Are you part of an organization that allows you to bring your authentic self to work? How does power and privilege impact your ability to do so? And does your organization support the authenticity of all of its employees? In this episode, Dr. David Rock is joined by best-selling author and renowned expert on covering, Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. David and Kenji unpack these questions, exploring the concepts of power, privilege, inclusion, diversity, and allyship in the process. Listen to learn how individuals and organizations can create systemic solutions to these challenges.
EPISODE S4E4
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:06] GB: Are you part of an organization that allows you to bring your authentic self to work? No, really. Does your organization live up to its inclusion values or lingers somewhere below them? Many organizations strive admirably to create cultures of diverse perspectives, and identities, and inclusive teams, and practices. But all too often, they fall short, so a lot of people at a lot of organizations are covering. That is editing, modifying, and downplaying unknown stigmatized identity so they can operate effectively at work.
The rationale being that while you can’t change yourself, you can change how yourself shows up to work. But covering is cognitively taxing, our sense of self, our sense of commitment to the organization and our performance suffers. What’s perhaps more disturbing but less surprising is that if we’re in a place of power and privilege, covering is often invisible to us. We have to choose to see it by educating ourselves. But when we do choose to see it, we can take steps to mitigate its effects and be allies to our teammates. Here’s how you can start.
I’m Gabriel Berezin and you’re listening to Your Brain at Work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. We continue to draw our episodes from a weekly webinar series that NLI has been hosting every Friday. This week, our panel consists of NLI’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. David Rock and best-selling author and renowned expert, Kenji Yoshino, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. Enjoy.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:38] DR: Kenji, great to see you again. It’s been far too long. Great to have you here today. Thanks for making time.
[00:01:43] KY: Likewise, David. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:45] DR: It should be fun. I want to dig in just a quick second for those of you who are new to NLI. We’ve been around for a long time, 23 years actually since we started operations in 24 countries, working with over 50 of the Fortune 100. The core of our work is science to build better people strategies or as we say, making organizations more human through science. Certainly, in the last year, the work we’ve been doing for the last seven years on diversity, equity, inclusion became very front and center. We’ve been incredibly busy in that space, but it’s our biggest practice but not our newest practice. We’ve been in that space for quite a while. Although not as long as you, Kenji. This has been your life’s work for a long, long time as I understand.
We want to kick off with this whole concept of covering. Before you even get to that, kind of power and privilege is such an important piece of the puzzle. Tell us from your perspective, what is power and what is privilege and how does all that work?
[00:02:40] KY: Great. I’m going to start with privilege because I think that this is the most misunderstood word in the diversity and inclusion space. Where we define privilege at our center as unearned advantage that flows from a demographic characteristic. So this could be privilege on the basis of your race or ethnicity or privilege on the basis of your gender or based on your sexual orientation. The reason that we think that it’s so reviled is that — I don’t know how you feel about this, David. But for a long time, we used to not lean into this word, because people had such an aversive reaction to the comment, “Check your privilege.” There are even studies as you know on this about the hard-knock life effect. If I tell you that you’re privileged, then you will tell me that you had a much harder childhood than if I’ll tell you that you’re not privileged, so we have aversive reaction to it.
Now, organizations I think are really leaning into it and are being much more sort of proactive about saying, “We have to both talk about it and sort of diffuse all these misconceptions that people have.” Because when I say you’re privileged, I’m not saying you grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth and all the lights turned green for you down the highway. I’m just saying, you’re privileged on this particular dimension of identity.
Power is a broader term, right? In the sense that power is just authority that inheres based in your role in you. It could be, as a tenure a professor, I have power. That doesn’t actually trace back to any kind of demographic characteristics that I hold. As CEO of your organization, you have power that doesn’t actually grow directly from your demographic characteristics.
[00:04:09] DR: Right. Interesting. Going back to the privilege, I mean, do you have a hypothesis or the research on kind of why people react so badly? I mean, you can sense from a gut instinct why it’s a status threat. Why do you think people react so intense with the word privilege?
[00:04:23] KY: I think it’s because we all have forms of privilege and disadvantage, so we don’t feel seen or understood when somebody says to us, “Check your privilege.” In this Hard-Knock Life effect study, they split two groups. This is Taylor and Lowery, two psychologists. A group into a controlled group and an experimental group. Under the controlled condition, people were just given a neutral pram. The experimental group was given the pram, black Americans have forms of disadvantage that white Americans by then to their privilege don’t have.
What they found was that, the first group described a much happier childhood than the second group, even though they were randomly split into these samples. The hypothesis was exactly what you just said, which is that, the white individuals who are challenged on their privilege were like, “That actually not a full description of who I am. I may be privileged, but you’re assuming that I grew up in some kind of — I’m dating myself, like a dynasty, kind of multibillionaire existence where we were all oil tycoons. In fact, I had all these forms of disadvantage, so you actually are not seeing me as a full human being.”
I think it’s actually on a benign way of looking at it, really just an attempt to correct the record and to say, “I’m trying to see you as a full human being. That’s what you’re asking me to do. I asked you to return the favor and see me as a full human being and not just a stick figure of somebody who’s privileged along all dimensions.
[00:05:39] DR: I might dig into that further in some writing later on with my teammate. It’s a really interesting kind of mechanism that happens there. We feel a status threat. We feel like we’re being attacked as though everything was privileged, then we wanted to defend ourselves and say, “No, no, no. This was hard. This was hard.” And it creates this kind of weird dynamic. Yeah, it’s an interesting thing we might dig into more later.
Let’s talk a little bit about covering then. That’s power and privilege. In terms of covering, this is a big body of work of yours for a long time. When did you first start working on covering?
[00:06:09] KY: Well, actually, it’s almost embarrassing that I’m still talking about it, although I view it to be part of my life’s work. I actually wrote the live view article. That was my tenure piece at Yale 20 years ago. I got tenure on that strands of that piece largely and then flipped it into a book after it was featured in New York Times. Then the book came out in 2006. Then I did a major collaboration with Deloitte and that extended from 2013 and then the paper was just republished again in 2018. This really has been with me for a very long time.
[00:06:41] DR: Yeah. Then finally, people are listening to it a lot more suddenly 20 years later. It’s amazing. I know. Sometimes big things take very long time. It’s incredible. How do you define covering?
[00:06:50] KY: I define covering as a strategy to which an individual downplays a known stigmatized identity blended to the mainstream. I Italicize the word know in there in order to distinguish it from the more familiar term, passing, because I often get asked, how is this different from passing? When you’re passing, people literally don’t know you belong to the group. When you’re covering, people know you belong to the group, either because you’re unable to hide it or unwilling to hide it. But they nonetheless put pressure on you to edit, modify, downplay that identity so that they can be more comfortable around you.
To tie it back to power and privilege. Obviously, if you’re in the disempowered or disadvantaged side of the power and privilege conversation, then you’re going to experience a much heavier demand to cover.
[00:07:35] DR: Right. Yeah, that’s interesting. I know you’ve done a lot of work on the data and kind of pulling this apart. Can you give us the cliff notes of the concepts and also the data that you found around it? Then we’ll kind of —
[00:07:45] KY: Absolutely. Yeah. This is an old body of work. Anyone who’s interested in this can just google Uncovering Talent and a Deloitte whitepaper will pop up. It was republished in 2018. In the original book, I disaggregate covering along these four axes. Then what the paper does is to add some data to substantiate the claims. The four axes of covering are appearance, affiliation, advocacy and association. I know you have your SEEDS model, so we both are I think similar, David, and not wanting our ideas to just mold on a shelf. So I’m really trying to come up with mnemonics to help this land. These are the Four As from my perspective.
Appearance-based covering concerns how individual alter their self-presentation to blend into the mainstream. A person might use a cane rather than a wheelchair to decrease visibility or salience of his motor function disability. This is assuming that the person would feel less physical pain in a wheelchair, but there’s substantial data that suggest that people often forgo the paraphernalia that would allow them to function optimally in order to foresaw the social discomfort people have when confronted with that paraphernalia.
Affiliation-based covering concerns how people avoid behaviors wildly associated with your identity, and this is where we tie back into unconscious bias. Because people are trying to preempt triggering unconscious biases about their group. A woman might avoid talking about being a mother because she doesn’t want her colleagues to think that she’s less committed to work. Again, difference in passing. Covering is the woman cannot do anything to pass, but she can cover by making her gender less salient by not talking about her children.
We both know, from Shelley Correll’s work. the sociologist at Stanford that there’s a motherhood penalty and a fatherhood bonus. If a woman talks about her children at work, she’s going to take a pay cut. Whereas if you or I talk about our kids, we’re going to get, if anything a pay buff, a pay increase, because different unconscious biases are triggered. We become providers who need to be paid more because we’re salary sensitive. Our female colleagues become caregivers who are going to get pulled out of the workplace either literally or figuratively.
Advocacy-based covering concerns how individuals avoid sticking up for their group. A veteran might refrain from challenging a joke about the military less to be seen as overly strider. Association-based covering is how much individuals avoid contact with other group members. For a gay person, this could be refraining from bringing same sex partners to a work function, but it could also be not joining an affinity group or not even having informal water cooler conversations with people of your own group. Deciding who to sit next to or who not to sit next to.
When Deloitte and I collaborated, we actually pushed this out eight different sectors in the Fortune 500. They were wonderful, they created the survey, they put their whole people analytics team on this. I’m not an empiricist, so this is actually not in my wheelhouse. They said, “We’ll put our money where our mouth is. We’ll push this out to our own clients.” What we found was that, first of all, 61% of people reported covering at least on of these dimensions. That included 83% of LGBT individuals, 79% of black respondents, 66% of women, all the way down to 45% of straight, white men. That’s one point.
The most interesting piece of this that we thought when we looked at this was some kind of murky finding that 45% of straight, white men reported covering. That’s mainly like kind of universal project. For those of you who are scratching you heads and thinking, how on earth does an ostensibly, most privileged cohort covers goes back to what we were talking about earlier, David. Which is that, it’s not a binary distinction between uniformed privilege and uniformed disadvantage. People who are straight, white men still reported covering along five axes: age, mental, physical disability or illness, religion, veteran status and socioeconomic status or background. Those are the top five ways a straight, white men cover.
The other thing that we wanted to draw from that incidents data was that, there is a big contrast between the 45% of straight, white men and let’s say 79% of black respondents or 83% of LGBT respondent who reported covering. That suggest that some groups are still expressing much greater headwinds in organizations, that the taxes paid by every cohort but not at even rates.
[00:11:57] DR: Right. So interesting. Yeah, this 45% of straight, white men covering, it’s so unexpected, isn’t it? It’s really interesting.
[00:12:03] KY: Yeah. I think that you just see the body language when we flash that data up in front of our audiences, where people uncross their arms, their body language relaxes. If they happen to be straight, white men, they kind of turn to the presentation a different way and they feet stop pointing at the door. A friend of mine who’s a body language expert says, “You always know where people want to go by where their feet are pointing.” Literally, you can see feet are reshuffling and realigning towards me when I give that data.
Of course, if I can sort of land the plane there. Even if the incidents are high, if the impact went low, then this would not be an issue, right? Because we could just say, “Oh! This is just a form of executive coaching that I need to go through. I do it but it doesn’t hurt.” But what we found was that, of that 61% who reported covering, 60% to 73% depending on the axis said this was somewhat to extremely detrimental to themselves. Even adapting a relatively parsimonious definition of arm, a super majority of people said, “This hurt.” Then when we asked about organizations, “Are your leaders expecting you to cover?” 53% said, “Yes. Our leader would expect us to cover.” Then 50% of those to somewhat to extremely diminishes their sense of commitment to the organization. If you’re looking for where your employees are kind of browning out or burning out, this is a really good place to look for that leak in the pipeline.
[00:13:19] DR: Yeah. It’s interesting. Anything that affects our cognition particularly kind of forces us to have to keep focusing on something, really debilitates our cognitive performances, obviously increases stress. But even surprisingly low levels, very small things have quite a big effect, an outsize effect. Not obvious effect. Our ability to think well and perform well in cognitive tasks. Think about, for example, whole lot studies that initially James Gross, who is kind of the founding father of emotional regulation and Kevin Ochsner at Columbia repeated a lot of this. They looked at what happens when you basically try to not show people that you have emotions. So they do these really interesting studies of looking at the brains emotional centers when people are releasing emotions and also trying not to show emotions.
It turns out, just trying to hide your emotions has a huge deliberating effect on your memory. They actually are able to correlate it and say, “It’s really similar to like literally watching television and paying attention to that while someone is talking to you. Like you remember as little of what someone said if you’re trying to suppress an emotion. We know suppressing emotions actually makes the emotions worst and reduces cognition and has always other effects. I think in a similar way kind of suppressing who you are and trying not to show things just take so much cognitive load. It’s like this palm that’s always there, that’s inhibiting good thinking. So it’s going to inhibit deeper thinking that requires a quiet brain as well. That’s how we think about it.
Make a link for us as we short of shift out of this chapter a bit between covering, privilege and power. Tell us about kind of the three of these together. How do you see it?
[00:14:54] KY: Yeah. Absolutely. The notion is really like, privilege and power make visible to us, right? Actually, I think the better way to put is, if we are privileged and powerful, covering is invisible to us. Where if you’re on the last privileged or powerful side of the equation, then you feel it on the bone how much you’re asked to cover. Just exactly what you just said. That individuals are saying, “I know exactly what I need to do” or “I think I know exactly what I need to do in order to fit in in advance at work, in order to navigate my power and privilege.” There’s nothing I can do about demographic characteristics, like race, or gender, or sex orientation. I cannot change those things. But I sure as heck can change the way in which I represent those things in the workplace. That’s where covering comes in.
Employees whether rightly or wrongly are making all of these decisions, employers are kind of tearing their hair up saying, “Well, we’re not asking any of that.” Sometimes the employers are wrong and sometimes they’re right. Even in the cases in which they’re right in which the employee has sort of misinterpreted a covering demand that doesn’t actually exist in the workplace, the employer is still responsible for it. The employer has to be the first mover in dispelling that, right? This to me is the difference between diversity and inclusion on the one hand and diversity or inclusion.
I think we talked a really good game about diversity and inclusion, but too often, it’s diversity or inclusion. It’s like, we will have lots of different people around the table, but only so long if they’re all covering the heck out of themselves, right? Forcing people to the choice of either, I can be fully authentic and risk exclusion or alternatively, I can tempt down the things that make me different behaviorally and minimize my difference to allow people to find me more palatable, then I will be included, but only at the cost of doing that work. And ultimately, from a dignitary perspective, ultimately only at sufferance. Because I know that the minute I stop managing my identity in those ways, then I will be excluded, right? A direct outcome of power and privilege. Covering is what you do when you don’t have power and privilege or to accommodate other people’s power and privilege.
[00:16:56] DR: Right. You’re accommodating people’s power and privilege; you’re trying to deal with it and reconcile. I want to just take a minute and just link to some of the research we’ve done as well, which I think ties really nicely to what you’re talking about. It’s more looking at the kind of biological basis of how this stuff happens. We did a piece of research back in early 2018 and 2019, we published it basically on how power actually affects the brain. It’s really one of what we call our synthesis study, where we’re synthesizing huge bodies of research to try to find the signal that is then very applicable. Kind of how do we synthesize and simplify all the different findings into something that you can use? We do that a lot.
This one, we also did a summary of this in fast company. It turns out that there are very, very significant, easily noticed effects of power at surprisingly low levels. Like literally get a team of people together in an experiment as the cohort, get them doing something and then randomly pick one person and say, “You’re just slightly in charge of everyone.” Then measure what happens in the brain before and after. It’s really different. All this stuff starts to happen at even low levels of power difference.
Without going too far into it, there are sort of three categories of issue. The first one really relates to what you’re saying. It’s essentially, when you get even a little bit of power, when you start thinking about other people, you think about them from the concept of your goals and you see them as object for your goals. And essentially, you objectify them in the literal sense of the word. You turn them into objects in your brain. Turning down literally the people focus network of the brain, which is more of the medial and turning up the conceptual focus, which is more lateral. You’re actually turning down the social network of the brain when you think about people when you have power. Literally, you won’t notice they’re covering because you don’t know any of their issues, you don’t notice the facial cues, you don’t understand emotions. You’re actually not even noticing them as people. You’re noticing them as concepts, and filtering their movements, their facia cues, everything through the lens of how they can be helpful to you as, but as concepts. There’s a very deep research on that.
The second thing that happens is that you essentially become overly optimistic. Not overly optimistic, but you’re just more optimistic. As soon as you have more power, you become more optimistic. You’re being more hopeful, optimistic, thinking about the future positively. Now, all of these things are adaptive it turns out for powerful positions. They have some adaptive value, but some dark side.
The third one, basically you lift up to vision level or more abstract level, so you think conceptually about people and everything. You think more conceptually with a little bit of power and less concrete. Essentially, you don’t focus on people as people, you become quite optimistic and you think very abstractly, so you miss a lot of information, a lot of details with a little bit of power. I think what’s happening is, people on the other end of this feel like they’re not heard, or seen, or validated at all. Their problems are not validated because the boss is just being optimistic and they’re not even — the details aren’t being heard because the boss is just high level. I think there’s all sorts of experiences that starts to happen. That’s how we approach it and we’ve been thinking a lot for a long time about kind of how to offset these and we’re working on a solution this year around empathy and how to teach people to really — as focus in power, how to really turn this around and listen much more deeply but through kind of brain lens.
Anyway, that’s kind of the way we’ve been approaching this. This comes up a lot, is how authentic can you be? Is professionalism just kind of masking? How authentic really can you be in an organization? Is covering a good thing?
[00:20:30] KY: Yes. I think we’re all imagining. I come work for you and then I show up tomorrow at your workplace and I say, “I’m going to engage unrapidly anti-social behavior, but I just have obnoxious personality syndrome. So this is my authentic self, deal with it.” Right? I mean, the first question is. Are all forms of covering bad? The answer, that’s obviously no from the example that I just gave. Some forms of covering are even beneficial to a function of an organization, much less neutral, much less bad.
But I think that that just raises much harder question of how do we distinguish for treating the good and bad forms of covering, once I acknowledge that there are good and bad form. Our touchdowns are really simple one, which is organizational values, which is that, if the organization is saying, “We believe in this particular metric of inclusion,” then it shouldn’t require covering along that dimension. On your survey, a lot of people said, “I have to cover my political affiliation as a liberal or conservative, democrat, republican.” We were, no harm no foul, because none of the organization that we surveyed said — this may be different today and this may be different in some organizations. But at the time of the survey, no organization that we surveyed said, “We believe in the capacity to express your political affiliation at work as one of our dimensions of inclusion.”
Whereas, every single organization that we surveyed said, “We believe in the inclusion of women.” But every single organization that we surveyed also said, “We as women in this organization have to cover, particularly on the surround of caregiving. We have to cover our status as parents and as father. Then the first instance, we don’t have a problem. The second instance, we do have a problem, because the organization is living under its value of inclusion rather than living up to the value of inclusion.” Once an organization states, “We believe in inclusion” on any of the dimensions that I was talking about: veteran, status, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, then it should not be imposing covering demands along those grounds.
[00:22:14] DR: Right. It ties to the stated values and stated goals around inclusion. I mean, it’s a really interesting question. I’m reflecting on it. We might do some more writing on that as well, maybe reach out to you or just so, how do you define good versus bad covering. It’s a really interesting piece to think about.
Let’s go to Chapter 2. I’m just aware of the time. We’re having a great conversation. It’s so fun, not a difficult one. It’s the opposite, it’s fascinating. Let’s talk about difficult conversations and sort of Chapter 1 is kind of understanding it. Chapter 2 of this is, how do we then approach these things and how do we really interact together. It’s such a big area, it’s something that we think about a lot. A lot of the work we do is changing habits around conversations, so literally kind of re-pathing the way you would have these conversations. But I love the way you’ve been thinking about this. Tell us about difficult conversations around not just covering but also power and privilege and all of this.
[00:23:04] KY: Yeah. Thank you for that pivot, because that’s exactly the way we think about this new project. This is a book that I’m writing with my executive director, David Glasgow and it’s going to be published by Simon & Schuster next year. We kind of have titled it The Art of Diversity Conversations. Please don’t hold us to that title, because it may change between now and when the book hit the stands. Essentially, this comes out of the work Uncovering, where people said like, “Okay. Teach me how to have the conversation with my manager, where I say, ‘I don’t think you’re living up with your values.’”
We realized that we didn’t have the kind of toolkit that we could just hand to somebody and say like, “Here are the kinds of moves that you can make in the conversation.” While we delve into it, David, the more we realized that we actually don’t want to give people those tools. We actually want to give them managers the tools, the people with the privilege and the power, the tools to invite those conversations. Because we’re so tired of putting the onus of change on the people who are least empowered in the exchange, right?
This book is really about the kinds of posture shifts, as somebody who has power and privilege you might need to make in order to have a more productive conversation. Just really quickly, this in itself is obviously a whole project onto itself, so maybe we can have a longer conversation about it at some other point. But just to get a précis, the first point is that, when we’re privileged, we’re often very, very fragile or used to being comfortable, to your point. And even small challenges to that comfort — this is Robin DeAngelo’s in White Fragility. I disagree with lots of things in that book, but this point of I think is like critically important and sound. Where she says, “We think about power as leading to resilience, but it’s exactly the opposite. Power leads to fragility. When you challenge somebody who is white about their racism, they’re not going to have a resilient response if they’re powerful. They’re going to have a fragile response more of them than not.”
What we’re trying to do is to try and teach people to move from fragility to resilience. That can be anything from an Angela Duckworth girt model of like, pull your socks up. Not feeling comfortable is different from not feeling safe in a conversation, so you really need to suck it up for the greater good. Then also, a more kind of a tender way saying, actually, let’s look at grief model. It’s like Susan Silk’s work on saying, there are concentric circles of grief. If you’re the person who really needs help, then you are allowed to vent and to ask for help from other people. You’re just not allowed to ask for help from the person you’re trying to help yourself.
If the affected person is a black employee of yours who’s saying, “I’m traumatized by Black Lives Matter” and you’re trying to help them, you’re not allowed to vent to them about your own fragility. You need to go home to your spouse or to someone who’s circle out in those concentric circles of support or a friendly colleague to do that venting.
The second one is, that when we’re privileged, we’re very ignorant and we’re very comfortable in our ignorance. Back in the day, it’s a literary scholar who actually made this point, where she said, “If Mitterrand and Reagan— again, dating myself, have a summit, what language are they going to speak?” You would think that because knowledge is power, that Mitterrand will get to choose because he speaks both French and English. But because Reagan has more power, although less knowledge, he gets to command the terms of the debate. He’s monolingual, Mitterrand is duo lingual or bilingual. Guess what language they’re going to talk. They’re going to talk English, right?
Similarly, like code switching is exactly what covering is all about. It’s just a subset of covering, but like the person who’s a minority in the workplace is going to have to code switch like crazy. They’re going to have to master the dominant norms of the workplace. The person who is a manager, let’s say the stereotypical sort of white male manager is not going to have to understand those other cultures or those other languages because the workplace has been historically structured around their norms. So we need a shift in posture from ignorance to curiosity.
Then finally, reductive to holistic. This is actually tied back to exactly what you were saying, I think, although you can correct me, David. To what you’re saying about how we literally objectify people when we’re empowered. I actually look at this through the Yale psychologist, David Berg’s work where he says, “When we’re powerful we over index on individual relationships.” Like you and I will be having a conversation and if you are the more privileged in the conversation, you’re going to think about us as having a conversation as just Kenji and David are talking. Whereas, I might think about this constantly through the lens as somebody who’s a rich minority, of somebody who’s a gay man, “Oh! Actually, I’m experiencing a dynamic here that I think is affected by my race.” Then when I bring that up, you might well say, “Oh, Kenji! Don’t make this about race.” My reaction might well be, “I didn’t make it about race. Society made this about race. This is not me inventing something. This is me injecting something.”
Moving from that kind of reductive to holistic framework is really important because we do have a tendency to reduce people to stick figures. And particularly for privileged, we like to think of things as individual-to-individual interactions rather than group to group interactions. The more privileged part are over index on how much this is about individuals. If anything, the underprivileged person will over index on how much it is about groups. But it’s really important to at least have both frames in mind when you’re trying to have these conversations.
[BREAK]
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[00:29:05] DR: Yeah. That’s interesting. I think it does come back to just the way, even a little bit of power makes you conceptualize people as essentially stick figures. It takes the meat, it takes the emotions, it takes people’s intentions, goals, emotions, ambitions, all that out and just treats them as kind of a number or a concept. It’s literally an object versus a person. In the brain, everything is classified either as an object or a person. We actually personify or we have a strong tendency — to comment with the exact word, anthropomorphization or something like that, but we anthropomorphize and we turn very simple concepts into humans a lot. So the brain often takes a stick figure and imagines it’s a person, but we go the other way also.
Everything I categorized in the brain in this realm if, is this is a human or a non-human thing? We do make things human a lot, but it turns out, power turns that down, switches that down. It’s quite an interesting topic in itself. We might do some more work on that and maybe get a guest on to kind of just dig into the power issue and how power fix the brain. We’ve done a couple of summit sessions on this, but let’s keep going.
We also wanted to talk about, as it relates to conversations, we’ve got about 15 minutes, 20 minutes total left. As we talk about conversations, what is some of the remedies that you’re seeing?
[00:30:20] KY: This is going to be a blitz, because I really want to get to allyship, which is our third and last chapter. Let me just say that, if you’re having these difficult conversations about covering or any diversity or inclusion topic, there are three ways that can add. One is the kind of happy way of like greater understanding and kind of mutual respect. I haven’t even put that on the slide because that happy outcome speaks for itself and tells its own story. But there are other circumstances in which, let’s say, I’m the privileged party and I realized that I have done something wrong and I need to apologize.
Power and privilege again mess this up for us. We are terrible apologizer. First of all, we’ve never been taught to do it, but even people who know the basics of it get it wrong because they’re riven in between their desire to hold on to as much power and privilege as possible and not make themselves too vulnerable in their desire to do the right thing and make the thing to settle the dispute.
The third way it can end is with disagreement. This is really increasingly important, because people are like, “I’m not even going to have this conversation if my only options are, we’re going to come to a happy outcome or I’m going to apologize to you. There has to be some room in this where I get to disagree, right?” Let’s say like people get interrupted and I’m eating a lot, then a woman comes to me as the manager and says like, I have to engage and overcome my advocacy-based covering and say like, “You interrupted me because I’m a woman.” I say back, “I really don’t think I’m doing that. I really think that everybody is interrupting everybody else. This is a high octane work environment.”
There’s actually studies that show that I’m probably wrong. But in order for me to feel like I can have that conversation, there at least has to be some space for me to say, “It can’t be that the only way that this conversation ends is for me to agree with you, either on the kumbaya sense or in the I owe you an apology sense.” But how do we usefully disagree? What we sort of step people through is like the four components of the apology. There are the four A’s of covering. These are the four R’s of apology. Recognition, responsibility, remorse and reparation.
Recognition is like clearly stating what you think you did wrong. This is like no ifpologies. You can’t say, “If I did this” or “Whatever I did, I’m sorry” because that’s against the apology. Responsibility is the kind of butpology. You can’t say, “I’m sorry I did this, but I was Ambien tweeting” as Roseanne Barr said. That totally negates the responsibility, so you have to assume responsibility.
Remorse is, you have to really mean the I’m sorry. Mario Batali has this great example where he apologizes for a sexual assault, but after the apology as a postscript, he says, “For those of you who are interested, here’s a great recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls.” It’s like, what are you doing? I have no belief that you’re remorseful about this at all. Then finally, reparation is, we think of apology as the end of something, but they’re actually the beginning of something. You have to show it through your future conduct that this is not going to happen again. Oftentimes, people feel like this is incredibly burdensome, because they’re like, “Oh, I thought I was getting closure on this.” You are, but you’re actually opening up something as well. You’re opening up on obligation.
[00:33:22] DR: It’s really interesting. Just to spend a minute on this, the disagreement. People are bad at disagreeing and I agree, we really need to find a way to be comfortable with just disagreeing a lot better. I mean, one of the big biases in the SEEDS model, experience bias is the second E, experience. Essentially what it says is that everyone sees the world differently and everyone thinks they see the world accurately. If you have a meeting with a leader, and engineer, a marketing person, a finance person and a lawyer. Literally, those five people are in a different meeting and actually hear different information. They hear concept, they extrapolate it differently. They make different interpretations of it. They’re actually in five different meetings. One person might say, “We all agreed” and another person might say, “We all completely disagree.”
In their experience, they’re actually right. The trouble is, just the way that our brain is structured is we literally perceive the world so differently than a lot of the times. Certainly in the instance you mentioned, the woman might be being talked over, but a lot of the times, we just hear differently because we hear differently. We need to disagree and then find the kind of common ground, and the shared goal and kind of get on with it. This is really, really interesting and definitely dovetails with the kind of the neuroscience of how we process. If we’re shying away from those disagreements, to be honest, the benefits of diversity are kind of minimal. Because if you’re not able to debate, a lot of these comes back to psychological safeties. That you’ve got to feel safe to actually disagree, and debate each other, and kind of be able to speak up.
We did a bunch of work on that in a solution called voice. It’s essentially teaching people how to challenge someone safely and how do you kind of call someone out in a way that’s productive. Similar work we’ve been doing as well, it’s just kind of how do you — essentially, how do you disagree productively I think is a really important thing.
Let’s dig in. Allyship is near and dear to both our hearts. Tell us firstly high level, how does allyship fit in all this and tell us about your passion about allyship and kind of how you think about it.
[00:35:20] KY: Yeah. I’m sort of covering as thinking about how you are thinking about your own identity and how you’re going to carry yourself into the workplace. Then difficult conversations is really about what happens when you and I are sitting down, David and you have an issue with me, and I’m privileged, a long-time dementia and I have to be mindful of the cognitive ticks that I’m bringing into the conversation with me so I can have a useful conversation with you.
Part three would be, if you and I are having a dispute, then it’s really the three-person conversation. Where you’re coming in from the side, you’re not directly affected, but you’ve read Heckman and Johnson, you’ve read all the studies that say, that sometimes people are better advocates for disempowered groups and those individuals will be for themselves. So it’s a moral obligation based on your greater opportunity to move the needle, or you just step in to be an ally. That’s really what the work in allyship is all about.
[00:36:09] DR: Fantastic. We both worked on allyship in the last year. You probably for longer, but we started working with Microsoft about a year and a half ago. I think they told us at the time that we’re working with you. We helped them think about the critical habits that people needed to build. Some of the ones we anchored on was around, what I was saying earlier, like how to actually speak up productively, how to kind of disagree without being productive, how to call things out and how to do that, minimizing how kind of threating it is as well. That’s kind of one of the pieces for us.
How do you think about allyship? I know you’ve done a ton of work with Microsoft on this as well.
[00:36:45] KY: I mean, this organizations that sort of invite us in are such useful collaborators and we really owe so much to both Deloitte and Microsoft for understanding of like how this stuff works on the ground. Because it’s very easy when you’re sitting in kind of academic department to have your argument smell of the lamp, right? But to actually get into an organization and roll up your sleeves with them is something else entirely. This model actually was based already on Keith Edwards’, which is a tremendous work about a maturity curve of allyship. The second piece of it called the empathy triangle. It’s the empathy triangle that we developed in conjunction with Microsoft when they approached us to think about allyship with them. I’ll get to this in a moment.
This kind of maturity curve of ally to one, ally to some, ally to all just suggest that all allies are not created equal, and that we can actually evolve as allies. Again, really quickly, ally to one is you’re focused on the individual, you’re acclimated help, you’re largely unaware of systemic issues. If you’re the source of non-inclusive behaviors, there are obstacles to circumvent and you don’t perceive your own mistakes. This is a beginning person who’s not even thinking about D&I, but who’s just like a good person. I mean, at least the ally to one is better than an ally to not. They’re thinking about somebody, they’re thinking — they’re being other-regarding. So this is, “I have a female protégé that I’m trying to get to the promotion process, I will help her whenever she needs help. But I’m not thinking about unconscious bias or challenges that she might face, that I as a man didn’t face. I’m not even going to think about my own mistake about D&I because I’m not even looking at the world through that point.”
Most people in most of the organizations that we work with, David are an ally to some bucket. Where they’re focused on a group. They know about in-groups and out-groups, they know about unconscious bias, so they act when they’re inspired to do so. They don’t need to directly be asked and they seek to be an exception to the system as a whole. So on my team, in my constitutional law group, in my classes, I’m going to be an exception to that broader system of bias that I see.
Here’s a dark part of being an ally to some. Because you divide the world into good people and bad people, you tend to see sources of non-inclusive behavior as bad people. That makes admitting your own mistakes very, very risky. Because when you admit to your own mistakes, you risk falling into the bad category, the bad person category so it’s very, very hard for you to admit to your own mistakes. Therefore, very hard for you to adapt the growth mindset with regard to your own mistakes.
What we’re trying to get people to is to this ally to all bucket, where you’re focused on everyone, including yourself. You can be, you know, Satya Nadella, or you can be a person at a top of a tree as a straight, white, gender male CEO, right? You’re still going to need allies. Someday, your health privilege, or you’re status privilege or your subject matter privilege is going to give out and you’re going to be really glad that you built a culture-rich ally. This shares with covering that kind of drives towards universality.
[00:39:41] DR: To call that out for a second, because it’s really interesting. We did a lot of research on inclusion of over about two or three years. We published it a couple of years ago now. One of the big findings is very sort of counterintuitive because the whole inclusion space is sort of like, you got to support women, you got to support people of color, you’ve got to provide all the support. What we found was that, kind of focusing on individual groups was creating out -groups here and there. We ended up with this mantra of, if you’re not actively including, you’re accidentally excluding and sort of inherently inactively including is everyone.
Is that if you’re going to be inclusive, you actually need to be inclusive with everyone all the time. If you’re inclusive to some as you put it here, you’re going to create all of these problems. We did a whole lot of research on what those problems are and kind of how that works. Our whole point of view on inclusion is, make sure you’re being inclusive with everyone in every interaction. But without over including and trying to put everyone in every meeting, so similar kind of thinking. I think we’ve got an event coming up in a few weeks. We’ve got a couple of organizations talking about how to build inclusive practices during crazy pandemic. I’m going to hear some stories of sort of what that looks like, which I think will be interesting.
Overall, I think we have some strong parallels in our thinking, which is good to see. But ally to all, tell me more about ally to all. How does that look?
[00:41:00] KY: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree that the drive has to be relentlessly universal to the extent that it honestly can be, right? So you can’t jury rig it so that’s it’s universal, just because you want it to be universal or truly has to be universal. But as you’ve discovered and I discovered, things like authenticity or universal values, things like allyship are things that everybody need. I think we can honestly begin with the universal. Show everybody that this is in everybody’s self-interest. It will of course benefit some groups more than others, but it is in everybody’s interest to do.
An ally to all is different so far, because they see this as a form of enlightened self-interest. They act consistently by creating sustainable practices. It’s kind of backed in to your own habits. Over time, this becomes so habitual that it’s more instinctive for you to act inclusively than to act non-inclusively. Now, I called down a randomized list in my constitutional law class. It would be so weird for me not to do that now, but that is a self-conscious inclusive habit that I’ve only developed over time. So you seek improvement of the system as a whole, not just your corner. Then the biggest change happens where you give sources of non-inclusive behavior the opportunity to grow and you accept your own mistakes as invitations to learn.
This is actually some of the most counterintuitive stuff, because we hear a lot about cancel culture and I think that the fear of cancel culture is overblown. Oftentimes, I think that we’re talking about a consequence culture rather than a cancel culture. But when we talk about sort of canceling somebody who in the real sense of like ostracizing somebody who’s engaged in non-inclusive behavior, that we are at the center. My center is truly against, right? Because we believe that sources need to be given the opportunity to grow, because guess what, someday, that person is going to be you. This is a game of musical chairs. You do not have the option of just being the lighting person all the times. Sometimes you’re going to mess up and you’re going to be really glad on that day that you’ve built a culture-rich allies. Because those allies will knock on your door too and say, “That was terrible. I just want to make sure that doesn’t happen again. We made mistakes like that and we grew past them and we came together to help you grow past the mistake that you just made.”
That allows you to adapt a growth mindset. This is Dolly Chug’s work about how, you say growth mindset, growth mindset, growth mindset in every domain, except for D&I. Why is it that in D&I, we suddenly go back to fixed mindset? Her diagnosis is that, we go back because there’s a moral valance to it. That if you make a mistake in constitutional law, you just don’t know constitutional law. If you make a mistake in D&I, suddenly you’re a bad person. So that makes mistakes much more threatening because they go to your very personhood. The identity threat is much greater there.
[00:43:35] DR: Yeah. It’s so interesting. We could talk for two days about these topics. We did an interview with Microsoft’s chief diversity officer, Lindsay-Rae, who I know you worked with closely as well. She talked widely about the whole allyship project that they’ve been rolling out and it’s gone huge at Microsoft with your work and our work. Let’s talk about the triangle and the sort of the structure and architecture of allyship. Tell us a little bit more about how you see this. We’ve got five more minutes.
[00:43:58] KY: Okay. Yeah. The million-dollar question is, how do I get from one point in those allyship maturity curve to the end of it? Give me a tool that I can actually use, starting directly after this talk that would help me to get from point A to point B. It’s really in response to that sort of operational challenge that we developed the empathy triangle. The triangle piece of this is, that every allyship interaction contains at least three parties. There’s the ally, there’s the source of non-inclusive behavior and there’s the person who’s been affected by the non-inclusive behavior.
Again, the ally is coming in from the side to help with the conversation. This questions around the horn are all questions that the ally is asking of themselves about the all three vertices really of the triangle. The question that the ally has to ask of herself or himself is, “Have I reflected on my role?” The sub there, “Do I have the proper motivations for stepping in as an ally? Am I doing this to virtue signal or to get a cookie?” Our acid test questions is, “If nobody knew I was doing this, would I still do this because I believe in non-inclusive culture?” If the answer to that is yes, then you’re probably safe. The second one is, “Am I important enough to act?” Part of this is, “Am I important enough to act with regard to what just went down?” Like about what the relationship between the source and the affected person is. “Are my facts right?”
But also, more deeply, “Am I important enough about the demography? Before I want to be an ally to the trans community, I’d better know a little bit about trans issues.” Oftentimes, people overestimate how much time this takes. [Inaudible 00:45:28] says, “If we have time to live it, you have time to Google it.” Oftentimes, the answer is just a Google search away, right? Then, “Am I maximizing my effectiveness about thinking about systemic solutions?” This goes to the example I gave earlier about my common law class, which is, I noticed I was calling on men to my shame more than I was calling on women. I said I was going to fix it. Did well for about two classes, then abjectly went back to my prior practices, when it become stressed, or tired or passionate about the material.
I taught myself to the mass and said, “This is obviously not something I can trust myself to do, so I needed more systemic solution.” I went to my assistant, Cory and I said, “Cory, randomize a list for me, hand it to me and I will call down that list every class.” No matter how tired I am, I can call down a list, to at least have that capability, right? This is a very Iris Bohnet type systemic institutional design solution that allowed me to be a better ally to the women at my class.
:Have I considered my relationship to the affected person before?” We’re not robots, right? Going back to that we’re not stick figures, so it matters. Whether or not your best friend is the source or you’re the affected person. If your best friend is the source and maybe you’re the one who knocks on the source’s door and puts your arm around them and says, “Let’s go together past this.”
Moving to the next leg, “Am I helping the person as they want to be helped?” So often, allies go barreling in, to some point where some organizations have started to talk about responsible allyship. Like, don’t just go barreling in and help the person as you deem fit to help them. Like ask some questions about how they wish to be helped. The sub here, “Could my intervention be received as unhelpful, embarrassing or patronizing? Should I seek permission or advice?” In the Uncovering Talent survey, one of the things was, as a LatinX person, I come in late to a meeting and someone says, “Oh! I see you’re on Hispanic time” and I don’t know whether to speak up or not.
If I were an ally doing the wrong things, I could jump in, I could say, “Oh! My colleague probably really didn’t appreciate that. He’s a Latino identity and do you understand the whole history of oppression against Latinos? This is a stereotypical remark.” And I could just get up on my soapbox. Meanwhile, my Latino might be like, “I have an agenda I wanted to do.” So you wasted all of that time or alternatively, I know the source so I had a way of handling this, that you just took all the power away from me and humiliated my friend in the bar. So ask if you can. Sometimes the behavior is so egregious that you have to speak up. Say you’re the team leader and someone says something egregious and you need to show people that you’re taking care of it, right? Then you can intervene but intervene in your own voice. So say, “As someone who’s invested in inclusive culture, I believe X.” It’s the impact on you. Don’t draw the affected party into it.
Last but not the least and most importantly I think, “Am I being an ally to the source of non-inclusive behavior?” Most importantly in the sense of, this is a least intuitive part. Am I separating that behavior from the person and separating in time for impact? With regard to the source, again, there’s a huge amount of resistance to say like, “Oh! Do I really have to be an ally to like the Amy Coopers of the world, the woman who called the police and the poor black bird watcher in Central Park? Our answer is no. You don’t actually have to be an ally to the source when it’s somebody out in the world like that. But if it’s in your organization, if it’s the person defending Amy Cooper, at least as a point of departure, although not a point of arrival. Yes, you do have an obligation to be an ally to the source. When we get further pushed back on that, we say, “Actually, think about this as a game of musical chairs. Some days you’re the ally, some days the affected person, some days unfortunately, you’re the source.”
We can close with this anecdote, which is kind of — I kind if grim placed to the end because it doesn’t reflect well me at all. But I’m teaching this class in the leadership, diversity, inclusion, David and there are three Asian women in the class. I call them by each other’s names repeatedly. The more I think about it, the worst I get over the course of three classes. This is humiliating to me, both because it’s a class on leadership, diversity, inclusion for goodness sake. And also, I am of Asian descent, have been on the wrong end of all Asian people like a like and have been called by names of people who don’t look anything like me.
I was the source and I had to realize that I was the source. On class four, I just took it in after apologizing to the individual woman of course, individually first. I took it into the class and I said, ‘We’ve learned about allyship. I’m really glad I taught you about this empathy triangle, because I actually need your help to be my ally as a source. One of the ways in which you can help me, if you deem fit to do it is to actually interrupt me if I get this wrong. We’re really going to try not to get this wrong, but if I get this wrong, either with regard to these three individuals or with anybody else, I needed you to stop me right away and reference this conversation as your aegis for doing that.”
It wasn’t puppies and rainbows immediately, like these things take time. But by the end, although I’m not glad that it happened, but we were closer as a group. But because we weathered that, then we would have been, had it never occurred in the first place. That I’m telling with confidence. I think this is such an important piece of the empathy triangle, that we need to have empathy for the individuals who are the sources of non-inclusive behavior.
[00:50:27] DR: There’s so much to say, unfortunately, we’re going to need to wrap in about 30 seconds. Kenji, I have so much to say. I’ve got like five articles I want to like write and run past you and see if we can kind of get some of these really critical questions answered. Things like, what is the difference between good covering and bad covering and all this stuff in allyship. There’s a lot more to say. Hopefully we get to have some great conversations. I think I can speak to everyone when I say, we’re all looking forward to your next book. Hopefully, you can use this as a motivation to do the very tough job of sitting down and writing. I know how hard that is, because a lot of people are just ready for your book, so use that.
Kenji, just super appreciate your time, your excellence, your expertise. I love your comment earlier that this is your authentic self, like a suit and tie.
[00:51:11] KY: Exactly.
[00:51:11] DR: That you’re now covering. I love the professionalism you bring. You’re better dressed than I’ve been in a year, which is the world we’ve been in. But thanks for being your authentic self and for the work that you do. You’re doing some really, really important work and pushing the envelope. I look forward to finding some creative, dynamic ways to collaborate that makes sense to everyone. But just for now, thanks for your time and focus, and really wish you well with everything that you’re doing going forward.
[00:51:37] KY: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful conversation. It’s always a pleasure.
[00:51:41] DR: We’ll see you soon, Kenji. Thanks.
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[00:51:42] GB: Your Brain at Work is produced by the NeuroLeadership Institute. You can help us in making organizations more human by rating, reviewing and subscribing wherever you get your podcasts. Our producers are Cliff David, Matt Holodak, and Danielle Kirshenblat. Our executive producer is me, Gabriel Berezin. Original music is by Grant Zubritsky, and logo design is by Ketch Wehr. We'll see you next time.
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