Prejudice
HOW LEADERS CAN PREVENT PREJUDICE FROM RUINING RESPECT
Leaders can’t control what people believe. Trying to be the Thought Police is a giant over-step. People are free to believe whatever they want. But they are not free to do or say whatever they want, at least not at work. Freedom is not chaos or a free for all or a right to be cruel.
It has been said that “your right to swing your arms ends just where the other person’s nose begins.” More or less the same thing can be said of prejudices. You can believe whatever you want, but you cannot impose those beliefs on others. It’s a leader’s job to make it clear to all where that line is between a person’s beliefs and any efforts to impose them on others.
When leaders teach their teams to hold up a mirror to bias, usually the result is self-correction. 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 a prejudice probably isn’t going to change it. What, then, can leaders do to prevent prejudice from hurting collaboration and respect on their teams?
I’m going to be honest here. I don’t have a great answer to this question. What I offer here are two ideas. Implementing them won’t “fix everything” but they will take you a few steps in the right direction. You can create a space for conversation, and you can design a fair and reasonable investigation process.
CREATE A SPACE FOR CONVERSATION
Leaders are responsible for setting and communicating clear expectations about the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Figuring out how to come up with a set of abstract principles that will help people know what is OK to do or say and what is not is hard. Do you come up with a list of every image or word that can’t be emblazoned on a shirt or a hat, a list of words that are not OK to say, beliefs that are not OK to express? No. It would be too long, and ultimately useless.
Instead, I suggest an inductive rather than a deductive approach to this problem. Create a space to have conversations about some case studies about things that have happened at other companies or on other teams. How would you handle these situations. After you’ve had a bunch of these conversations, you may be able to figure out a short list of guiding principles. But even after you have those, you’ll still need to continue the conversations to figure out how you’d apply those principles in a given situation.
The goal of these conversations is not to tell people what to believe but instead to come up with a shared understanding of what is OK and not OK to do in your workplace. Most people will respect boundaries—if they know where they are. Bullies, of course, won’t, but we will come to them later.
These conversations will take time and they will elicit some emotion and probably even some heat, but they will push you as a team to think as clearly about behavior as you do about performance. They will force you to articulate what is OK and not OK to say and do in your workplace, and to decide what the consequences ought to be for violating the standards you are setting forth. They will let employees know when they will get a warning, and what is grounds for immediate dismissal. If you have these conversations when things are calm, before some painful public crisis erupts, you’ll be better equipped to figure out what to do.
The first conversation with your team can start with the abstract question: where do they think the line is between one person’s freedom to believe whatever they want and another person’s freedom not to have those beliefs imposed on them is. But pretty quickly, pose some case studies. You can start with some easy ones. Putting a swastika up in one’s cubicle would be a clear violation, at least in my book. What else would be a violation? Why? What would not be a violation? Why? You don’t have to write down what you’d do in every situation. But it’s useful to see how hard or easy it is to come to a shared understanding of what you’d do.
It may be helpful to read about things going wrong at other companies and to imagine that it happened on your team. Read about the James Damore “memo” at Google, or the Basecamp founder making a policy that prompted a third of his employees to quit. These were hard situations. How would you hope your team would handle such incidents? Talking about such emotionally charged situations might feel like borrowing trouble. But it’s much easier to come up with policies based on things that happen at other companies than when you’re in the heat of a real crisis of your own.
If based on these conversations you decide it would be helpful to write a Code of Conduct that articulates your team’s guiding principles, Project Include offers some excellent advice and resources. One important point they make is that that lawyers should not draft such documents because they will turn them into cover your legal ass documents. “What you really want is a collaborative, values-driven approach — one that will inspire working with openness, trust, and collaboration instead of bias, fear, and avoidance.”
DESIGN A FAIR, REASONABLE INVESTIGATION PROCESS
Unfortunately it won’t always be a case study about things going off the rails at some other company. Sometimes they will go off the rails at your company. These conversations will help you figure out what the right consequences are when one person imposes their prejudices on other employees, creating a hostile work environment. 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 investigation process before you are in the middle of a difficult situation.
As a leader, you can create consequences on people who try to impose their prejudices on others. But you can’t impose consequences on people for simply being accused of doing so. It seems like it ought to be unnecessary to write that sentence. But recently a CEO reached out to me, proudly saying he would fire anyone accused of saying things that were prejudiced against women. Certainly, privilege prejudice against women over all the other forms of prejudice is itself a form of privilege. But even if he broadened his policy, it would not be just. As a boss, it’s your job to make sure any complaints are handled fairly. So you need to investigate. It’s not fair to punish for accusation.
As a leader, you’ll have to come up with a system for making judgments case by case, and it’s important that everyone understands the process for making these judgments. Helpful hint: Don’t decide unilaterally or abdicate entirely. Your process can’t be “Trust me, I’m a good leader” or “I don’t know, HR will figure it out.”
