Why career coaching and other career-nurturing relationships are a necessity for underrepresented people to thrive at work
This post is hard, because vulnerability — which is supposed to be an anchor of sound leadership, self-awareness, and growth — for many women of color at work doesn’t always work. I’ve had several ideas for blog posts, ones where I want to share areas where I’ve grown, learned or developed, but I constantly measure what I share against a very present reality that vulnerability about my own growth could reinforce negative implicit biases that are real for women of color.
In an earlier post, I shared a link to a study that showed that black women in leadership roles, in American workplaces, are more harshly punished for mistakes at work. And before I go into how that very real fear of failure, can negatively influence professional development, I need to lay a little foundation for context, starting with a story.
One of my family members went to a book talk, the author was a black man who grew up in a small Upstate New York community, and his book detailed his experience as a black child in the community. He told a story about a black little girl, who was injured while walking to school. She was walking, because black students could not ride the school bus with white students. As a result of her injury, policies were changed and black students could ride the bus. The majority of the attendees at the chat were white members of the community, and one gentleman stood up to comment saying, “Wasn’t it better back then? We all got along. It’s not like today.”
What was wild was that I wasn’t really surprised by his comment — this is why.
I think many of us, irrespective and respective of race, are living in a bubble of our own community. The more privilege we have, the less necessity there is to understand another community’s perspectives, and experiences, for the sake of survival. It may be fun to take a world history class in college, travel, or learn a new language, but the more privileged you are, those things are less of a requirement to survive.
If you are a working-class person on the other side of privilege, much of your survival, and progression, is based on your proximity, or understanding, of the communities with the most power, influence, and leadership of institutions and environments where you live and work. So many of us are raised consciously embodying a mindset that the better you’re able to speak like, think like, look like, and understand the needs of, the most powerful people in those spaces, the greater the likelihood that you will survive and thrive. I want to be clear here and say, this particular mindset isn’t based on an inherent desire to be, or do, any of these things, its based on necessity and fear. Though, there are many people who would do some of these things anyway, because that is simply how they were raised or simply what they like.
Some folks take it a step further, and don’t simply see adopting, and learning the traits of powerful communities as necessary and empowering - they see it as better. So, for them, the people in those communities are better, and this creates a constant sense of inferiority.
In context, whether your lack of privilege is racial, gender-based, financial, educational, all four, or anything else, you invest time energy and attention in learning about the groups with more privilege and increasing your social capital. And because dominant groups influence more channels of influence, like media, entertainment and more, you are naturally inundated with the world through the lens of the powerful. This is in every community, group, and sub-group, in the world — West, East, North & South. It even happens casually in the smallest instances of our most intimate relationships — e.g. whoever is driving controls the music. Now we have to listen to hours of that music. Just let me drive, please.
Sorry, back to black women at work.
With this context, if a black woman is working in a mostly non-black woman environment, in North America, by the time she’s stepped into that office with a couple of years of work experience, she’s learned a lot about the perspectives, experiences, and interests of the dominant communities represented in her workplace.
Through her formal and informal education, she likely knows the things. If she didn’t, she probably wouldn’t survive for long. And studies show that majority folks at work tend to have expectations of the few people of color at work, to not simply be average, or good, but for them to be excellent. The pressure is palpable and real.
I watched an episode of NBC’s “This Is Us” where the character Bethany’s backstory was first revealed. It was beautiful. The episode centered Bethany’s relationship with her mother, which was a personification of Bethany’s lifelong tension between taking the risk-free, trusted and reliable path, versus a dream-filled path, infused with passion, and an increased risk of success. As a talented dancer, Bethany gets into an elite dance academy as a child, where the director hails Bethany, beaming that she could be the first black principal ballerina in an American dance company. Over the years, as Bethany’s body shape doesn’t align with the aesthetic that is prized for ballet, the director finds another black dancer who has the body that matches what is desired. As viewers, we can see that there is only room for one.
That scarcity for an opportunity, the pressure to be excellent, experiencing a lack of empathy for your experiences, and reality-based fear that your mistakes will not be treated with the same grace, requires an approach to work that is simply different, by necessity.
I think that is why there is a bit of a disconnect for some women of color with pop-literature published about “how to be successful at work”. Often times the guidance is written from a lens that cannot understand the real danger of complete vulnerability, or to the greatest extreme, expressed incompetence for underrepresented people.
Over the past few years, I’ve had friends share stories about majority managers, leaders, and peers saying things like, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Many people are faced with new experiences at work, but making that kind of expression is unfathomable for many black women in western workplaces. And so many of them grind, cross every “t” and dot every “i”, keep their colleagues accountable just to make sure it is clear where their responsibility starts and stops, so they are never viewed as dropping the ball. These women are the ones who know the HR policy because they have to make sure they’re always following the rules, they don’t feel as comfortable letting “loose” or being “free” because there’s a chance that a statement can be taken out of context, misunderstood and used to make a case about their lack of professionalism.
Many of my friends have been told that they are too uptight, not fun, need to relax, or my favorite, that they are overdressed to the point that it makes other people feel bad at work.
When they do try to relate, communicate, and share in the same way as their peers, some of them are punished for being unprofessional or critiqued during performance reviews.
This creates a tension that can’t quite be articulated when it comes to professional development. Early in your career, you may hear a critique about your performance that is surprising, but you take it in stride because you want to be better.
Then you notice critiques that seem more like non-specific personality-based comments than data-driven, specific, performance-based feedback, and it’s no longer surprising, it is frustrating. You are now conscious that there is a true lack of awareness of the double-standards. Then, you reach a place, let’s call it a point of maturity, where for the sake of your spirit you learn to delineate between personality-based critiques based on situational likability, and performance-based critiques based purely on numbers. And yet, there is a gray area of professional development, that you know needs attention, but through an implicitly-biased lens, you can’t quite tell if the feedback is spot on and don’t feel safe engaging with it. In fear of reinforcing a stereotype of being combative, aggressive or defensive, you silence yourself, and real learning cannot take place.
If you don’t trust the lens, or integrity, of the professional feedback process, you can’t grow professionally. You may even grow to be defensive in response to it, because you know your career is on the line. For many black women, the performance management experience, with the double-jeopardy of identities, is an inherently intense and disproportionately risky experience. It doesn’t stop black women from still needing solid, bias-free feedback, from someone who genuinely desires to support their professional growth.
So, if this is you — I implore you to find a person outside of work (and maybe outside of your partner) to have a safe, honest conversation about your professional development. Invest in a solid pro career coach/counselor, engage a licensed therapist who specializes in workplace dynamics, feed a trusted professionally-aligned friend group, and nurture a mentorship relationship. Do not rely on your workplace to be the safest and only space for genuine, vulnerable conversations.
Being marginalized doesn’t make you incapable of benefiting from constructive feedback that helps you grow professionally. Many of us have to center a lot of our daily energy to professionally respond to challenges of the workplace, so pro dev feels like a luxury. It isn’t. It is the foundation for your progression. Creating a safe space to invest in honest reflection, may create a professional breakthrough that you’ve been waiting for and deeply need.
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Yes! You made it to the end! Thank you for reading. If this helped you, and you think it could help a friend, share it. Keep up with my future posts by following me here on Medium at medium.com/@ckamya.
