Mike, a Black senior associate at a top global law firm, sought coaching to help him manage junior associates more effectively. Mike was exceptionally well-liked by clients and colleagues. Everyone expected him to make partner.
Mike told me privately that he wanted to merge his real self with his professional self. He couldn’t relax at work. He felt the need to change to fit in-altering his speech, mannerisms and clothing. (That’s what’s known as code-switching, originally a linguistic theory but now a recognized phenomenon among people of color.)
Yet, when I spoke with Mike’s practice group leader, Ben, a gregarious white man with a warm manner, he raved about Mike and said he considered Mike a good friend.
I shared with Ben a few generic examples of how race or color had factored into some of my other coachees’ struggles at work and asked if he believed race or color might have some effect on the issues Mike wanted to address.
Ben listened carefully and then responded, “Oh, no, we’re all colorblind around here. There are no race issues. Mike and I are friends.”
Ben had encouraged Mike to get coaching because some junior lawyers had complained about Mike. There seemed to be a pattern: Mike, an affable and gentle guy, wasn’t being clear or firm enough when giving assignments to the more junior lawyers about what he expected when it came to deadlines, work product or quality. Then, when they didn’t give him what he expected, Mike got angry or micromanaged them. The result was that some junior lawyers criticized Mike in their upward reviews and a couple tried to avoid working with him.
Within a couple of coaching sessions, it was clear that Mike was too polite in explaining his expectations to associates, bending over backward to be a nice guy. Why? Because he was afraid of being stereotyped as an angry Black man-which was, paradoxically, exactly what ended up happening.
Mike’s fear was rational and not unjustified. As a coach, I’d seen many similar instances with regard to race, ethnicity, gender and more. And when I’d practiced law myself as a female lawyer in majority-male Big Law firms, I’d personally felt the need to monitor and often alter my own behavior to avoid seeming either soft or a pushover, on the one hand, or bossy on the other hand.
Academic research supports Mike’s fear and even has a name for it. It’s called The Tightrope Bias: Women and people of underrepresented groups have a narrower band of behavior that’s considered acceptable. They are often viewed negatively or penalized when they act in the exact same ways as those in the majority group.
The result is that folks in underrepresented groups end up walking a metaphorical tightrope to fit in and to avoid stereotypical criticism. It can be exhausting, not to mention professionally counterproductive.
Mike and I explored this pattern in our coaching sessions and devised better communication strategies. His relationships with the junior associates improved. Yet, before attaining what seemed virtually guaranteed partnership, Mike left the firm. The firm considered it a major loss. And Ben was crushed.
What Mike told me privately was, “I’m exhausted by constantly pretending to be someone I’m not.” What Mike told the firm publicly was that he’d received an offer too good to turn down.
I’ve been especially troubled by Mike’s story. That’s because so many ingredients for success were in place:
- A firm whose senior leadership seemed to value and support diversity, equity and inclusion by allocating meaningful budget and resources to it.
- A well-meaning practice group leader who wanted to support a valued team member and friend.
- A talented and well-liked lawyer with excellent rainmaking potential.
Yet, despite these positives, crucial ingredients were missing:
- Blind spot: an underappreciated power imbalance. Ben did not seem to fully appreciate the power imbalance between Mike and him, or the impact of that.
- Missing Black role models. The firm did not have Black partners who Mike felt he could trust to talk with about race.
- And most importantly, a lack of curiosity and empathy about the role race might have played in Mike’s life.
Ben’s comment that “we’re all colorblind around here” was obviously well-meaning. It was based on a genuine desire to treat Mike as an individual and a friend, and to refrain from stereotyping Mike or lumping him into a group.
But the problem with anyone claiming to be colorblind is that it ignores or discounts the actual or potential role that another person’s race or color might play in that person’s life. It’s like choosing to live in the World of Pretend, where racism and discrimination don’t exist, instead of in the Real World.
That’s why it’s a fallacy for anyone to claim to be colorblind-or gender-blind, disability-blind or blind to anything else. That characteristic might be an integral part of a person’s self-identity if it factors into their unique daily experiences. Besides living in the World of Pretend, being colorblind means not wholly seeing the other person.
According to a recent report, 51% of white C-suite executives say they consider DEI issues to be a “distraction” from their company’s “real work.” Mike’s firm lost a likely valuable rainmaker. I wonder what – and who – the companies led by those 51% might lose.
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Reprinted with permission from The American Lawyer. © 2021 ALM Media Properties, LLC.
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