Rising Together: Creating A Better Workplace Without The Rancor

Let’s face it. In many ways, today’s workplace is a minefield. Even the most innocent misstep can produce a social explosion.

While there’s no doubt that some old paradigms were penalizing and unfair, especially to women, change efforts have been fraught with a new set of challenges. Some people seem eager to be “triggered,” taking quick offense rather than engaging in honest self-assessment and constructive dialogue. In many work environments, hypersensitivity and cancel culture seem to be the new norms.

What’s needed are voices of wisdom and reason. One such voice is that of Sally Helgesen, internationally bestselling author and cited as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership. The Wall Street Journal called her book The Web of Inclusion one of the best leadership books of all time and credited it with bringing the language of inclusion into the business world.

Helgesen’s most recent offering is Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace.

“While people at every level help build a culture of belonging, leaders are key,” Helgesen says. “Everyone watches what leaders do. So if their actions don’t align with their verbal messages about inclusion, people won’t feel as if they belong and will talk about the organization as ‘they’ rather than ‘we.’”

Helgesen says must-dos for leaders include:

• Being transparent about major decisions and sharing the reasoning behind them broadly, especially decisions related to hiring and layoffs.
• Explicitly linking decisions to the organization’s mission.
• Being very clear about what constitutes exclusionary behavior and holding those who exhibit it to account.
• Freely admitting what they do not know, areas where they do not have expertise.
• Being sure they have one person or group who tell them the absolute truth with no reluctant to say, “This isn’t working for you.”

When they feel marginalized or otherwise offended, some people tell stories to themselves, thereby limiting their ability to respond effectively. Helgesen has some advice for such situations.

“Say you’re a woman and a man gets the promotion you expected and believe you deserved. Your automatic response might be to tell yourself that it’s not fair, that the company privileges men when it comes to promotion, that the guy who was promoted ‘played the game’ while you focused on doing the job. Perhaps all these things are true,” Helgesen says. “But where does telling yourself this particular story get you? Unless you plan to lodge a formal complaint (something you want to think carefully about), you are probably left simply feeling resentful and sharing that resentment with women you assume will be sympathetic, bonding over your shared belief that women never get a break, that ‘men just don’t get it.’ The problem with this narrative is that it offers you no path forward.”

So, what’s the key to dealing effectively with the stories we tell ourselves?

“Tell ourselves a different story,” Helgesen says, “one that puts what happened in a positive light, gives us a way to push back against our resentment and provides a way for us to continue building alliances that will serve us in the future.”

What might that different story be? “We might pause to consider if the man who was promoted had invested in building connections or positioning himself to be visible in a way that made him a more obvious choice for the new job,” Helgesen says. “Perhaps we were too invested in showing we were exactly right for the job we had, an approach that undermined us despite our hard work. The thing is, we don’t necessarily have to believe this story. It’s just a tool for helping us to move forward. We can then ask a mentor, a sponsor, or someone in HR what we need to do to prepare ourselves better for that specific kind of job. We might even forge a relationship with the person who was promoted, asking him what he believes was responsible for his success.”

Helgesen says that when people are unsure of their status or don’t feel entirely accepted, they can get be distracted by what they perceive others might think. “Why doesn’t this person seem interested in my opinions? Why does he favor my colleague? Why do the people in this meeting seem bored when I speak?”

“We may find ourselves putting our energy into trying to manage other peoples’ perceptions rather than communicating clearly or simply doing our work well,” she says.

The problem with this approach, she says, is that people have little control over what others actually think about them. “Perhaps we remind them of their former husband, or the mother-in-law they don’t like,” she says. “Perhaps they just sat through a long and deadly presentation on the very topic we are addressing. Or maybe their mind glazes over whenever someone references statistics.”

In these situations, Helgesen says it’s helpful to recall Stephen Covey’s distinction (highlighted in his classic book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) between what lies within our circle of concern—those things we care about—and what lies within our circle of influence or control. “Since what others think about us lies outside our control,” she says, “putting undue attention there undermines our ability to be effective.”

She says some leaders can be tripped up by “the fallacy of omni-competence,” believing that because they’re good as a specific set of things they are good at everything, that their domain of expertise is expansive. “This often happens with leaders who don’t have anyone who tells them the truth, who are reluctant to let others make decisions because they want a broad expanse of control, or who have risen to their position because of the perception that they are extremely confident rather than ‘merely’ competent). So they feel they can’t afford to be seen as normal humans with strengths and weaknesses. The fallacy of omni-competence tends to result in a lot of bad decision-making as well as serious under-leveraging of the organization’s actual talent and expertise.”

One of the things getting a lot of emphasis these days is “authenticity.” But Helgesen says that quest comes with a big “danger” sign.

“For a long time, people outside the leadership mainstream felt pressured to show up as someone other than themselves,” she says. “If they were gay, they might be urged to hide it. If they were a woman, they may have been told that, to get ahead, they needed to act more like a man. So it’s little wonder the news that we can bring our authentic selves to work has been greeted with relief. Yet at times it’s become almost a kind of article of faith. When authenticity is presented as an absolute, as I often see these days, it can encourage what Marshall Goldsmith calls ‘an excessive need to be.’ The key is balancing our desire to be authentic with the need to show up as a professional.”

Some people in today’s workplace seem predisposed to being aggrieved by what they perceive as microaggressions or microinequities. Helgesen says the “it’s not fair” approach to such perceived behavior is a losing game.

“Concepts such as microaggressions or microinequities can cover a range of behaviors, from small acts of aggression and disrespect to simple tactlessness and cluelessness,” she says. “Let’s face it: these should not be considered hanging offenses. None of us benefits from conflating these very different kinds of behaviors, which only serve to further divide us.”

By contrast, she says, everyone can profit by giving each other the benefit of our good will, and by inquiring calmly what others may have intended by a remark or act that disturbed us. “This is especially important in highly diverse organizations, where people bring very different experiences and backgrounds with them to work,” she says. “We need to save our energy for addressing behaviors that are seriously offensive or problematic, since these can be plentiful and do serious harm.”

For establishing helpful professional relationships, the traditional grapevine and OBNs (Old Boy Networks) have been in use for generations. What are some good alternatives in today’s workplace?

“The traditional strength of Old Boy Networks has been that people within them tend to go out of their way to support one another,” Helgesen says. T”he weakness of OBNs, ever more apparent as the workplace becomes more diverse, has always been their exclusivity. Grapevines, by contrast, are essentially gossip-based networks that encourage bonding among those who perceive themselves as powerless. They tend to be inclusive—open to anyone with a complaint—but they are not good at providing useful support to members.”

She says that in her experience, the most effective networks are those that, like OBNs, operate using leverage and principles of mutual support but are open, inclusive and welcoming.

In today’s society, attempts at humor can be dangerous. Helgesen has some tips for being both self- and situationally-aware when using humor in the workplace.

“A good rule of thumb is to avoid jokes. Jokes are by nature transgressive, relying as they do on confounding expectations. As a result, they frequently succeed in offending one group or another. By contrast, jokes that can’t possibly offend anyone generally aren’t all that hilarious, so you succeed primarily in showing that you’re not very funny. Finally, most people are not particularly skilled at telling jokes.”

Yet humor, she says, is far too important to lose in the workplace. “Humor smooths sticky situations, makes challenging situations endurable, and bonds people together like nothing else,” she says. “But the best kind of humor usually discovers absurdities in a situation and brings them cleverly to the surface. Self-deprecating humor is also highly effective, though not to those at a power disadvantage. If you’re the least senior person in the room, inviting others to laugh at your failings is rarely a good idea. By contrast, if you’re most senior, poking fun at yourself can make you more likeable, more human.”

Some people feel that well-intended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are often as biased and unfair as the previous practices they purport to replace. So, how can DEI programs be deployed in ways that are generally seen as a help to everyone in the workplace, not just a favored few?

Helgesen says claims of “reverse bias” tend to be “fairly ridiculous, usually put forth by those who find their own expectations of privilege are unexpectedly thwarted by their organization’s efforts to offer those outside the traditional leadership mainstream a level playing field."

However, she says, she has seen DEI programs “that marginalize the experience of those who represent the mainstream—for example, white males in western countries. This usually happens as part of ‘whole new day’ initiatives that aim to reverse longstanding practices overnight, or unconscious bias training programs that ask people to disclose attitudes that may come from their family of origin and that are actually nobody’s business. What matters is how people behave, not how they think. When DEI initiatives attempt to police peoples’ thoughts, it’s not surprising that they can stir resentment and backlash.”