Toxic co-workers? A new way to think about nice people causing exclusion

The people bringing down the culture of your organization are not necessarily the ones you think they are. In this episode, Michael Baran describes the insidious way that all of us, even with the best intentions, can cause our co-workers to feel exclusion in our attempts to bond, to help, to be funny, or even to give a compliment. Michael and his book’s co-author name this concept “subtle acts of exclusion,” and in this episode he describes why they coined this term to reframe “microaggressions.” He build a deep understanding of what these interactions are, why they are such a problem, how they impact people, and what kind of culture would support addressing them directly.

Sometimes the most damage to an organization’s culture can come not from those explicitly trying to cause harm, but from those who are trying to be the nicest. How is that possible? What harm does that cause? And what can an organization do about it?

In this episode of The Culture Advantage, host Michael Baran provides some deep understanding about something that happens quite frequently in our places of work. People may be trying to connect, to bond, to ask a question, to be funny, or even to compliment someone else. And yet that effort may land with the opposite effect; it may cause hurt, pain, exclusion or stress. Often this happens across lines of difference, whether that’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, age, or anything else. 

For 50 years, people have sometimes called interactions “microaggressions.” Michael explains just how often these are happening to some people in our workplaces and what the impact of them might be, on people and on organizations.  

The term, microaggressions, however, can get in the way of us truly making progress around bringing people together to build more understanding and trust. People react defensively when they hear the “aggression” part of it, as if their intention was to be aggressive, which it usually was not. Others react to the “micro” part of the word, feeling slighted or uninterested because they understand micro to mean small or unimportant. Because of that, Michael, along with his co-author, Dr. Tiffany Jana, coined a new way to talk about these interactions. They call them Subtle Acts of Exclusion, in their work and in their book by the same name.

Using this more straightforward term, they bring people together to be able to have productive discussions when someone makes another feel excluded. People are able to speak up without encountering the same defensiveness. Colleagues can learn about one another and act in more inclusive ways.
This reframing of the concept is only part of the story. Organizations need to develop a speak up culture, where we understand we’re going to make mistakes, but we can build more trust together when we are able to speak up and to be heard. No matter where you sit in an organization, this episode will help you think about inclusive action and the culture that is needed to support all people. Michael provides some practical strategies and promises to provide lots more in an episode coming soon.

Transcript

Toxic co-workers? A new way to think about nice people causing exclusion

Is your company struggling, navigating through high turnover, toxic leadership, or a culture that's holding your team back from reaching its full potential? Well, you're not alone. So here's your host and guide, Michael Baran.

Michael Baran: Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Michael Baran. And I'm gonna talk today about one of the corrosive insidious threats to workplace culture. And no, it's not people trying to cause harm to others. It's not people who are explicitly racist or sexist or homophobic. I'm talking about.

Maybe the people you know, drinking coffee out of an ally mug. [00:01:00] I'm talking about the people maybe not quite knowing what to do after the George Floyd murder, but wanting to do something and sending their black colleagues an awkward support email. talking about the people saying they totally think everyone should be whatever gender they want.

They just don't know how it works grammatically to use they them pronouns, right? Today I wanna talk to you about these people who mean to do their best, or at least don't mean any harm. And yet they still contribute to a culture that does not feel inclusive or psychologically safe for everyone. If you are a leader at an organization and you're finding that your retention rates for minority groups are lower, then you would like and you don't get it 'cause your employees seem really nice and welcoming, and your policies seem good, I want you to pay extra attention to this.

So let me start today by playing some audio [00:02:00] from someone that I interviewed. I interviewed around a hundred people, going around with a videographer to different locations, and I ask people a very simple question, what's something subtle that happens at work that makes you feel bad and other people probably don't even realize it?

Okay, here's the audio professional. That's another thing that can be accomp. Uh, trying to be a compliment. You're very professional. Like, what, what does that mean? Like as opposed to what? As opposed to who, like, okay. You're very professional. Would it make you feel bad if someone was calling you professional?

A lot. It might not. Depending on who you are, it might not at all. Right? Certainly the person saying that thinks they're giving a compliment. And yet that's not how it lands. For this person who identifies as a black woman, I want you to think about [00:03:00] what could be happening in a real scenario here, right?

You're at your organization, you went through a very time consuming search to find the best person for a really important position. You found this woman, she's amazing. She's excited to start. You're thrilled, and as she starts working at your organization, several people are telling her maybe excitedly about how professional she is, and she starts losing some of that excitement.

She's starting to feel less inclusion. She's wondering, is there a culture here where I'm gonna really felt understood and valued? She's thinking, maybe I should go remote and avoid some of this stuff. She's maybe turning that job alert back on, right? This is a really bad outcome for everyone, and it was just from people who are trying to do their best.

Let me give you another [00:04:00] example. I think when I talk, uh, something about like a past boyfriend or something, like just in a normal conversation when I've sort of met people for the first time. Yeah. Or sometimes when I'm working through my work with community members or things like that, um, there is, there is a pause and there's, and I'm not quite sure how it's gonna be received, but I actually don't care and.

And typically it's like, okay, that's fine. Um, but there's, there's usually always a pause. Yeah. First. Yeah. Okay, so this person who identifies as a white gay man, he mentions a past boyfriend and there's this pause, and then someone says, oh, okay. Right. No one said anything bad here, and yet this might make him feel like he's not normal.

Or like he doesn't belong. And I know he [00:05:00] said it doesn't bother him, but remember what the question was that I asked, right? What subtle thing makes you feel bad at work and people wouldn't realize it. Now, this kind of thing may be resonating with some of you, especially with those of you who don't find yourself in the majority, whether we're talking about.

Race or ethnicity, gender or sexuality, ability or disability? Religion, weight, brain processing, any dimension of identity that we talked about before. You may have experienced things like this. Others might be thinking, wait, what you're saying, I can't call someone professional. What could possibly be the problem with that?

And I will say, good. Good. I'm glad you're here. I'm going to, for the rest of this episode, I'm gonna take you on an explanation journey. Please stay with me. Okay, now we talked about [00:06:00] inclusion and exclusion before. I wonder if you know that even subtle exclusion or passive exclusion hurts, and I don't mean that in just a kindergarten teacher sort of way.

I mean, they do these brain scan studies and they'll give people these passive exclusion prompts and they look at what part of the brain lights up. And it's the same part of the brain that lights up as when people experience physical pain, it literally hurts us. And when that part of the brain gets activated, it gets in the way of all sorts of things.

It gets in the way of decision making. Problem solving, right? For a bit. Of course, that comes back. We regulate, but it may take a while, so it gets in the way of our work, but worse than that, when this kind of thing happens again and again and again, which it does to many people, it can cause [00:07:00] mental and physical health problems.

That's how serious of an issue this is. And then guess what happens when people feel this exclusion? They might quietly quit, right? People were talking a lot about that this year. You know, people doing the bare minimum but not giving it their all. They might actually quit and leave the organization, right?

That's what's going on with your retention rates. They might withhold important information. Thinking it's dangerous. I'm not gonna get credit anyways. Why should I? They might stay silent when they see big problems coming. They might even share about their feelings publicly or with other people and damage your brand or reputation.

None of these is good, and sometimes employers think, well, we've got time to address this. I'm sure it takes a while for all this exclusion to build up. No, it takes one second. It can [00:08:00] happen in one second for some of this to be put into motion when someone feels that exclusion pain. Now, these interactions that I'm talking about where there's kind of a mismatch between someone's intention, what they're trying to do and the impact.

Or the way it lands or what it makes someone else feel, right? There's that mismatch. Some people have called those microaggressions since the early 1970s based on the work of Dr. Chester Pierce, and I'm so grateful that he brought attention to some of the exclusion that was happening, but flying under the radar.

Now, of course that term's been around now 50 years and there's a lot of research on it. Right? I'm thinking specifically about a McKinsey study on women in the workplace. For example, in that study, they asked women about specific kinds of microaggressions They might feel. These were some of the ones they asked about, [00:09:00] having your judgment questioned in your area of expertise.

Needing to provide more evidence of your competence than others do. Being addressed in a less than professional way, being mistaken for someone at a much lower level than you're at your work contributions are ignored. Okay. Those were just some of the things that they asked about. And the percentage of women responding, yes, this happens was big, right in the teens, twenties, thirties, 40% depending on the specific demographic.

Now, this wasn't just for women 'cause they asked men to, but mostly for women. It wasn't just for black women, but it was especially true for black women. And I wanna point out the question they asked was not, has this ever happened once in your life? The question was, does this occur during the normal course of business?[00:10:00] 

Right? And those percentages, 20, 30, 40%, that was just for one of these. So when you take them all together and think about all the other a hundreds that could be happening, you can see this is happening a lot. And if it's not happening to you, you just might not be seeing it. Right. Like sometimes I'll be speaking to big groups and I'll be telling them about the research showing that women get interrupted more than men.

They don't get credit for their ideas as much. And I'll sometimes watch as the men turn towards the women in the room and they'll say, you know, quietly, well that doesn't happen here. Right? The eye rolls that they get in return, they're like, are you kidding me? But it's not happening to them and they don't see it.

So if you're thinking right now, oh, come on. I've been in lots of different workplaces. I don't see these microaggressions happening to people. [00:11:00] Imagine the eye rolls you would be getting when people heard you saying that. Now in that same McKinsey study, they looked at where have we seen progress with women in the workplace.

For example, they found 24% improvement of women in the C-suite and leadership. Great. Is that enough? No. But it's a bright spot as they call it. Then they looked at microaggressions and found no real change. So here you have this situation where these things are happening all the time. To some people, they're causing real damage both to the people and to the organization, and we're not making progress.

So when organizations would realize this, they would call people like me in one of my colleagues or me to do a microaggressions workshop. And I will tell you honestly, these workshops of all the different workshops we do, these were so [00:12:00] hard. And that was primarily for three reasons. So first, we'd give a really common example of a microaggression.

Probably the most commonly talked about one is calling a black person articulate or well spoken, and we'd say that, and people, some people would react with extreme defensiveness. They would say, you can't call that a microaggression. If that person wasn't being aggressive at all. They were trying to give a compli.

And look, I sort of get that reaction. I mean, aggression is in that word, right? It's sort of bringing our attention to that as if it's the intention of the speaker. You know, what else is in that word? Micro. What does micro mean? Small. Unimportant. So now if you're in this workshop and you've been experiencing this kind of thing, and then someone calls it implicitly not important, well that might [00:13:00] feel like it's sliding you.

And if you're in that workshop and someone implicitly signals to you in the very title of it that this is not an important topic we're gonna be addressing, well then how motivated are you to really pay attention? How frustrated are you even that you have to sit through this workshop? 'cause you've got important pressing things to deal with.

So for a while I was uttering under my breath. Someone's gotta think of a new word for this thing. Because this word is getting in the way of the work we're trying to do here. Now, around that time, I was talking to a friend and brilliant organization, consultant, Dr. Tiffany, Jana, and Tiffany said. Oh my gosh, I'm finding the same thing.

What if we could be the ones to think of a different name? And that led to us writing a book together. This book first came out in 2020, second edition came out in [00:14:00] 2023. Now starting that, that renaming process was really interesting. We had a long list of potential renames. Some of them were trying to be clever, some were trying to be.

Sticky or jargony. In the end, we thought, why don't we just name them what they are? Subtle acts of exclusion or SAE for short, right? Subtle. Because while they don't necessarily feel subtle, the subtlety is what keeps them happening. It keeps them flying under the radar and people don't address them.

Second, they're acts. They're words or actions. They're not someone's intention, and we should be able to talk about that without all the defensiveness. And then we thought, let's just name the problem right? In the term itself, they are creating the opposite of inclusion. They're creating exclusion, so subtle acts of exclusion.

Now, one of the things we wanted to do in the book was to [00:15:00] really help people understand what those subtle acts of exclusion are making people feel when they happened. So we looked at all the examples we could find. Books, articles, all the stories we'd heard over the years. I did those a hundred interviews with people on the streets in our decades of doing this work, and we found that eight most common things people may be feeling, you don't belong.

You're a threat, you're inadequate, you're not normal, you're invisible. You're not an individual. You're a curiosity or you're a burden. Now, again, people aren't saying this right? It's just what the other person might be feeling. So for example, someone asks an Asian American, Hey, where are you [00:16:00] from? And they say, I'm from Houston.

And then the person says, well, where are you really from? And on the surface, that's just a question of heritage, right? We, I've certainly met people who say, I just love to know where people are from. I love to know about Heritages. Okay? But it might make someone feel like they don't belong and they're not normal.

'cause when you ask someone else where they were from and they said Dallas, there was no follow up question. Right. Another example when someone tells a younger colleague, oh, you're one of the good millennials. You are not like those other millennials that might seem like the person thinks it's a compliment, but it might make that person feel inadequate or like they're not an individual.

Another example, when a man who's blind is walking down the hallway at work and people silently flatten [00:17:00] themselves up against the wall to get out of his way, they're trying really hard to help. But it might make him feel like a burden or like he's not normal and they could have just said hi.

Right? Which would've helped him navigate the hallway better? Maybe feel like a normal human. Now, do we know what people are gonna be feeling when one of these things happens? No, we don't. Right? It might be one of these eight. It might be a different one. It might be multiple at the same time. It could be all of them at the same time.

Right? But here's the thing, we don't know. They would have to tell us what they're feeling and it's complicated human stuff. So for example, one millennial might feel that comment, oh, you're one of the good millennials. They might feel it as a subtle act of exclusion, but a different millennial doesn't.

That's fine. It doesn't invalidate the fact that. One millennial said it did bother them. It did [00:18:00] make them feel bad, right? Someone also might feel it as a subtle act of exclusion one day, but not the next day for whatever reason. Someone might feel it as a subtle act of exclusion when one person says it to them, but not when a different person says it to them.

'cause they have different relationships, right? Different trust built up. So it's complicated stuff and you can't just memorize a list of 25 things to say, right? A lot of times people want that. There are some things you should definitely not say, and we might have an episode about that at one point, but this is just a situation where you've gotta create a culture where people aren't expected to be perfect, right?

We're all gonna mess up sometimes. But we're confident we can do the repair. Right. We're confident we can build more trust by talking about it. This is a situation where we've gotta build up a culture of curiosity where people wanna learn more [00:19:00] about their colleagues, where we build up a culture where people feel safe to say something about it rather than letting it.

Fester and just like never wanting to work with that person again. We need a culture where people feel actual gratitude rather than defensiveness or shutting down when they get feedback like this because they know they can grow and they can be more inclusive with their colleagues and they wanna be more inclusive with their colleagues.

So that's where we are today with subtle acts of exclusion. Now don't think I'm just gonna leave you here with no real solutions. Today's episode is all about understanding these subtle acts of exclusion, which are bringing your culture down. I will do more episodes, maybe one even next week with some guidelines for what we can actually do about this.

Okay? That is gonna be all for now. If you're looking for an action you could do this week, [00:20:00] I would encourage you to ask someone a question like I did when I interviewed people on the street. Are there any subtle things that happened to you that might make you feel bad and other people wouldn't even realize it?

You could ask people that now you might think that would sound really strange coming out of the blue, and maybe it would. So I often preface things by giving some context like, Hey. This might sound odd, but I just heard this podcast about subtle acts of exclusion, and I was wondering, right, you preface what you're gonna say.

See now they might say, no, there's nothing. Okay. And that might be true, or it might be that they don't feel like sharing with you in that moment. Or it might be that they don't feel safe sharing, maybe with you or maybe just at work in general, and this is really important. If someone does share something with you, do not argue with them [00:21:00] that that shouldn't make you feel bad.

Don't defend the speaker and their intentions. Do not play devil's advocate in that moment. Just listen. Listen to it from their perspective. Not yours. If you wanna ask follow up questions, ask things with respectful curiosity, like how did that make you feel, and how often does that happen? And as they're telling you, just validate, right?

Gosh, I'm sorry that happens to you. And thank you for sharing it with me. It means a lot that you trust me enough to hold that. Now this exercise sounds simple, but it's actually not easy. It takes courage, right? On both sides and in a broader context, right? Last week we were talking about having conversations with people who you might have differences with overcoming divisions.

These [00:22:00] conversation skills I'm talking about here. Are some of the building block skills, we're gonna need to do that. Okay, that's it for today. You know, I mentioned my book on this topic. If there's anyone out there that would like to read more, email me. Maybe with some feedback, some questions, some thoughts, and put your mailing address in the email and our team will pick five people at random and send you a signed copy of the book.

The email to send that to isMichael@cultureadvantagepodcast.com. Okay, be well everyone. I will talk with you again soon. 

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