Why Opening Up at Work Is Harder for Minorities

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2018

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Katherine Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School, discusses research showing that African-Americans are often reluctant to tell their white colleagues about their personal lives — and that it hurts their careers. She says people should expect and welcome differences at work, and she gives practical advice for strengthening connections among colleagues of different racial backgrounds. Phillips is a coauthor of the article “Diversity and Authenticity,” in the March–April 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
0:03.8	HPR have a great new podcast for you. It's called New Here. Think of it like the
0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
0:12.8	Share new here with the young professionals in your life.
0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickett. Opening up about yourself at work is an act of risk management. Can you be yourself
0:51.5	yourself or do you have to worry about presenting well?
0:55.0	When your manager asks how your weekend was, how much do you share?
1:00.0	That calculation is more fraught for members of minorities.
1:05.0	New research shows they're often more guarded when it comes to their colleagues who are in the majority.
1:10.0	Let me just kind of create this little space and I'll stay in this space and I won't share too much information and I'll try to manage people's impressions of me, right, by essentially covering who I am.
1:23.0	That's Catherine Phillips.
1:25.0	She studied why African Americans hold back
1:28.0	and found that playing it safe can hurt their careers.
1:31.0	Take Marcus, a high performer she interviewed for the study.
1:35.0	He told her he thought he was doing everything right.
1:38.0	You know, all my numbers are the best numbers according to, you know,
1:42.0	kind of how we are objectively measuring things, yet I'm still not being promoted.
1:46.0	It wasn't until he started going to lunch with company executives and revealing more about his life outside work that his managers promoted him.
1:55.1	His numbers didn't change, his approach did.
1:58.2	So I think managers oftentimes fail to understand and recognize the impact of the relationships that they have with people
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.