inclusion

Cultivate empathy and curiosity among your team.

by handsrm

One of the central operating principles that makes diverse teams work successfully – what makes them effective – is the effort they make to get to know one another’s experiences. Approaching collaboration with empathy and curiosity is what enables those efforts to succeed.

What do I mean by empathy?

There are different ways of thinking about empathy, and to illustrate them I like to use the example of Counselor Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (If you’re not a Trek nerd like I am, hang with me here – the metaphor should still make sense.)

The character of Troi is from a planet where everyone is an empath, which means she’s able to sense the feelings of others, a valuable trait in a ship’s counselor. When she does her most effective work on the Enterprise, she’s aware of the feelings of others (even over a video call), but she isn’t experiencing those feelings herself, at least not to the same degree. She’s able to identify what’s going on for the other person emotionally, and advise Captain Picard on how to take that into account in his actions.

There are times when Troi does experience the feelings of others deeply. Those are, generally speaking, not good times for the Enterprise, nor are they good times for her. The intensity of the emotions she’s taking on prevents her from being able to take action to address the underlying issue – and at work, we have to be concerned with addressing the underlying issue. Unless we are trained therapists, we don’t have the expertise or authority to really address the experience of those feelings themselves, and to try to do so from your position as a manager will cross a personal boundary for most employees.

So, when I say that you need to cultivate empathy among your team members, I’m talking specifically about empathetic awareness. (You don’t have to be Betazoid to develop that kind of awareness!) It’s not important that your team members feel each others’ frustration and joy as if it were their own; it is important that they understand how to identify others’ emotions and take those emotions into account as they act.

Or, as I often say, feelings are not facts, but they are data. We can and should learn what the data tell us, and take those learnings into consideration as we make decisions at work. (It’s also important to note that the feeling-deeply sort of empathy is not accessible to everyone – but the good news is, you don’t need it to be.)

Curiosity drives empathy. Listening supports both.

One of the most valuable assets just about any employee has is their curiosity. A constant push to know more, to explore ideas, and to understand others’ perspectives is at the foundation of successful collaboration, and following that curiosity creates the space for empathetic awareness among your team members.

You might be thinking “how can I cultivate this on my team? Aren’t empathy and curiosity are traits that adults either have, or don’t?” And it may in fact be easier for people to work together on a diverse team if they come onto the team already inclined toward those approaches. But as a manager, you can identify the specific behaviors in which curiosity and empathy manifest on your team, and make those behaviors part of your employees’ job description.

For example, in a program management role, you might expect the employee to find ways to regularly listen to the needs of your constituents and adapt the program to better meet those needs.

You can also help to cultivate the underlying skill that lets employees enact their curiosity and empathy at work: active listening. In next week’s post I’ll talk about ways that you can model active listening for your team.

How does this tie back to equity and inclusion? One of the main obstacles that people from marginalized groups face at work is that people with more identity-based privilege lack an understanding of the unique challenges that one encounters simply by being of a particular race, gender presentation, or disability status. By creating an expectation that acting with empathy and curiosity are core to doing their jobs well, you establish empathy and curiosity as core to your work culture. By creating a work culture that emphasizes enacting empathy and curiosity through active listening, you open up space for people who face those obstacles to be heard and taken seriously, and for their more privileged colleagues to join them in solving those problems together.

Check your attitude toward your customers.

by handsrm

This week we’re continuing the series on anti-racist management practices. If you haven’t read the other posts in the series, this one stands alone, but I recommend going back and reading the others as well.

Pay attention to your shortcuts.

The ultimate test of your diversity and inclusion efforts is how you apply them to the people who aren’t in the room (whether that “room” is physical or virtual). If your organization is serving people of a particular underrepresented identity – whether by race, gender identity, age, ability, or any other identity axis – it can be easy to talk about those folks with shorthand that reflects negative stereotypes about who they are, rather than focusing on the challenges they face. Your team members will hear that and pick up on those stereotypes. They are likely to replicate them in ways you didn’t intend. They are likely to understand it to be an indication of your own bias in ways that undermine your ability to be effective as a manager. In some cases, they may correctly understand it as a racist or sexist action.

Here’s what I mean by this kind of shortcut, and how subtle it can feel. When interviewing candidates for a technical support role, I’ve often asked: “Tell me about a time when you needed to provide technical help to someone without a technical background.” The most common answers are along the lines of “I helped my mom set up her computer” or “I helped my grandmother figure out her phone” without contextualizing their relative’s background in any way other than their implied age and gender. (Much less frequently, they’ll use “dad” or “grandfather” as their example.) The best answers to that question focus on the background of the person they’re helping and relating the technology to the person’s area of expertise – the challenges that person faces and how to overcome them, rather than who the person is.

When you use that kind of shorthand, even if you know that what you mean is “I helped my grandmother, who has a really deep background in restaurant operations, figure out this new point-of-sale interface that was unlike anything she’d ever seen before, but which was similar to something I used at my last job,” what others will hear is “I helped a person of a particular age range and gender, who obviously needed help because of those factors.” That’s all the information you’ve given them. They’ll reasonably assume that what you’ve said out loud is the relevant information about that person, and that you’re not only extrapolating about that person’s technical ability based on their age and gender, but that you expect them to do the same extrapolation.

As a manager, the risk of the people around you making those assumptions is even more pronounced. At least until you give them reason to do otherwise, your reports will filter everything you say through the lens of “my manager said it, therefore it’s important.” They’ll remember even your offhand comments. If you’re using shortcut language (which by necessity is language laced with assumptions, if not outright stereotypes) to describe an identity that your reports share, they’ll come to reasonable conclusions about the way you think about them, whether you know they hold that identity or not. That can undermine your reports’ willingness to be candid with you, and that makes it much more difficult for you to be effective at achieving your mission.

Pay attention to your team’s language.

You also have to keep a critical ear toward the way your team members talk about your customers amongst themselves. You have to be ready to course-correct if you hear them using this kind of shortcut language, or if you hear them being extra-harsh about customers who are of a marginalized identity. You need to be ready to notice if they’re dismissing the expertise or competence of your Black customers while giving your non-Black customers the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong.

Practice (like, really, practice in the mirror) saying things like “Help me understand why that’s relevant” when you hear shortcut language being used. (“Help me understand more about your grandmother’s nontechnical background.”) Practice saying things like “It sounds like you’re feeling extra frustrated about customer X compared to customer Y, who’s having similar challenges. What’s under that?” Don’t let the underlying assumptions go unquestioned.

Be as consistent about this as you know how to be (and keep learning).

Establishing a pattern of consistently bringing awareness to this behavior, and correcting it, will make your organization a more inclusive place to work, even if your current team is relatively homogenous: it means the next Black person you hire won’t have to be the one to bring up the behavior, and they’ll see that you have their back when you correct it as it arises.

Next week we’ll dive deeper into what it looks like to cultivate the empathy and curiosity that will help your team respond well to interrogating those shortcuts.