
It’s difficult to get hiring right. But if you don’t also focus on retention, it is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE SPREAD.
DON’T BIFURCATE.
CREATE A FAIR COMPENSATION SYSTEM.
CONSIDER STANDARDIZED, TRANSPARENT SALARIES.
QUANTIFY HOW BIAS IMPACTS PAY.
DISCRIMINATION CAN BOOMERANG.
ANALYZE PROMOTION DATA TO QUANTIFY YOUR BIAS.
RELY ON A PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM NOT UNILATERAL MANAGERIAL DECISIONS.
QUANTIFY BIAS IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS.
Formal systems such as compensation and ratings are important for an employee’s career development. Often, informal mentoring is even more important. Having good mentors can be an enormous boost in a young person’s career. But few things are hijacked more by bias than mentorship. Mentoring people who are underrepresented gets into a gray area that is almost everyone’s reality. The only way to build a diverse team is to make sure you and your team are not biased about whom you are mentoring. Make mentoring transparent. Don’t build these relationships behind closed doors, at strip clubs, at golf clubs, in your hotel suite, whatever. Have these meetings, no matter whom you’re mentoring, in public places.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has not only defined psychological safety but also come up with an effective way to measure it. She developed a brief survey that gauges employee reactions to seven statements:
If you break the answers down by gender or any other group of underrepresented employees, this simple series of questions offers a remarkably powerful indication of how people feel about the place they go to work every day.
Exit interviews can also be useful in providing a qualitative snapshot of your organization. When people whom you wanted to retain quit, you should do everything you can to get them to tell you why.
Do not adopt the practice of requiring all employees to submit to forced arbitration if they get in a dispute with the company.
What if the CEO misbehaves?
If the company has a board of directors, it is the board’s responsibility to address the CEO’s misbehavior—it’s one of the reasons you have a board of directors in the first place. However, HR is often blamed for not holding the CEO accountable or for mishandling HR violations reports. I’m all for speaking truth to power, but this doesn’t seem fair. It’s pretty hard to investigate your boss.
7.For People Harmed and Upstanders
How to Fight Discrimination and Harassment Without Blowing Up Your Career
Beware of Enterprises That Require New Clothes*
When you are confronting harassment and/or discrimination, or when you are an upstander for someone else who is, you’re likely to feel angry and confused. That’s legit. Before you decide on tactics and strategy, take some time to find people who have compassion for what you’re going through, folks who can help you assess your situation.
Whether you are a person harmed or an upstander, I suggest three preliminary steps:
Once you have oriented yourself and decided to move forward, here are four other escalation choices you may want to consider, depending on your situation:
If you are an upstander, you probably won’t be taking the last two steps, but you may help the person harmed take them.
8.Touch
How to Create a Culture of Consent and the Cost of Failing to Do So
It would be nice, at least from the manager’s perspective, to have absolute rules regarding touch in the workplace. No touching. No dating. No affairs. No casual sex. But humans have never been able to follow these sorts of rules. And employee romance is not always a bad thing. Before we got married, my husband and I dated while working at the same company. Work is a place where many of us meet our life partners.
This chapter will cover the different ways that touch can go wrong at work, how to try to prevent them from happening, and what to do if they happen despite your best efforts to avoid them.
ALCOHOL IN THE WORKPLACE.
Serving alcohol at work or at work functions is undeniably risky—for the employees and for the company. I don’t recommend it. But if you’re going to do it anyway, here’s how I recommend managing it.
INNOCENT HUGS VS. “INNOCENT” HUGS AND OTHER LOADED INTERACTIONS.
When one of my employees kicked another in the butt, he considered it a friendly sideswipe gesture. She found it obnoxious. Nobody, including the woman kicked, thought it was a federal case. But she wanted him to knock it off, and it was my job as the boss to make sure he did.
REGRETTED SEX IN THE WORKPLACE.
What happens when two people who work together have a genuinely consensual hookup and then one or both of them regret it in the morning—or after a week or a month?
ABUSE-OF-POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN THE WORKPLACE
However, things can go badly wrong when one person in the romance is the boss of the other or considerably more senior in the organization.
INSTITUTIONAL COURAGE
I offer suggestions below on preventing and responding to physical violations in the workplace
TELL YOUR STORY. LISTEN TO OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES
DON’T ALLOW SHAME TO SILENCE YOU
FIND THE SUPPORT YOU NEED
GIVE YOURSELF A VOICE
CONSIDER GETTING A MEDICAL EXAMINATION
CONSIDER REPORTING THE CRIME TO THE POLICE
LEADERS:
Educate yourself.
Create a culture of consent
Build trusted reporting systems
Investigate thoroughly. Don’t hide behind sham processes
BE TRANSPARENT
DON’T PASS THE TRASH
DON’T GIVE UNCHECKED POWER TO MANAGERS
COLLECT DATA
Don’t Over-Delegate Diversity Equity and Inclusion Work
PART THREE
Systemic Justice and Injustice
At some level, Just Work is so very simple. It’s about respecting each person’s individuality so you can collaborate and get sh*t done. Who doesn’t want that? If we weren’t so numb to injustice, we’d be shocked that we ever allow it to get in the way of becoming who we want to be and doing what we want to do. And yet we do. All. The. Damn. Time.
To understand why Just Work is so rare, let’s look at what moves us away from collaboration and respect. Partly it’s the discrete attitudes and behaviors already discussed. But it’s also the dynamics between them.
The Conformity Dynamic drags us away from respecting individuality, usually offering a pretense of being rational, civilized, polite. But this dynamic excludes underrepresented people in a way that is not at all rational and can cause as much or even more harm in the long run as outright violence.
The Coercion Dynamic is what drags us away from collaboration. It makes no pretense at being polite—it is brutal.
Understanding and recognizing these dynamics, the differences between them, and how they operate together and separately is crucial to our ability to interrupt them before we have created systems that are unjust. Recognizing these dynamics is essential to understand how to replace unjust systems with Just Work.
9.Two Bad Dynamics
THE CONFORMITY DYNAMIC
The Conformity Dynamic implicitly conveys an ancient message: Be one of us, or make way for us. And for many underrepresented employees, of course, conforming to that “us” is not desirable or even possible.
The Conformity Dynamic is obviously not particular to gender: it plays out wherever bias or prejudice impacts decision-making and leads to discrimination.
THE COERCION DYNAMIC
The Coercion Dynamic is an equally ancient, well-worn path that leads from bias to bullying to harassment to violence.
If we lived in a world where the Coercion Dynamic did not create a well-worn path from bias to sexual violence, his behavior would have been “only” bullying. A discrete event. But given the world we did live in, he was reflecting and reinforcing rape culture. His behavior was misogynist.
BOTH DYNAMICS ARE SELF-REINFORCING.
10.Recognizing Different Systems of Injustice
These dynamics combine in different ways to create three different systems of injustice in the workplace. If we know what to call them, it can be easier to identify them and dismantle them.
SYSTEM ONE: BRUTAL INEFFECTIVENESS
Brutal Ineffectiveness is what you get when the Coercion Dynamic and the Conformity Dynamic are happening at the same time and reinforcing each other. Sometimes it springs from an evil leader, but it often springs from management systems that fail to hold people accountable for bad behavior or that even reward bad behavior. Power dynamics, competition, poorly designed management systems, and office politics can create systemic injustice in ways that may be subtle and insidious at the outset but over time become corrosive, and often even criminal.
SYSTEM TWO: SELF-RIGHTEOUS SHAMING
We can—indeed, we must—hold people accountable for unjust attitudes and behaviors, but we should not attempt to coerce people into mimicking our own beliefs and ideas, tempting though it may be to try, abhorrent though we may find their prejudices. The problem is threefold. First, it doesn’t work. Yes, it may be possible to intimidate people into hiding their prejudiced beliefs, but that doesn’t change what they think; it just makes it more likely it will come out in destructive, insidious ways. Second, such bullying tactics violate the very principle of collaboration, even when they are employed in the name of morality. They land us in an unjust system I’ll call Self-Righteous Shaming. This brings us to the third problem. This system is unstable. We don’t have to respect prejudices that demand conformity; indeed, we must challenge them. But when we disrespect the people who hold them, then over time we are demanding conformity—ironically in the name of respecting individuality! We slide from Self-Righteous Shaming over to Brutal Ineffectiveness.
BOTTOM-UP SHAMING: THE CONDEMNING MOB
Often our intentions in shaming are good: we are trying to defend a vulnerable individual or a group of people who are being disrespected. Or perhaps we have been shamed ourselves, and so it feels fine to dish it out. Or we are just fed up with a broken system that isn’t working for us, so we lash out at a person rather than trying to fix the system—as the guy who shamed me for my bicycle behavior did. Or perhaps the people we are shaming are more powerful than we are, so we assume they somehow deserve it or can take it. We forget that we owe common human decency to everyone, regardless of how powerful or powerless the person is.
Shaming becomes even more dangerous when a group of people are doling out the shame. Given how addictive the rush of shaming others is, and how social media tend to facilitate this kind of communication, condemning mobs are not only ubiquitous online but increasingly common in today’s workplaces.
Another thing that makes Self-Righteous Shaming more likely is when there is not just a majority but a supermajority. When the vast majority of people share a point of view, it’s likely that they will dismiss the dissenting voice in a way that shames those who disagree.
TECHNIQUES THAT WORK BETTER THAN SHAMING TO CONFRONT INJUSTICE AT WORK
TOP-DOWN SHAMING: ZERO TOLERANCE
The power of a condemning mob is bottom up. It lies less in the status of its members than in its sheer size. Weak leaders fear this kind of mob and seek to avoid its wrath at all costs; strong leaders seek to learn from it and are able to guide it to a more productive outcome.
WHAT WORKS BETTER THAN ZERO TOLERANCE FOR LEADERS?
CREATE A CULTURE OF COLLABORATION: TEACH FOLKS TO “INVITE IN,” NOT “CALL OUT”
ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
DON’T CRITICIZE THE CRITICISM
LAY YOUR POWER DOWN
MANAGE ONLINE COMMUNICATION
DO WE HAVE TO TOLERATE INTOLERANCE? NO
But we have to combat it in a way that doesn’t create a new in-group and a new out-group, thereby compounding the very problem we are trying to correct. The touchstone is always collaboration. Intolerance fragments the team. How can that fragmentation best be healed? Fighting prejudice by creating a new kind of prejudice is not effective, either practically or morally.
HOW TO BECOME LESS SELF-RIGHTEOUS AND MOVE TOWARD JUST WORK
If your workplace is characterized by Self-Righteous Shaming, the good news is, you’re already part of the way through your Just Work checklist. You’re struggling with one bad dynamic but not two. The bad news is that if you don’t continue to work your way down the checklist, not only will bad things happen, but the good work you’ve already done will likely get undone. Self-Righteous Shaming is unstable, as its bullying leads quickly toward discrimination and abuse.
OBLIVIOUS EXCLUSION
Oblivious Exclusion is by far the most common manifestation of workplace injustice. It’s the least dramatic and hardest to put your finger on. It’s especially easy for the people causing harm to ignore. Things are collegial, pleasant, and civilized—at least if you’re on the inside or even close to the inside
It’s also difficult for the people harmed to identify Oblivious Exclusion when it’s happening. Brutal Ineffectiveness, that’s something you feel. You know something is wrong because you are being harmed in pretty obvious ways. Self-Righteous Shaming slaps you right in the face. But Oblivious Exclusion operates in the shadows. When you try to call it out, the answer is often just “Nothing to see here.” It’s what I was running away from when the bank executive said, “I didn’t know they let us hire pretty girls.” Here’s a story about what it’s like.
11.JUST WORK
A Moment for Optimism
It’s inspiring to think about how often throughout history impossible dreams have become expected realities.
When we learn to recognize how the dynamics of bias, prejudice, bullying, discrimination, harassment, and physical violations operate in similar ways for different people, we can unite in interrupting them and make the workplace—and, indeed, the world—more just. This growing understanding of our interconnectedness is reason for optimism.
LOVE AND JOY
In a commencement address to Wellesley’s class of 2018, Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd poet laureate of the United States, offered a beautiful reminder that to achieve our ideals, we need to bring love and joy to the work.
We tend to avoid that word [love] when we talk about politics, about demographics and policy, employing in its place a term like “tolerance.” But tolerance is meager. Tolerance means I will make space for you beside me on some kind of imaginary national bus, then slide back over so you don’t get too much of what I never stopped thinking is mine?… Tolerance requires no cognitive shift.
But Love is a radical shift. Love tells me that your needs must be as important to me as mine are; that I can only truly honor and protect myself by honoring and protecting you?… Love assures me that giving you what you need is a way of ministering to myself, to the Us that you and I together make?…
In order to embrace Love, I must move past fear, past a fixation on my own claim to power or authority.
JUST WORK: THE LOOK AND FEEL
Have you ever worked someplace where everything felt more or less right? Where your boss was fair, your colleagues respectful, and the atmosphere conducive to doing your best work? Where there was no bias, prejudice, bullying, discrimination, harassment, physical violations, or at least very little? What was it like? Even if you’ve never had the experience, dream a little. What would it be like? I once had a job at This Company where I felt as if I could Just Work. Let me end with that story—and the lessons I’ve learned from it.
JUST WORK IS MORE SUCCESSFUL—AND MORE FUN
In an environment where I felt secure, comfortable, and on an equal footing with my colleagues, I was able to do some of the best work of my life. I brought everything I had to that job. My team and I delivered on my promise to “defy the law of large numbers.” We increased our revenue 10x while actually shrinking costs. We built an extremely profitable, fast-growing business. And we had a lot of fun doing it, building relationships that have endured for years. I loved my work and my team; we accomplished a great deal together.
JUSTICE IS BY DESIGN
The work environment at This Company was no accident.4 This Company had optimized its organizational design to maximize effectiveness and innovation. That design yielded two great benefits: unstoppable business results and justice. There were two key principles: Collaborate and Respect Individuality.
COLLABORATE, DON’T COERCE
RESPECT INDIVIDUALITY, DON’T DEMAND CONFORMITY
A PROCESS, NOT A DESTINATION
Here is the key thing to remember about Just Work. It’s a process, not a destination. There’s no natural stopping point. You have to keep striving to achieve it.
IT’S SIMPLE, EVEN IF IT’S NOT EASY
When the problems seem insurmountable, return to these two core ideas: First, respect your colleagues for who they are. Don’t demand that they conform to some preconceived idea you might have of who they “ought” to be. Second, collaborate with your colleagues. Don’t try to dominate or coerce them.
In other words, Just Work!
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