Knitting together a workforce with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and other demographic differences is challenging even for experienced managers, who must socialize those employees into the organization and also help them form new work identities.
Sometimes, concludes a recent research paper, organizational leaders rely on their own experiences and established success standards to form expectations for these workers, resulting in them feeling discouraged and unable to fit in.
The paper, Relational Reconciliation: Socializing Others Across Demographic Differences, investigates how tutors at a diverse urban charter school were at first frustrated in their attempts to connect with and socialize students, but learned valuable lessons about asking questions and sharing information about themselves to break down barriers. The paper is currently available online and forthcoming in the April 2020 print edition of the Academy of Management Journal.
“A big lesson for all organizations is to be more thoughtful about the extent to which our expectations for others are rooted in what worked for us, and also to understand that what worked for us may not work for everyone else,” says Erin Reid, associate professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business. She co-authored the paper with Lakshmi Ramarajan, the Anna Spangler Nelson and Thomas C. Nelson Associate Professor at Harvard Business School.
Difficult for tutors to reach students
Ramarajan and Reid conducted their research at an urban charter school, where over 95 percent of the 500 students were minorities and more than 75 percent were low-income. They focused their attention on tutors—the employees with the closest and most extended contact with students. (Tutors serve a one-year, entry-level position that involves working closely with students in small groups, assisting teachers, and running extracurricular programs.)
The ethos of the school centers on a “no excuses,” high standards approach for performance and behavior, backed by a system of merits and demerits. Ramarajan and Reid also gathered information on the school’s training programs and read extensively about charter schools in general, for additional context.
As they read through their notes, Ramarajan and Reid observed a clear, common theme: Tutors were struggling to implement the school’s cut-and-dried policies for student behavior—and that struggle was connected to an uncomfortable awareness of race and class differences.
“It emerged that race and class mattered, but tutors felt they couldn’t talk about it,” says Reid, an associate professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business. “Instead they were supposed to teach students a particular way to ‘be.’”
Lurking in the background was the fact that the tutors were mostly white and middle- or upper-middle class, while the students were racial minorities whose families had experienced deprivation.
“The elephant in the room,” Reid continues, “is that the tutors felt like police, telling these kids what to do.”
That observation led to another insight: Tutors, charged with pushing behavioral standards associated with a college-bound, middle-class, professional culture, were questioning their role in the hierarchy as students simultaneously demanded recognition and affirmation for their background. Some white tutors worried about being seen as “oppressors” or “privileged,” for example, while those of the same race or economic background were concerned about being “betrayers.”
“When differences in race and class come up, typically it provokes fear and anxiety,” Ramarajan says. “The default tendency is to withdraw.”
But the tutors attempted to engage with students, despite the school’s discouragement of getting too “personal.” For example, one white male tutor told a student who was failing that he himself had repeated ninth grade; in another instance, a white female tutor asked a black student about her hair weave.
Often, these attempts led to higher engagement and a feeling of closeness that benefited the relationship. Other times, the result was a sense of estrangement.
In discussing the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a white female tutor questioned students about their efforts toward change before realizing they were more interested in talking about the systemic injustice of police shootings in general. (“I felt very uncomfortable, um, just because I didn’t want to offend,” she said. “I realize that some of the things I say could greatly offend them…”)
A journey of ‘relational reconciliation’
By asking questions and sharing information about themselves—whatever the results—the tutors engaged in what Ramarajan and Reid describe as “relational reconciliation,” and a potential framework for resolving similar conflicts in other institutions such as business.
The imperfect, all-too-human process takes place on organizational, individual, and interpersonal levels. It is one of ongoing adjustment and iteration, they write, with all of the awkward missteps and moments of connection that make up the human experience. In this way, tutors managed to walk the line—performing their role as an authority figure while accounting for their sense of self as well as that of their students.
Reid says tutors engaged in this activity largely without tools or guidance from school administration. “They had to figure it out for themselves,” she says, noting that the same is often true in any workplace where differences exist.
“The fact that we observed an engagement and openness to creating the relationship, despite those stumbles, was definitely one of the reasons to write about it,” Ramarajan says. “Much of our work, and certainly this paper, is trying to understand better what happens in diverse workplaces. How do people understand themselves and relate to each other? In this study, we were interested in how the tutor went about building constructive, helpful relationships with people who are different from them.”
Lessons for business leaders
The researchers hope their work will highlight the need for business leaders to become more aware of the origins of an organization’s performance expectations and standards. Typically, they say, the people who make the rules base those rules on their own experience—and the people who make the rules are often those with power and status.
“A big lesson for all organizations is to be more thoughtful about the extent to which our expectations for others are rooted in what worked for us, and also to understand that what worked for us may not work for everyone else,” says Reid.
Workplace programs that attempt to bridge race and class often view the minority group as “other,” Ramarajan notes, with acculturation expected of the minority individual. But often, leaders are not willing to critically rethink the culture itself and change their default set of expectations if someone has trouble ‘fitting in.’
Moreover, the people whose job it is to acculturate members of marginalized groups into these dominant group expectations are also finding it challenging.
Building productive relationships across gender, racial, and socioeconomic divides is difficult work, as Ramarajan and Reid’s study shows. But making that effort—beginning with a clear-eyed, inward look at one’s background, identity, and place in culture—can provide the foundation for building a workplace where everyone can thrive.
About the Author
Julia Hanna is an associate editor of the HBS Alumni Bulletin
[Image: MicroStockHub]
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