Let discomfort be your guide.
White leaders: we are not supposed to feel comfortable as we pursue equity work in our organizations. To do this work is to dismantle some of the very structures that led us to be where we are.
Over the last several months we’ve seen stories break of companies — nearly always led by white men of some repute — choosing to create a “no politics at work” policy. And the reasoning each time seems to be that it pulls focus away from the work at hand, which is an interesting position to defend when that policy also leads to roughly half your team leaving the company. But I digress. There is a common thread among these companies: they are led by experienced leaders who over the years have no doubt honed their instincts and have learned how to listen to their gut for information. They are probably exceptional at assessing a certain kind of risk. They make decisions once they get comfortable enough with their ability to control the variables. So it’s not a surprise at all that these same leaders want to shut down conversations about “politics.” As far as anyone can tell, they define “politics” as whatever makes them uncomfortable, or whatever might provoke a disagreement. And therein lies the problem: in the case of building an equitable organization that can get the best work out of its teams, a white leaders’ comfort is the wrong barometer.
“Politics at work” is coded language for conversations about racial and social justice. Those conversation should be about making space for Black and Brown, queer, disabled, neurodiverse people to show up more fully at work (which then leads to them delivering their best work, which is what the white leaders in question claim to be optimizing for). The variables that are introduced when we invite conversations about equity into our organizations are not ones white leaders have a lot of personal experience with, and therefore we can misunderstand and mis-assess the risks.
Hakeem Jefferson and Koji Takahashi recently published research that shows this behavior is actually most common among white people who consider themselves progressive. These white progressives are most “motivated to protect their self-image as egalitarian,” and instead of confronting how whiteness, privilege, bias and racism play a role in the workplace, they practice “aversive racism” (coined by psychologists Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidiowhich) which is discrimination by avoidance.
So let’s be very clear: when white leaders try to eliminate “political conversation” in the workplace, they are practicing discrimination by avoidance.
When it comes to building an inclusive organization, we as white leaders can still use our own sense of comfort as a barometer for what is right. Except that in order to effectively build an equitable organization, it’s actually our discomfort that should guide us. When we feel scared, uncomfortable, novice and sometimes even lost at sea, that’s our well-honed instincts telling us where there is work to be done. The next step is to take all the tools we use to succeed as a leader — networks, experts, active listening, accountability — and apply them here.
Let’s just take the last of those — accountability — and unpack it for a moment. In our social media universe, accountability has been deeply conflated with “getting cancelled.” In our work at Seed&Spark with organizations on workplace culture, white employees commonly express this fear. Specifically, that opening up space for conversations about race, gender identity and the like also opens them to the risk of saying the wrong thing, which could lead to the loss of social status, or platform, or their job.
So, avoiding conversations about “politics” is an aversive practice that theoretically reduces the chances that a white person might say something wrong and get “cancelled.” However, the not-so-subtle subtext of an organization avoiding these conversations is that this is a place it’s possible to be cancelled for mistakes. It also says, we optimize for how white people feel.
As Marie Beecham so beautifully articulates, accountability is about reconciliation and repair. An alternative to avoiding hard conversations is to provide a strong framework for accountability inside an organization. How do we hold someone to account? How are we held accountable? What are the steps we take to repair? A framework for repair lets everyone know it’s okay to make mistakes without risking your livelihood. (It also helps people understand what constitutes crossing a line where no repair is possible.)
I find it somewhat astonishing that leaders who really pride themselves on innovation don’t seem to be applying to their workplace culture basic tools for change management (how to help people move through discomfort! how to have hard conversations!) or the incredible resources that seem to be published almost daily. Salwa Rahim-Dillard’s recent 1000-word masterclass in the Harvard Business Review includes an incredibly simple and actionable framework for creating and measuring inclusive leadership. Applying its teachings in our organizations is long-term work, to be sure. But is that work any more challenging than combating the high turnover, loss of talent and institutional knowledge, or worse — lawsuits! — that come with not building workplaces that work for everyone?
Our comfort as white (or cis or male) leaders is not the reward for equity work. Even after we apply all these tools that usually make us comfortable, we will still be uncomfortable. We will second guess that thing we said in a meeting (good, we may say it better next time). We will be extra careful to refer to someone by their correct pronouns even when they’re not in the room (let’s be honest, that’s the bare minimum). We will have to deeply assess how power operates in our organizations and we will have to build new systems that work better for everyone in our workplace.
We will still make mistakes. We will feel “distracted” by all of this, that it is pulling us away from “the work.” Except in this case, we will be doing our actual job as the CEO, which is to remove barriers for our teams to do their best work.
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Emily Best is the Founder and CEO of Seed&Spark. Seed&Spark is an education and crowdfunding platform for creators, and they deliver creators work into enterprises to build more inclusive workplaces through their employee engagement platform Film Forward.
