September 30, 2020
September 30, 2020
Contributor: Jordan Bryan
To drive workplace inclusion, executives must recognize marginalizing behaviors and address them to support employees.
From taking credit for someone’s idea to pet names, marginalization can take many forms in the workplace. A set of small actions that individually are annoying, but not egregious, can create a “death by 1,000 cuts” phenomenon — they collectively add up to an environment that does not feel inclusive to some members.
Kasey Panetta, Gartner Senior Content Marketing Manager, interviews Christie Struckman, VP Analyst, to talk about confronting behaviors that marginalize underrepresented employees. Christie explains that any employee can marginalize or be the target of marginalization and once these behaviors are recognized, they must be confronted.
For the full interview, listen to the podcast below or read the transcript that follows, which has been edited for clarity and length.
Listen to podcast: How to Confront Marginalization in the Workplace
Marginalization is when someone feels their contribution is not valued, or their idea or specific recommendation is not valued, or because they as an individual, with a demographic that they cannot change, is being devalued. An example is when women feel that simply because they are female, they are not being valued by their peers or they're being treated differently because of that. I'll give an example of three types of marginalizing behaviors.
Let's say that we were in a meeting with three male cohorts, and as a group getting really frustrated because we were struggling to make a decision. It felt like we were caught in this sort of endless debate. And one of our male cohorts slammed his fist on the table and said something like, ‘Come on, we have to get our act together and make a decision. Let's move forward.’
The assessment would be that he is trying to take charge and move forward. But if a woman had done that exact same thing, she would be assessed as exhibiting the behaviors of a “B word.” So think about how uncomfortable it is when you feel that people think that you are a B when you're trying to move the conversation forward, like your other male cohorts have done on occasion.
This occurs when there is a difference between what we think confidence looks like from men and from women. A woman who chooses to be a little bit more quiet in how she approaches things might come across as somebody who's not as competent. So there's this linkage between how confidence is exhibited and therefore somebody's competence, but confidence can look different.
Confidence can look different between men, of course, as well, but there tends to be some sort of natural differences between men and women. And so that difference in how we exhibit confidence being correlated to our competence can be very frustrating.
For example, in a meeting someone volunteers an idea that doesn't get a lot of discussion, but then five minutes later, another team member offers up the exact same suggestion, not giving me credit for the first suggestion, but instead takes it as their own and takes credit.
Read more: Making the Case for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion During Disruption
Yes, and I think organizational processes encourage that because it then gets tied to their performance assessments. But when you do that, there's this huge separation between when the behavior happens and then the HR processes.
And I want to be really clear: The HR processes are necessary, but there's a lag. I refer to marginalization as a death of 1,000 cuts — no one instance in and of itself is going to inspire someone to reach out to HR and to say, “I feel like I'm being marginalized.” But collectively, they create an environment where people don’t feel supported.
Psychological safety means creating an environment that encourages, recognizes and rewards individuals for their contributions and their ideas and makes individuals feel safe enough that they'll take interpersonal risks. The biggest contributor to psychological safety is the relationship between employees and their managers.
Those employees who feel they can have an open and honest conversation may be more comfortable bringing up work challenges. And it is an important part of the management role to create that environment, which is why I've put together five steps that managers can do when in the moment they see a marginalizing behavior.
I'm a big proponent of what I call diversity and inclusion norms. These norms are the socially accepted ways that we're going to work with each other. The value of norms is letting people know what is expected, by giving a language when we need to call somebody out on whether they're following that. Diversity and inclusion norms can be ones like seek to understand, take turns, listen generously and remember that words matter.
Learn more: Embed Greater Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Your Organization
I find two big mistakes. One is making an attribution about the person who made the marginalized behavior. Keep it to what you heard. For example, ‘Christie stated that I'm worried that we're not listening to each other, right?’ That's not attribution about why the behavior happened, but that's an observation about the behavior. I find that when you keep the conversation to observe behaviors that really can't be debated, it helps the conversation move forward.
The second mistake is assuming the impact to the woman. That's why the coaching privately is important to understand how that woman is feeling. Did she feel marginalized? Is this a pattern? Maybe this is happening in many more places. That lets you know where you need to spend more time so that you can help to confront and ferret it out. Or maybe the woman doesn't feel marginalized. And so it’s important to keep the conversation open and allow employees to have the freedom and the safety to open up.
When I use the language to “‘confront behaviors,” I think that's very uncomfortable for leaders, especially if it's around marginalizing. So I expect that this is an uncomfortable proposal, but I've had many conversations with clients who told me that it was amazing how impactful confronting a behavior once or twice was. And my assumption is that most of these behaviors are a lack of attention versus an intention to hurt somebody's feelings.
The good news is that while it might be uncomfortable, I haven't come across clients who said that they felt like they had to continually confront. And then frankly, what it also does is it narrows down where you might have some issues where you need to get HR involved.
Join your peer CHROs and HR leaders from leading organizations to discuss specific HR challenges and learn about top HR trends, insights and priorities.
Recommended resources for Gartner clients*:
Confront Behaviors That Marginalize Women
Create Psychological Safety in IT to Boost Team Performance
Building Inclusive Leadership To Enable Future Success
Inclusion, Belonging and Generational Diversity in the Workplace
*Note that some documents may not be available to all Gartner clients.