Let’s Get Shiny
This week has been full of interesting conversations. First Liz Strauss got me thinking about what is it I really do for clients. I think what I really do is make people shiny. Then we shine up the team together, which shines up the organization. It’s mostly a matter of reconnecting with our brilliance and making it visible to one another.
This means I have to keep myself shiny and bright, which means I need a little help from my brilliant friends and colleagues.
So a few days later, I’m talking to Marjorie Weingrow. She directs the SAGE Scholars program at UC Berkleley, a fabulous, inspiring program I’m looking to get involved with. We were musing about deeply embedded prejudices and how we all have them. Whether we want them or not. No matter how much work we’ve done to eliminate them. All of us. Every dang one of us.
Prejudice: It’s not just for white men anymore. It may be the most equal-opportunity thing about us.
Marjorie and I got to talking about the legion of things that can set us off: race and gender, sure; ethnicity and religion, check; but, wait – there’s so much more! What about more subtle, less obvious things: the way someone looks, or talks, or the position they hold in an organization? What about the way you don’t seem to listen to me when I talk to you? What about the way I dim myself slightly to be in your presence because you’re an executive?
You snub me in the hallway and I decide you’re a snob. I start ignoring you – Ha! I’ll show you!
You wear a black suit, and talk fast using big words, so I decide you’re an empty suit. I start talking you down behind your back – I must warn others about your callow ways!
You grew up in the American South, England, Pakistan, the wrong side of the tracks, with a silver spoon in your mouth. We all know what that means. No? Then let me fill you in…
Here’s the thing though: When I start reacting to one tiny aspect of you, I can start to mistake it for all of you. Pretty soon I’m interacting not with you, but with my assumptions about you. There you are, shining in the way only you can, and I can’t see a thing but my belief about executives or union members or people who wear black. You may be reaching out to me, you may be asking as clearly as you can, but I don’t respond. I can’t hear you – I can only hear your suit, your title, your status.
I have the most trouble with this when it’s triggered by something so tiny it barely registers - a loud speaking voice, a mannerism or gesture. But register it does – then it worms around in me to the point where I don’t dare question my assumptions about you, because they’re all I’ve got. Soon, I’ll have no choice about how to react to you. As a result, I get smaller, dimmer.
Yuck. Or, more accurately, STUCK. And we all do it. I sometimes think it’s the one thing we have in common with everyone we meet. The one thing we can count on.
One of these tiny, potentially wormy assumptions popped up the other day. I mentioned I lived in a houseboat to a client. What I meant as throw-away comment brought our conversation to a full stop:
“A houseboat? I thought you lived in a gated community.”
Which is true, just not in the way she meant it: “Well, yeah – we keep the gate locked so no one wanders onto the docks and falls through them. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Silence, then laughter. I got to tell her how funky houseboat living is, and why I love it. She got to tell me how surprised she was, and how delighted. Our conversation got more spacious, and our relationship more real and powerful. We got shiny with each other.