Prejudice, unlike bias, is a conscious belief, usually incorporating an unfair and inaccurate stereotype. People of one race are inferior or superior. One gender tends to be better or worse leaders. People of a given generation are slower or faster on the uptake, wiser or more foolish.
People don’t change their prejudices simply because someone points them out with an “I” statement. Holding up a mirror tends not to work. When confronting prejudice, it’s useful instead to draw a clear boundary: a person can believe whatever they want, but they cannot impose their beliefs on others. People at work cannot do or say whatever they want.
An “it” statement can offer that boundary by appealing to the law, an HR policy, or common sense. For example, “it is against the law / an HR violation / ridiculous to refuse to hire the most qualified candidate because of their hairstyle” — or any other identity attribute.
In the case of prejudice, if you hold up a mirror, the person is likely to say, “Yeah, that’s me. Aren’t I good-looking?”
What can you as a leader do if someone expresses a consciously held prejudice, reflecting a stereotype that you believe is inaccurate and unfair, and that people on your team find offensive? The first thing to do is to manage your own emotions.
You can’t control what the people who work for you think. Managers are not the thought police. But where, exactly, is the line between each person’s freedom to believe and freedom from other people’s beliefs?
Prejudice can induce a strong response: incredulity, disgust, rage, impatience, avoidance. Take a deep breath. Your job is to work with your team to identify and articulate where that line is — what is okay to say and do at work and what is not. The trouble comes when you’re the one charged with deciding when the murky line between “freedom to” and “freedom from” has been crossed. This is one of the toughest challenges you’ll face as a leader.
It’s a leader’s job to create an environment where people can work with one another productively. Prejudice, a belief that some sort of false stereotype is actually “the truth,” is inherently disrespectful. It gets in the way of a team’s ability to collaborate, to honor one another’s individuality, to communicate across differences.
Pointing out a prejudice probably isn’t going to change it. When leaders teach their teams to hold up a mirror to a person’s bias, they typically self-correct. But in the case of prejudice, if you hold up a mirror, the person is likely to say, “Yeah, that’s me. Aren’t I good-looking?”
The person with the prejudiced belief doesn’t acknowledge the prejudice; rather they think it’s “the truth.” What, then, can a leader do when one person’s prejudiced belief gets in the way of their ability to respect others on the team or even creates a hostile work environment?
I don’t have The Answer to this question. But there is one thing you can do to improve your odds of arriving at a good outcome: create a space for conversation. When you spend a little time with your team talking about what is okay to say or do and not okay to say or do on your team, you’ll build an important conflict-resolution muscle.
You don’t have to come up with a rationale that would satisfy a philosopher to figure out how to work better together. There are resources out there that can help. You can hire someone with experience to guide you through the conversation.
Create a Space for Conversation
Leaders must set and communicate clear expectations about the boundaries of acceptable behavior at work. But how to do it? It’s not practical or desirable to come up with a list of every image or word that can’t be emblazoned on a shirt or a hat, a list of words that are not okay to say, beliefs that are not okay to express. Banning words, books, and ideas rarely works in the long run.
Instead, I’d suggest starting a conversation with your direct reports about prejudice, and I recommend starting with a specific situation rather than abstract principles. Sit down with them and talk about some real sh*t shows that happened at other companies, for example what happened to Susan Fowler Rigetti at Uber.
Give your team the basic facts of whatever example you chose. Then ask them how they would have handled a similar situation. Invite a bias buster in to have this conversation with you, especially if your team is homogeneous. The goal of these conversations is to come up with a shared understanding of what is okay and not okay to do or say in your workplace.
These conversations will take time, and they will elicit some emotion and even some heat. But avoiding these conversations will leave you and your team without the skills you need to figure out what to do when you’re presented with a crisis of your own. If you have them now, before your team is in crisis, they will push you as a team to think as clearly about behavior as you do about performance.
Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I’ll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect, available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor® and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.
