Be One of Us or Make Way for Us: The Harmful Effects of Conformity Culture

Be One of Us or Make Way for Us: The Harmful Effects of Conformity Culture


Let’s look at what moves us away from collaboration and respect. Partly it’s the discrete attitudes and behaviors I discussed last week. But it’s also the dynamics between them. This week I’m going to talk about the Conformity Dynamic and next week I’ll introduce the Coercion Dynamic.

The Conformity Dynamic drags us away from respecting individuality, usually offering a pretense of being rational, civilized, polite. But this dynamic excludes some 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 Conformity Dynamic implicitly conveys an ancient message: Be one of us, or make way for us. And for many employees, of course, conforming to that “us” is not desirable or even possible.

There are many things about myself I don’t want to change—my gender, for example; and others I couldn’t change even if I wanted to, like my age or my height. And when people are excluded from opportunity or subjected to unjust policies because they can’t or won’t conform with an arbitrary norm, it leaves them vulnerable to abuse, both emotional and physical.

The conformity dynamic

The Conformity Dynamic often masquerades as “polite” or “professional.” This is BS. The fact that it’s not overtly violent doesn’t mean that it isn’t destructive.

Shortly after I joined Google, a colleague told me not to wear a pink sweater to a meeting with the executives. The basic message, offered in the guise of helpful advice, was this: Try not to look too much like a woman in this meeting. He thought he was being helpful, but he was reinforcing gender bias. A white colleague told a Black colleague to cut off his locs before an important meeting. The basic message, offered in the guise of helpful advice, was this: Try not to look too Black in this meeting.?

If either of these people had wanted to be truly helpful, they would at the very least have acknowledged that in a more just world, they would have offered feedback to the leaders in these meetings to focus on the real work and not the sweaters or hair of their employees.

The Conformity Dynamic is reflected in the polite racism that Martin Luther King Jr. decried in his liberal allies in the North. People use the absence of explicit violence in their behavior to deny the harm that their attitudes and behaviors cause, to ignore the systemic injustice that results. The Conformity Dynamic plays out in different ways for different people. Here is a story about how it played out in my life.

The Conformity Dynamic: The Effects of Erasure

The Effects Of Erasure

When I was 7 years old, my parents were playing tennis at their club as I amused myself by picking wild blackberries along the fence. Suddenly, two men approached the court. I was nervous because I knew the club’s rules. Women were not allowed to be members; my mother and I were there as my father’s guests.

This translated to the following hierarchy for the tennis courts: If two women were playing, a man and a woman could take their court. Once the man and woman started playing, if two men walked up, the men could boot the man and the woman off the court. This, I feared, was about to happen to my parents.

But then my mother, who was seven months pregnant, pointed at her belly and said to the two men, “I have a man-child inside of me. So there are two men on the court.” The two men accepted this logic and went off to find another court.

I was astonished. My embryonic brother’s penis had carried the day in a way that my brilliant, creative, strong adult mother could not have. I was outraged by the injustice of it. At school, we would never have been allowed to invent such ridiculous rules to exclude kids we didn’t want to play with. But this was the sexist hierarchy that governed our existence.

When I got my first summer job at a bank in Memphis, an executive said to me, “Why, I didn’t know they let us hire pretty girls!” I was eighteen, and I had no idea what an “I” statement was or how to respond. So I said nothing. I just felt deflated.?

This kind of erasure wore down all but the toughest women. And while I was getting underestimated as a result of my gender, I was getting overestimated as a result of my race. I was in denial about both dynamics for much of my life.

It was conversations with women who weren’t white that helped me notice what was really going on. This speaks to the importance of solidarity between people of different identities to challenge all the behaviors that contribute to a vicious cycle. United, we can create a virtuous cycle.


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Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight?some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I'll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect, available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor? and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.

Aaron Schmookler, Awakening Unstoppable Teams

75+ Growing Teams Awakened || Stop fighting human nature. Boost team chemistry, PERFORMANCE, and morale || When will your team become unstoppable?

4 个月

The trick often comes in seeing arbitrary norms as arbitrary. Once a practice can be felt as a norm, our minds stop questioning it. Question norms! RIght on, Kim!

Simon Bamping

PYP Coordinator, NPQH and Outdoor Learning Advocate

4 个月

Interestingly illustrates how some parents of students sometimes try to pressure schools to exclude other students who differ in their learning needs or family backgrounds.

Anindya Kundu

Designing for AI at Salesforce

4 个月

Loved this... so true!

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