Читать книгу Corporations Compassion Culture - Keesa C. Schreane - Страница 34

Corporations hoping to understand parallels and patterns between historical dynamics for people of color at work then and now must take a critical look at conduct that may be legal but is still unacceptable. Although some of these behaviors are legal, none of them are ethical. This is where compassion comes into play. Just because something is legal, or even acceptable at one point in time, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. When corporations and their employees create cultures that accept despicable and pedestrian conduct, despite its legality, it breeds mistrust in the organization specifically and in the institution of business in general.

Large numbers of Blacks and other people of color would likely agree that the words compassion, equality, and inclusion do not accurately reflect their historical or present working experiences. There are too many stories of being systemically shut out of C-suite corporate structures or having to master processes, knowledge, and people management with a humbleness and adroitness not required of their peers. Frustration kicks in when White managers and colleagues are oblivious, or claim to be oblivious, to the ways in which the corporate world is different for Black people.

And let's not forget, these cultural inequities have real-world economic consequences. Marcia Chatelain discusses the concept of racial capitalism. It can be summarized as a level of respect and value afforded people in business based on their race:

Racial capitalism shows ways that we think about how people are racialized. How their racial identities determine their possibilities in the world and determine the ways that they're treated.

So, when we're talking about racial capitalism, we're talking about ways that value or devalue is placed on specific people and their personhood. Racial capitalism has been a healthy way for people to understand the history of slavery and the continued abuse of African Americans even after the end of slavery.

It's also important in racial capitalism to understand how people are treated in other kinds of labor forces in which certain racial and ethnic groups tend to dominate and can also explain other types of exploitation. This includes when we look at Latinx people in agriculture even with certain types of women in domestic work. It helps us understand how value is assigned.³¹

Historically, Blacks laid the foundation for the wealth that successful business owners were able to enjoy in the early industrial days up until now, yet they were devalued at every turn. There were approximately 3 million enslaved people in the United States by the time slavery was abolished. These were not paid employees, and they were not willing volunteer workers. They were, what we call in modern days, forced labor.

These humans survived an ongoing intercontinental trafficking scheme that continued for centuries. Herded up and chained, they endured abhorrent overcrowding in the trafficking process, experienced humiliating physical and sanitary conditions, and suffered complete displacement from their culture and kin. They were not lavishly transported by patrons who sought to support their art or craft. They were not “immigrants” looking for “a land of dreams and opportunity,” as was controversially claimed by Dr. Ben Carson in his first speech as Housing and Urban Development Secretary.³² They were brutalized, maimed, and killed at owners' and supervisors' whims. There was no labor union to help them. There was no regulatory agency to protect them. Aside from emerging and established abolitionists, there were neither international relief organizations nor nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) pouring in massive amounts of money and volunteers to save them.

Although that may sound like ancient history to Whites, it's important to understand that many Black people don't view it that way at all. When I took my first job at a Wall Street firm, elder mentors from church and extended family cautioned me to be mindful that industry “doesn't care a thing about us.” That observation sprang from a number of experiences that are all too common among people of color in the workplace. For example, the experience of training a series of (White) managers who were less qualified and yet, somehow, climbed the ladder significantly faster. The experience of seeing their ideas adopted by and credited to others. False assumptions about their intellect and education when they walked through the door. My elders wanted me to successfully avoid these pitfalls—or at least successfully navigate around them—while keeping my composure and compassion no matter the circumstance.

Unfair, unleveled business playing fields are a primary aspect of the old corporate culture that leaders must address. It is not enough to talk about them—what's needed is concrete action. If businesses want to benefit from top talent, these practices have got to go.

Right now you may be thinking, “Okay, sure. But how?” One step is to educate ourselves as corporate leaders about the history of how businesspeople have created heinous work conditions, exploited inequality, and ultimately benefitted long term from our lopsided system. Consider these observations author Ta-Nehisi Coates made in The Atlantic:

By 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.³³

Those benefits still pay business dividends today. Although no monetary value can adequately compensate for historical abuses, Blacks have yet to see any sort of reparations, be they social, economic, or professional. What's more, lack of pay parity, psychologically abusive discrimination, and large-scale exclusion from higher levels of the economic system are still taking place.

We are dealing with a different type of playing field in modern times; for instance, there is an entire body of law related to the physical protection to workers. However, it's difficult to legislate unethical, uncompassionate workplace behaviors, especially ones that don't yield physical damage. Today's behaviors attack employee psyche and often challenge their ability to work effectively and bring their most innovative selves due to equivocal tones and language used.

The common term for these subtler types of workplace abuses is microaggressions. Kevin Nadal, professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, describes the term this way: “Microaggressions are defined as the everyday, subtle, intentional—and oftentimes unintentional—interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups. The difference between microaggressions and overt discrimination—or macroaggressions—is that people who commit microaggressions might not even be aware of them.”³⁴

A prevalent example is when underrepresented people are left out of relevant meetings or electronic communications or they aren't included on inside knowledge that other colleagues share at virtual watercoolers. These are all tactics that keep them ill-informed for key decision-making, resulting in poor positioning when it's time to discuss succession planning and promotion.

Following are other examples that destroy trust between colleagues and stoke hostility and distrust, all of which affect performance:

 Isolating a colleague or having unspoken agreements to not address and acknowledge that person inside and outside of meetings

 Ignoring her comments in meetings

 Talking over her in meetings

 Refusing to share critical information

 Refusing to include him in meetings critical to job functions

 Discrediting her feedback and performance, including doing so in front of peers and management

 Participating in misplaced conversation about physical attributes

 Making condescending remarks about origin or pronunciation of his name

Selfish, thoughtless behavior isn't solely the experience of people of color, of course. But these behaviors are used successfully and pervasively to create an uncomfortable, sometimes toxic environment for people of color. Further, when microaggressions go unchecked, they are an opportunity to circumvent protections against workplace racism.

When aggressors are called on the carpet for their behavior, a common response is to say, “It was just a little joke.” Or that the person of color is being “too sensitive.” If people of color challenge low performance ratings with clear evidence of outperforming consistently, an intimidating response meant to shut the employee down is “I can get someone very senior (translation = old friend) to back me up.”

The phrase “bring your whole self to work” was a recent, popular statement encouraging people of different backgrounds to not wear “the mask” that Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote about in the poem We Wear the Mask.³⁵ Workers were asked to be open, vulnerable, and completely untethered to past unspoken rules concerning assimilating within mostly White corporate environments.

The “bring your whole self to work” era brought neither decreased microaggressions nor increased numbers of people of color to the C-suite and pay parity with White colleagues. Undercutting Blacks' ability to thrive professionally, and using microaggression and intimidation, has been a part of our corporate business culture for decades. This has continued, whether we wear the mask or not. And, as I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, every microaggression—every false allegation about performance, every moment of isolation in a meeting, every condescending comment—comes at the cost of worker confidence, productivity, and even the bottom line.

A 2020 report by McKinsey on 17 leading companies demonstrated a significant correlation between a diverse leadership team and financial performance.³⁶ Leadership representation matters. Increased revenue is generated in these spaces that are diverse at the executive level. In particular, companies that were in the top tier for cultural and ethnic diversity on their executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading profitability. We can add compassion to that metric to ensure that diverse candidates who are recruited are also retained, in part because of a welcoming culture, in the corporate workplace.

Interestingly, many times people of color who experience workplace injustices tend to either overlook them or work through a mental assumption that their race or ethnicity has nothing to do with what may just be a personality difference.

Idris lives in the United Kingdom and describes himself as Afro- Caribbean. His career as a marketing executive for banking firms has spanned nearly two decades. “I'm the first person who really wouldn't use my color in this way. Just speaking to some of my Black friends who are outside the industry, who've looked at my career who have looked at my skill set. My friends keep telling me, you know, if you were this [race], trust me, you would not have these situations. In this case, I believe them.”

The grave mistrust Blacks have pertaining to workplace treatment and corporate establishment may have begun with how their ancestors were treated as forced laborers, but it didn't end there. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, we can find examples of White-led terror and violence against Black workers and their entrepreneurial endeavors. Today, dealing with the mental impact of workplace microaggression, while simultaneously processing ongoing physical violence against Black and Latinx people in public spaces, continues to take a toll. This sets a backdrop for current racial justice demands in the workplace and beyond. In other words, the pursuit of racial justice is not separate from the compassionate workplace—it is a vital component.

Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that unethical behavior, exclusion, and inequality at work have a long and sordid history—a history that employers don't acknowledge and make no attempt to correct. The fact that we're still fighting for racial justice well into the 21st century confirms those behaviors are still alive and well. To see the link between historic injustices and today's injustices, simply replace discriminatory treatment, lack of pay, and workplace abuse from the past with today's discriminatory treatment, pay inequity, and unchecked microaggressions, and we find a connection. Racial discrimination just takes a different form in the 21st century than it did in the 19th or even 20th centuries.

This is not comfortable work, but it is necessary work. We must acknowledge and learn from history to rectify the present, and then we can build a new workplace culture in which people of color drive innovation, achieve C-suite positions, receive fair pay, and drive revenues without being encumbered by systemic racism.