Talking About… Unwritten Rules and Workplace Norms

The subtle and hard-to-see ways that bias shows up at work, every day.

Sarita: Today, Maggie and I are talking about how bias shows up in everyday workplace norms. And that even the most earnest of us have blind spots.

Equity issues are prominent in corporate environments. Let’s start with a bit of data: In the United states, about half of us are female, half are male, 70% of us are white, 13% of us are Black, 18% are Hispanic or Latino. But that’s not what C-Suites or Boardrooms or Congress looks like.

The people in power in America don’t look like the rest of America.

An illustrative example: There was a recent congressional hearing with CEOs of large banking firms. Congressman Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, asked “If one among you happens to be something other than a white male, kindly extend your hand into the air.” No one could raise their hand. This is the de facto picture of the American CEO.

What I think is interesting is that, in 2020, the lack of diversity isn’t by intentional design. There’s plenty of data that shows that more diversity leads to stronger earnings. Which ties to activist investors focusing on this topic, seriously.

To explain the lack of diversity, on the ground, we hear a lot of things like the pipeline problem, which is mostly seen as a myth by the research community.

There seems to be strong convergence around the idea that, rather than intentional design, the lack of diversity has pernicious underpinnings. There are a lot of factors in those underpinnings — a person’s voice (“she’s so shrill!”), a person’s size (being short as a man, or being overweight), the double-bind (“too aggressive”, “too emotional!”) — all kinds of conscious and unconscious assumptions. It’s good to see this topic get a lot of coverage — awareness is key to addressing it. But there’s one part that we don’t hear about as often, and that we can impact: The unwritten rules, aka the workplace norms.

Workplace norms come in different forms: Things like whose authenticity is welcomed and who has to code-switch, the topics that people talk about (golf and football immediately come to mind), the norms around, and the expectations and assumptions about, how people spend their time.

Maggie: Yes — because the norms give rise to poor outcomes, like microaggressions and incorrect assumptions about leadership potential. Norms and unwritten rules are some of the most insidious ways corporations uphold racist structures.

And, yeah, I’m going to use the word “racist.” We don’t talk about systemic racism in our workplaces very often, and the “R-word’ still feels like a pejorative. In point of fact though, it’s not a pejorative. It is a descriptive word.

Sarita: I hear you. If we have entrenched racial bias in the country, it’s natural to see that reflected in workplaces.

Okay, let’s start off with “cultural fit.” Let’s focus on two aspects of cultural fit: The “values” and the “norms.”

In the “values” parts — you want colleagues who are honest, hardworking, collaborative, strong EQ, and so on. This part is about character, virtue, social emotional skills — this is an area that’s easy to agree on.

Then, there’s the “workplace norms” part. This is where bias can be subtle, like your hobbies or how you speak.

One common workplace norm is being drawn to “the younger version of myself.” Seeing a person who reminds me of me makes that person seem like a great fit, right? Those thoughts drive hiring and promotions. And after cycle-after-cycle of people promoting people who are their younger professional dopplegangers, you now have the blueprint of what a leader looks like. And you see that in the numbers: Senior executives are overwhelmingly white, male, and tall.

Another common workplace norm, and also insidious, is the “authentic” factor. The leadership zeitgeist is “be your real you!” But if your “real you” is different from everyone else, you aren’t really in the club. So, my personal experience, over many companies and many years, is walking into conversations about golf, football, cars… oh wait, I fell asleep as I was typing. Anyway, these are things that hold no interest for me. Imagine me going into an executive meeting and talking about an epiphany I had in yoga. I’d worry people were calling me a “pansy” behind my back. I wouldn’t talk about those things.

What are some of the subtle-bias workplace norms you, or your clients, have experienced?

Maggie: We had a famous example of this back at the Fortune 50 corporation I used to work at. It became a teaching example of this kind of thing.

I live in Minnesota, and there’s a strong culture — specifically a strong white culture — around going fishing, hunting, state parks and things like that. A lot of these outdoor spaces are north of our metro — people often reference it as “Going Up North.” And part of what enables this is owning a cabin, up north, and getting away to it every summer weekend. Kind of like going to the Hamptons for New Yorkers.

So in the summertime, “Up North” was basically the only Monday morning and Thursday afternoon conversation in many departments at the company. “Are you going Up North this weekend? Did you go up North? Did you go to your cabin? Did you get out in the boat?” It was almost always assumed that you had a cabin somehow in your family or friends that you could go to. Cabin culture, cabin life.

As you can imagine, land Up North is often really expensive. The ability to own a second property is a form of wealth privilege; cabins, even for “middle class” professionals with really modest properties, are often inherited wealth or investment properties.

Well, this assumption about cabin life excludes a ton of people. Folks that don’t come from Minnesota usually don’t have that chain of inherited access to cabin life. People who didn’t grow up with wealth, or young folks with high student debt load are excluded from this conversation — no inherited property or no money to buy the property. People with other priorities are excluded from the conversation.

Crucially, BIPOC are often excluded from this conversation, as it is a very white-culture thing in Minnesota. It is far less common for Black, Indigenous, communities of color in the Twin Cities to have this multigenerational tradition of the cabin. The narrow focus and lack of inclusiveness were dominating, especially if it was the team leader or a senior leader driving the discussion about their Up North plans. Usually, these conversations didn’t open the door for people to say, “I don’t have a cabin, but I got up to X, Y, and Z this weekend.” It was a systematic lack of curiosity about the full range of how people spend their time.

The Cabin Discussion became a really strong cultural norm and culture driver in my company, and a way to bond with peers and leaders — if you were like the peers and leaders.

In 2016, the summer where there were a ton of police murders of Black individuals all throughout the country, the company grappled with how to respond to that round of police shootings. As part of that, “The Cabin Discussion” started getting spoken about and it started to become more okay to talk about this kind of exclusionary conversation, to talk more openly about diversity, inclusion, race in the workplace.

Sarita: I’m curious about how people in your company started to point out that the Cabin Conversation was exclusionary. It takes courage to be able to say something like that.

Maggie: It had been a huge blind spot for many of the mid-level and senior leaders. I, myself, don’t have this generational cabin connection. And I still found myself upholding the norm.

It started with staff from employee resource groups. In the wake of the shootings, we’d been asking “What can we do? How can we help?” And they, bravely, responded. “Some of you think we don’t have a problem with exclusion here. Well, we have an example: Let’s talk about how you talk about your cabins.”

Unfortunately, we had put the burden of education onto people who didn’t have access, namely, the Black people and people of color in our organization, and the “transplants” who’d moved here.

I no longer believe that that is okay to do. It is up to us, as white folks and wealth-privileged folks, to interrogate ourselves and do the work. How might we look through the lens of people who aren’t exactly like us (racially, age, tenure in career, wealth background, “localness”, etc)? How do we draw everyone into the conversation on equal footing and level the power? How do we ensure we fairly assess and include people whose style differs from our own? How do we offer curiosity and genuine interest towards other people? We could have figured this out but it was easier not to — privilege wants to be comfortable.

The awareness of the problem also stemmed from some urgent conversations driven by the Recruiting team, about managers in key areas where they were having trouble recruiting and retaining people. Why can’t why can’t we keep people once we hire them? Exclusionary culture was a significant piece of the answer to that question.

Sarita: That’s an important point: Diversity is recruiting, retention, and advancement. Diversity in hiring doesn’t mean much if a business can’t retain the people they’ve hired. And then grow them professionally, which is built on top of helping employees feel like they belong, see evidence that they are valued, and are given real opportunities to grow.

Maggie: Exactly! So the Cabin Discussion became a teaching example in the broader inclusion & retention conversation. It led to real discussion and practicing of new leader behaviors to improve team culture. I think — hope — that the HR and D&I leaders also made progress holding managers accountable for team culture’s role in retention of diverse team members.

Sarita: Let’s touch on your earlier point about the blind spot, too. The cabin example is an interesting example, because if you’re used to the cabin conversation — if it’s something that you grew up with — it might not be obvious that it’s problematic.

It seems like a good idea to talk about the Johari Window, and deliberately look for our blind spots.

The Johari Window is an exercise to help you map out what you know, what you don’t know, and what you don’t even know you don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld made it famous. That last area, the what-you-don’t-know-you-don’t-know piece is essentially your blind spots.

And of course, with blind spots, the big question is how do you find them? There are blind spots that other people see, but are blind to you. And in workplace norms, these can be things like the cabin conversation, where you don’t know the impact, but other people do.

To me, this strikes an even more fundamental issue: That people often don’t feel safe to challenge the unwritten rules and workplace norms. I’ve felt it, myself, deciding not to share a concern because simply speaking up can, in and of itself, exclude you. We all know the adage: Don’t bring a problem into my office without solutions.

Maggie: And if you don’t bring those solutions, that reputation will stick with you, or at least that’s the story we’re fed. This norm presupposes your concerns will be believed (which they often aren’t!) even if you do have solutions, and again puts the accountability on the person who is uncomfortable or being harmed to fix things — rather than on the people or systems doing the harm.

That reluctance you describe, that fear, that lack of psychological safety and frankly often the lack of real career-security safety, is also what keeps us playing small and staging silent. It often keeps us from speaking up on behalf of others, even though that’s sometimes easier to do.

Sarita: A straightforward example is the idea that “all are welcome here” or “I have an open door policy.” We genuinely believe it — we’re sincere when we say it. The problem with that model is that it puts the burden on the people who are not on the “inside.” It also has an interesting unintended side effect, that, despite what you say, people might not feel welcome — the sense that the risks are way higher than the rewards. Better safe than sorry.

Another norm is “Occam’s Razor,” the idea that the simplest explanation is likely the explanation. You could say that a lack of gender or racial diversity is due to a tangled web of assumptions and biases and behaviors. Or, you could go with Occam’s Razor and say “There’s a pipeline issue. That’s why we don’t have diversity. We don’t have enough women and POC of color in the pipeline!”

That second reason is easier to accept. It’s easier to understand. Whereas, say, microaggressions are just plain hard to see — they are subtle and easy to dismiss. It’s more of a “death by a thousand cuts” than a one-big-thing.

For me, this has one of my biggest struggles when I’ve talked about these topics with people who are particularly data-based. Data-based leaders often respond that there’s no evidence, or the evidence could be explained one of fifty different ways.

It goes hand in hand with the “I’m a good person” defense. It highlights what the person assumes about their own underlying intent. A combination of, “I didn’t intend to be exclusionary. I didn’t intend to be racist. I didn’t intend to set social norms that make you feel like you’re left out.”

Maggie: But then are they going to actually change the situation? That’s a very defensive, self-preserving kind of statement. One I hear all the time from my twelve-year-old, “But I didn’t mean to.” Yet somehow ok also for a fully grown adult leader to say.

I recently learned a counter to that protest about intention — and to be honest, I’m still practicing using it in the moment. I practice all the time on my twelve-year-old. The response is that his intent behind his words/actions doesn’t really matter as much as the impact of his words/actions. Intent is actually not at all what we’re talking about here. You can carry that intent with you, but that’s your personal thing.

It’s really just a rehash of the old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If we can be clear we’re talking about impact of our words, action, workplace norms, then we maybe get to something measurable in the workplace, or accept the evidence more easily.

There’s tons of business case data out there around inclusion around the cost of losing great talent, the productivity hit if we can’t attract talent, the better outcomes when we have diverse team members and diverse leaders actively involved in decision making.

So can we get away from this mistrustful conversation about intent? Can we start to flat-out take ownership of the conversation and steer it to impact, to measures?

Sarita: I agree! First, I generally assume people don’t intend to be sexist, racist, agist or homophobic.

Maggie: So I can then choose to respond with the mindset of someone who is actively dismantling those things. I’m anti- sexist, I’m anti-racist, I anti LGBTQ-bias, I’m anti age-bias. All of the things that are protected by the civil rights act.

Sarita: It brings us back around to workplace norms and culture fit — how we define fit or “leadership potential,” what it means to be a senior leader. Let’s dig into the idea of fit and what a leader looks like, in our next conversation.