What was that??

How do you know whether what you are experiencing is bias, prejudice or bullying--or none of the above? Not knowing what you’re dealing with can make it hard to figure out what to say.

I like to explore things through a story, so here is one. If you want to listen to it rather than read it, check out the podcast. Co-host Wesley Faulkner and guest Kate Holterhoff share their thoughts about this story, and Kate tells one of her own.

Here’s the story…

Mr. Safety Pin

I was just about to give a Radical Candor talk to the founders and executives of some of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. A couple hundred men were at the conference. I was one of only a handful of women. Just as I was about to go onstage, one of these men ran up to me.

“I need a safety pin!” he hissed. He was clutching at his shirtfront—a button had popped off. Evidently, he assumed I was on the event-staff team. To prevent this very confusion, the conference organizers had given the event staff, most of whom were women a good twenty years younger than me, bright yellow T-shirts. I was wearing an orange sweater. But all he could notice was his need and my gender.

I didn’t know what to say. He was utterly certain that it was my job to fetch him a safety pin. 

I wanted to believe that his assumption about me stemmed from unconscious bias. Not a federal offense. Most of us have made an incorrect assumption about another person’s role based on some personal attribute. These moments are as embarrassing as they are common. It was a classic “Sorry, I don’t work here” moment.

There was very little risk to me in challenging his assumptions. I was established in my career, and he couldn’t harm me in any real way. Why didn’t I say anything?  

If I explained, “I need to prepare for my talk right now, so I can’t help you out,” there was some chance he might reply along the lines of, “Oh. You must be the Radical Candor lady. I don’t believe in that soft, feminine leadership bullshit.” Unlikely. But I’ve experienced that kind of prejudice, more than once. If my attempt at a courteous response prompted him to reveal a conscious prejudice against women, it would piss me off, and that would make it harder for me to focus on my talk.

Then, there was another possibility: bullying. What if I corrected him and he escalated, saying something like “Hey, lady, no need to get your panties all in a wad”? Again, unlikely but not alas impossible. Such things have been said to me, more than once. Then I’d go onstage roiling mad. That would knock off my game.

There was another confounding factor here beyond gender: power. The man assumed he had a right to be rude to the people staffing the event. Perhaps when he realized I was a speaker, not a staffer he would snap into polite mode. But talking to anyone the way he’d talked to me was not OK. And it was my job as a leader to remind him of this, to prevent him from treating the staff badly.

But I didn’t feel like a leader. I felt like a target. All this felt like too much for me to deal with in the moments before I walked onstage. So I said nothing, and the man stomped off, evidently wondering why I was refusing to do my job, muttering something about complaining to the event organizers about the unhelpful staff.

It was hard to know what to say because I didn’t know whether it was bias, prejudice, or bullying behind his comment. Also, it was hard to know what my role was. Was I the person harmed since the comment was directed at me, the leader since I was the speaker, or an upstander for the staff? Or all three? 

In retrospect, my silence was bad for everyone: bad for the staff because he was going to complain about them to their boss; bad for me, because I hadn’t lived in accordance with my own beliefs; and even bad for Mr. Safety Pin. By not pointing out his bias (if that’s what was behind his request), I was making it more likely that he’d repeat his mistake.

The “flavor” of bias, prejudice and bullying that I have experienced as a White woman in the workplace is obviously different from what a Black woman experiences. Indeed, the only Black woman at the conference had been Secretary of State; all I’d had to do to earn my spot as a White woman was to be a director–a middle manager–at Google and Apple.  

A colleague of mine who is a gay Black man and another who is a White Jewish lesbian and another who is a straight Latina executive also experience these attitudes and behaviors differently from each other, and differently from either Michelle or me. My husband, who is a straight White man, also has his own experiences with bias, prejudice and bullying. And so on. We all have these experiences, sometimes as leaders, sometimes as upstanders, sometimes we are harmed by them, sometimes we cause harm. 

My goal in pointing out the shared roots of our difficult experiences is to build solidarity between as many different people as possible in solving these problems.   

Adapted from Radical Respect, the paperback edition of Just Work.