When talking to managers a new challenge increasingly enters the conversation: standard business and role accountability becomes a minefield where it intersects with diversity and race dynamics.
Increased incidents of being held accountable, as well as the sensitizing effect of other opportunities for reflection, has the effect that managers are becoming steadily more aware of the reality of modern racism and internalised dominance.
The realization of unearned systemic benefits afforded themselves because they belong to a dominant group, and the ongoing anger it evokes, can be very disconcerting.
Not wanting to act or be seen as oppressive, this awakening has the bewildering effect of robbing many of the confidence to exercise the responsibility of their executive role which is, inter alia, to hold employees accountable to adhere to their key performance areas and to support company values and objectives.
Efforts to traverse the potential quagmire where managers’ role responsibility of expecting employee accountability intersects with the potent diversity dynamics of race, gender, sexual orientation, etcetera, often seems daunting and intimidating.
Impact of Internalized dominance/privilege
Rightfully, employees are increasingly assertive in their response to all forms of ‘isms’, often leading to disciplinary actions against managers. Accusations of discrimination or stereotyping levelled at managers are mostly met with defensiveness and bewilderment. Wounding remarks often emanate from the blind spot of members of a dominant/privileged group.
Without feedback, such an individual cannot ‘see’ what effect he/she has on others, yet appropriate feedback is mostly resisted. As an example, a white manager commenting ‘Congratulations, you were the best B-BBEE candidate for the job!’ inflicts a multitude of hurtful and insulting innuendos on the recipient. When confronted, the manager often vehemently denies any racist implications, adding insult to injury by further dismissing the other’s experience.
Historical Wounding
Historical wounding regularly amplifies this already complex dilemma. Employees often bring painful and dehumanizing memories of authority to the work place; experiences vary from brutal authority figures publicly humiliating parents in front of impressionable young children, abusive teachers, to exploitative employers and humiliating past institutionalised regulations at work and in society.
These wounds will manifest in the work place. One such effect is a world view which regards all authority as suspect and inherently persecutory, abusive and invalid. Such perception justifies a default response that authority (and per implication, being held accountable) should be resisted, attacked or undermined at all cost.
The above challenge of authority is unconscious and instinctive, and does not have the discernment to differentiate between authority which is legitimate, or which is discriminatory. Nor does it matter whether the individual occupying the managerial role is black or white, male or female. All employees carry a ‘manager-in-the-mind’ – an image consisting of projections of all previous authority figures in their lives. Similarities to the employee’s current manager may be purely coincidental, but this is neither here nor there; to all of us reality is what exists in the mind.
Thus, if past authority figures were abusive and wounding, some of those attributes may be projected – and responded to accordingly – into current leaders and managers.
How Leaders can Help:
Leaders are held accountable by institutions to assume their managerial roles in an assertive yet non-vengeful manner. In dealing with the above complex situations, the role of the manager is to hold a space in which courageous and difficult conversations around this issue can happen. In order to do so, managers have to;
- Recognise their own defensive triggers when involved in discussions about stereotypes, discrimination and all forms of ‘isms’.
- Learn to recognize and contain own defensive feelings and not act from these.
- Explore the realities of internalized dominance and internalized oppression and acknowledge that both the position of privilege as well as of subordination produce blind spots. Identify which may be their own and how these may impact on communication.
- Develop a clear understanding of their own role, task and boundaries as executive role-players, and, similarly, of employees’ role, task and boundaries. Such clarity provides valuabledirection when negotiating complex realities impacting performance.
- Adopt a ‘both-and’ thinking style, rather than an ‘either-or’ perception of situations. Accept that, when dealing with complexity, multiple truths always exist.