What does the elephant in your workplace look like?

Welcome to Lead With Inclusion! This weekly newsletter is a resource for EVERY professional. Whether you’re a manager ready to be a more inclusive leader, or an employee ready to be a DEI champion in your workplace, inclusive actions lead to inclusive outcomes. Leading with inclusion simply means starting with inclusive actions in everything you do. It means identifying the areas where bias is at work, and shifting mindsets to make change.?

If you’re not sure where to begin, start here.

We’ve all heard the phrase “the elephant in the room” and asked the question “How do you eat an elephant?”

But have you ever really thought about the fact that these two phrases are related? The first elephant refers to the thing that we are avoiding. The thing that we are pretending we cannot see. Something we are uncomfortable discussing and find awkward or embarrassing to talk about.

The second elephant refers to the way to tackle a task or a problem. I am fond of saying a task may be difficult, but that doesn’t make it impossible. We can break down a task and make it manageable by dealing with it in small chunks.

But why elephants? Probably because an elephant is something you shouldn’t really be able to ignore. It is large, imposing and out of place in somewhere as mundane as a room. It’s a sardonic phrase that tells you a person shouldn't actually be able to ignore this thing, yet is working really hard to do exactly that.

Before I get to our workplace, I think it is important to state the largest elephant in the room today is the current administration in the United states. The entire world is watching as Nazi salutes are being excused, unauthorized access to government systems is being ignored and the breakdown of a democratic government is happening right under our noses. The revolution may not be televised, but the cause of it is.

That being said, the elephant I'm going to address in this issue is that of racism. Currently, in the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we seem to have forgotten that this comes on the heels of the attempted dismantling of affirmative action as well as the outcry about critical race theory being taught in classrooms. So it should come as no surprise that education which attempts to address behaviors that are born out of racism would be problematic to racists.

And I know what you're going to say. I am not a racist. I don't know any racists. I just know good people with occasionally problematic behaviors. But this is why those problematic behaviors are actually an elephant that needs to be addressed. We expect that racist behaviors look like:

• Burning a cross on a Black person’s lawn
• Public lynching
• Bombing predominantly Black churches
• Participating in a Klu Klux Klan rally
• Assaulting a person wearing a hijab or kippah
• Disowning a family member in an interracial marriage
• Threatening, harassing or violently targeting a person of color
• Using the N word as a racial slur (personally any use of this word by a non-Black person is problematic)

We don't think that racist behaviors look like:

• Constantly mispronouncing someone’s name and/or calling them by a simpler name because it’s easier for you
• Refusing to let a Black or Latino doctor operate on you
• Always expecting a Black person to give way when there isn’t enough space on the sidewalk or crossing the road when you see someone of another race approaching you
• Expecting that the Latino person in your office is interviewing for an entry-level role and not the managerial role
• Never nominating one of the Asian women on your team for a promotion despite their superior performance
• Laughing when your coworkers joke about the physical appearance of a Black coworker or say “she’s pretty for a Black girl”
• Staying silent when your peers make comments like “they aren’t as intelligent”, “they’re only here because we needed to fill a quota”, “are you sure they can handle this job?”
• You start a sentence with “I’m not a racist, but . . .”
• As a leader you ignore complaints of harassment and discrimination and/or misdirect blame for harassment / discrimination by saying, “they were just joking” or “you misunderstood”

We expect racist behaviors to be overt, aggressive, violent, and glaringly obvious because this makes it easier for us to ignore the everyday behaviors that racists also exhibit.

If you find the first list of behaviors to be unacceptable, while overlooking the second list of behaviors, you have now identified at least one of your elephants. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Lead With Inclusion

The good news for you is that you don't actually have to do a lot. You don't have to protest in the streets or quit your job in a huff. But you can begin to pay attention to the inequities that exist right in front of you. You can wake up, and stop ignoring the elephant. Stop making excuses for bad actors. Stop laughing at racist/homophobic/sexist/ableist jokes. Stop negatively labeling the request for people to be treated with respect as “woke” and ask yourself why you oppose such treatment.

Be An Inclusive Leader

Of course, if you lead an organization, or a department, or a team, you have a little bit more responsibility. It is literally your job to identify the elephants and begin to take small bites. Take the advice above AND learn how to lead teams. Take that professional development budget you have been provided and put it to good use. Learn how to create psychological safety in teams. Discover ways to obtain feedback from subordinates. Act on the information you have been provided through countless surveys, exit interviews, and one-on-one meetings. You can no longer continue to say you didn’t know you had a problem. And we never believed you anyway.

There are many elephants running rampant in your teams, your departments and your overall organizations. It is time to tackle them. Starting at the organizational level is difficult (not impossible ??) but starting at the team level is easier to tackle. At Rework Work we have broken down the ways to tackle elephants in teams in our The Work Beyond the Workshop program.

Watch below as I explain what The Work Beyond The Workshop program is and then visit https://UnconsciousInclusion.com for additional details.

About Stacey Gordon:

Stacey Gordon is a Bias Disrupter and an unapologetic evangelist for inclusion. As the Founder of Rework Work, she anchors action using change management principles while facilitating mindset shifts. She is a global keynote speaker, Top Voice on LinkedIn and a popular LinkedIn Learning [IN]structor with nearly two million unique learners enjoying her courses.

Want to work with Stacey live? Consider booking her for your next keynote, leadership development meeting or consulting engagement.