Tl;dr – ★★★★☆
This is a great introduction to workplace injustice — how to recognize and fix it.
The book is broken out into three parts:
- The root causes of workplace injustice
- Discrimination, harassment, and physical violations
- Systemic justice and injustice
We’ve broken down each of these sections in our full review below, so you can skip to the sections you’re interested in. If you’re not able to spend the time — see our favorite learnings here.
Key learnings
- The three root causes of workplace injustice are bias (unaware of stereotypes), prejudice (aware of stereotypes), and bullying (intentional use of stereotype to harm).
- There are four types of people in any situation — leaders, upstanders (observers taking action), people who cause harm, and people who are harmed. Responses to injustice differs for each of these roles.
- When you’ve been harmed — weigh silence & response; think through “I” & “You” statements
- When you’ve caused harm — educate yourself about your bias; understand why your actions caused harm; practice results over intent: it doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend to harm someone, it matters that you did
- For leaders — as a victim, you must still act like a leader; as a leader of teams, you must educate and determine how your team will interrupt bias
- Applying concepts to your business
- Use business logic: proactively look for bias, quantify your bias, and “measure the progress you’re making toward creating a more diverse, inclusive organization”
- Use your checks, balances, and quantified bias to improve operational processes like hiring, retention, compensation, performance management, coaching/mentoring, psychological safety, exit interviews, and non-disclosure agreements
- Diversity is a competitive advantage — hiring for talent will build a more qualified team + diverse teams have been proven to be more innovative & effective.
- Learn to recognize the different systems of injustice: brutal ineffectiveness, self-righteous shaming, and oblivious exclusion.
Part One: The Root Causes of Workplace Injustice
Bias, Prejudice, and Bullying
Kim Scott starts out by defining the three problems at the root of injustice — bias, prejudice, and bullying — and providing responses to those problems.
- Bias — Not meaning it (unaware of stereotypes) → Bias interrupter (make the person aware)
- Prejudice — Meaning it (aware of/rationalizing stereotypes) → Code of Conduct (do not allow one person to impose prejudices on others)
- Bullying — Being mean (intentional use of stereotypes to harm) → Clear consequences (demonstrate that bullying won’t work)
Players
There are four types of people in any situation involving the above problems — leaders, upstanders (observers taking action), people who cause harm, and people who are harmed.
- Recognizing bias — “The moral failure comes when we refuse to notice or address the bias, the harm it does, and the ways in which bias often leads to prejudice, discrimination, harassment, abuse, and violence.”
- Responding to bias — “It’s not your job to educate the person who just harmed you. But you may choose to do the work because saying something may cost you less emotionally than remaining silent.”
- Not sure where to start? Maybe try an “I” statement — “starting with the word ‘I’ invites the person to consider things from your point of view — why what they said or did seemed biased to you.”
- Responding to prejudice — “The reason to confront prejudice is to draw a bright line between that person’s right to believe whatever they want and your right not to have that belief imposed on you.”
- Responding to bullying — Use a “You” statement as in “What’s going on for you here?” Using a “You” statement strips the bully of their perceived status & allows you to take a more active role.
When you’ve been harmed
Kim recommends choosing a few “I” and “You” statements, and then practicing them until they feel natural.
That said, the overarching message is not that we always need to respond but that we shouldn’t default to silence.
When you’ve caused harm
When you’re told you’ve caused harm, adopt a growth mindset — “I’d like to understand why [my actions caused harm], so I don’t repeat that mistake.” This does not mean that the person you’ve harmed is responsible for educating you — in many cases, you should be educating yourself about your unconscious bias.
This is hard work — keep in mind that “when it becomes routine for us to notice our biases, they feel less threatening.”
One of our favorite takeaways from this book is that “results matter more than intentions”. If we approach bias & prejudice from a business mindset (and we are at work here), then we see that it doesn’t matter if we intended to hit our business goals, it matters that we did hit goals. Applying this same logic to bias — it doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend to harm someone, it matters that you did.
For leaders
If you’ve been harmed or you see someone acting in a way that could harm others, “you may feel like the victim, but if you are the leader, you’d better act like one.” Leaders “must be personally involved with both helping to educate the team during the training” and “figuring out how they and their teams will interrupt bias when it shows up afterward”.
Find a place of shared commitment through a set of goals:
- Make sure the interruption is clear enough
- Make sure the interruption does not re-harm
- Make sure the interruption does not humiliate
- Make is safe for the interruption to happen publicly & safe to ask for clarification
It’s your job to create an environment that is psychologically & physically safe — “people are free to believe whatever they want. But they are not free to DO whatever they want.”
- If you don’t have a code of conduct, write one
- Enforce consequences
- “Give the quiet ones a voice”
Part Two: Discrimination, Harassment, and Physical Violations
A leader’s role in preventing
- Set up checks & balances
- Address the pressures that keep people silent about discrimination, harassment, and physical violations by implementing “systems in which leaders are held accountable for doing their jobs well rather than given unilateral power or authority”.
- Quantify your bias
- Think again about applying business logic to bias. Proactively look for bias, quantify your bias, and “measure the progress you’re making toward creating a more diverse, inclusive organization”.
- Use your checks, balances, and quantified bias to improve operational processes like hiring, retention, compensation, performance management, coaching/mentoring, psychological safety, exit interviews, and non-disclosure agreements.
A few of the most interesting suggestions revolved around hiring processes.
- Diversity is a competitive advantage — hiring for talent will build a more qualified team + diverse teams have been proven to be more innovative & effective.
- Explore putting together a hiring committee to help make decisions. That said, avoid the unconscious discrimination of insisting that underrepresented people spend the extra energy sitting on the committee (to “fix” a problem that isn’t theirs to fix).
For people harmed and upstanders
It can feel impossible to fight discrimination and harassment without “blowing up your career”. After all, “capitalism is so good at rewarding what we can measure, so bad at rewarding what we value”.
The first steps don’t require you to make the decision of whether or not to report it —
- Document
- Build solidarity
- Locate the exit nearest you
If you decide then that you want to take it a step further. Some of the following actions could be taken (though every situation is different, so keep a close watch on your wellbeing & consider your physical safety) —
- Talk directly with the person who cause you harm
- Report to HR
- Take legal action
- Tell your story publicly
Touch
This chapter was extremely difficult to power through & brought up some personal memories — so we would caution readers with a history of trauma or assault to skip it.
On that note, the points documented below will be relatively zoomed out.
Leaders should
- Create a culture of consent & code of conduct — and over communicate it to your team, even if (especially if) you don’t think it’s a problem — then understand the cost of not doing so
- Make it safe and easy to report violations & build trusted reporting systems
- Give people a chance to learn, but not too many chances (and consider the offense)
- Investigate thoroughly and don’t hide behind sham processes
Part Three: Systemic Justice and Injustice
This section is heavily based on the Conformity Dynamic and the Coercion Dynamic.
- Conformity Dynamic — doesn’t allow us to value the individual, but usually offers “a pretense of being rational, civilized, polite” (the “slippery slope toward abuse”)
- The Coercion Dynamic — “drags us away from collaboration”, and is accompanied by bias, bullying, harassment, and physical violations (the “slippery slope toward violence”)
These two bad dynamics are self-reinforcing. In order to actively combat them we have to get past denial — taking Ibram X. Kendi’s quote “Denial is the heartbeat of racism” and apply it to all workplace injustice.
Recognizing different systems of injustice
- System 1: Brutal Ineffectiveness
- Caused when “management systems fail to hold people accountable for bad behavior” of even “reward bad behavior”
- A little louder for those in the back — in business, “results matter, not intentions”
- System 2: Self-righteous Shaming
- Using shame to “attempt to coerce one person or group to respect another person or group”
- Recognizing the difference between being shamed and feeling shame — “There is a huge difference between being shamed for being a racist and feeling shame. It’s my job to regulate my emotion, move through shame in a productive way” (Brené Brown)
- “It’s important to distinguish between the truly bad actors and the people who made a mistake they can learn from.”
- System 3: Oblivious Exclusion
- Likely the most pervasive system — it’s the “least dramatic and hardest to put your finger on” and this makes it ambiguous, allowing it to operate in the shadows
- It “occurs when people in an overrepresented supermajority allow unconscious biases and/or prejudices to impact both day-to-day interactions and also important decisions”
- Lean away from “good intentions” and into the “hard questions” — make bias interruption the norm, make sure the code of conduct is well understood, and build bias quantifiers into your internal processes
Optimistic Conclusions
“When individuals feel encouraged to bring their whole selves to work — when they feel confident they will be heard rather than shut down if they speak up — they do better work, and they work better together. Productivity increases, innovation flourishes, and things are much more fair. Everyone is happier. It becomes a virtuous circle.”
Sparklos recommended supplemental reads
- Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
- How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo