Saturday, March 13, 2021

In Her Words: ‘Shutting up, shutting down’

Why is it so hard to speak up at work?
Hanna Barczyk

By Ruchika Tulshyan

"I started shutting up, shutting down."

— Sacha Thompson, who advises clients on diversity and inclusion in the workplace

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Sacha Thompson was excited to start a new job. The hiring process had been long and grueling, but at long last she'd gotten a call from her soon-to-be boss asking her to lead diversity marketing efforts at a big multinational company.

The position was a step up in salary, would include global travel and positioned her for a leadership role.

The first few months were "a honeymoon," she said. She was reporting to an influential director and would soon be able to hire to expand her team. At regular check-ins, her manager encouraged her to share her ideas candidly. "I was told, 'We're starting a new program and whatever your vision is, we're open to that.'" She felt as if her manager "really had my back."

Then the trouble started.

Ms. Thompson heard from several peers that an executive who was sponsoring her program was also criticizing her performance. It was news to her. Because she hadn't received the feedback directly, she felt she couldn't go straight to the source and ask the executive how she should adjust her approach.

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Despite her boss's continued encouragement to expand her program and her successfully diversifying the company's annual conference, Ms. Thompson was starting to feel invisible. She got the feeling that she was being left out of meetings and that her ideas weren't being heard despite her deep knowledge about workplace inclusion and her lived experience as a Black woman.

And when her first manager left the company, a new one put her on probation without telling her.

Ms. Thompson constantly felt as if she was being silenced. She says she was given little direction on projects and was "shut down if I asked for more information." She said she didn't get the direct feedback she felt she needed.

From her perspective, it felt as if "they were trying hard to get me to leave."

"I started shutting up, shutting down," she said.

What had begun three years earlier as an exciting new opportunity had turned into a job where she did not feel valued, welcome or safe, she said. She started losing her hair and suffering stomach issues. It was time to go.

Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up, take risks and put forward ideas, questions or challenges, without facing ridicule or retaliation.

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, in 1999 popularized an idea that was first written about by the psychologist William Kahn nine years earlier.

When employees feel safe, they trust that they can admit mistakes, seek feedback or even fail without dire consequences, according to Dr. Edmondson. Not only does this garner greater team success, but it can be lifesaving in certain settings, such as when a nurse can challenge a doctor at a critical moment in the neonatal intensive care unit. And even in less high-stakes environments, teams with safety have a higher chance of innovation, growth and expansion, better collaboration, trust and inclusion.

A two-year study at Google found that feeling secure enough to contribute is the most common feature, by far, of high-performing teams. The very nature of innovation requires employees to surface half-formed ideas, take risks or propose solutions that may not have data to inform them. And that can happen only in an environment where employees feel secure and safe.

But more often than not, it's women — and especially women of color — who don't feel safe in their workplaces.

"When you're in the numerical minority or different from everybody else, then you're going to feel pressure to self-censor," said Modupe Akinola, an associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. "Just by nature of being one of the only makes an environment feel less psychologically safe." That's why this issue is magnified for women of color, she said.

Women are less likely than men to speak up without solid data or the conviction that they're definitely right about what they're going to say, so they'll hold back, Dr. Edmondson said. That's concerning. That women don't feel secure enough to speak up at critical junctures is problematic for everyone, especially as we navigate the uncertainty of the pandemic, she said.

Of course, most women experience the double bind of being perceived as either likable or competent when they speak up. But women of color face additional racial stereotypes, too. Some Black women feel pressured to modulate their tone so they are not perceived as conforming to the harmful "angry Black woman" stereotype, Dr. Akinola said.

Recently, a number of women of color have been fired or maligned after criticizing their companies, such as Timnit Gebru, who brought to light A.I. ethics challenges at Google, and Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, two former Pinterest employees who raised racial discrimination concerns.

"You can imagine that in a psychologically safe environment, this type of feedback or dissent would have been welcomed and the outcome for them would have been dramatically different," Dr. Akinola said. In a safe environment, leaders would foster an openness to candid feedback and address that feedback, even if they didn't agree with it, she said.

But far too many women get the message from their companies to toe the line — or else.

The virtual environment has exacerbated the safety problem. Of the female business leaders who responded to a recent survey from Catalyst, nearly half said women face difficulty in speaking up in virtual meetings. And one in five women reported feeling overlooked or ignored during video meetings.

"The virtual environment has reduced the amount of social interactions people have in general," Dr. Akinola said. When social interactions are hampered, the opportunities to build trust and truly connect — the building blocks of psychological safety — are reduced by the virtual environment, she explained. For all employees, but especially women.

Managers can foster safety by constantly asking themselves the hard questions: Am I hearing some ideas more than others? Have I made sure everyone got a chance to speak?

Organizations can set rules that people don't interrupt each other in meetings, Dr. Akinola said. Even on the Supreme Court, female justices get interrupted at twice the rate of male justices, one study found.

And leaders can show vulnerability, take risks and model the behaviors that would have more women feeling psychologically safe, she added.

Aiko Bethea, founder of RARE Coaching and Consulting, said she could recall feeling safe to take risks just once in her three-decades-long career, because her boss modeled vulnerability and welcomed ideas from all employees. That boss was Stacey Abrams.

When she was working on a new legislative process for the City of Atlanta, Ms. Bethea said, she felt trusted to "run with it and do it." She said Ms. Abrams "also challenged me to do things that I never would have dreamed of doing. I knew that she would never let me be thrown under the bus."

"She believed in me and she pushed me," Ms. Bethea said. "That was the best experience I ever had."

As for Ms. Thompson, she now advises clients on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

She urges her clients to work on creating psychologically safe organizations in tandem. "I've seen light bulbs go off for leaders who say, 'Oh, I actually have to make sure, especially in this virtual space, to onboard people properly and to make sure they feel included and valued?'" she said.

"Many women want to contribute and we want to challenge the status quo, but we can't if we've never felt included to begin with," she said.

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What else is happening

Here are four articles from The New York Times that you may have missed.

"I was willing to give my life for my country, and I deployed, no questions asked," said Capt. Sara Ingrao, who says she sees many flaws in the Army's fitness test.Lexey Swall for The New York Times
  • "The intent was not to discriminate against women." As the U.S. Army revises its physical test and rethinks fitness, it faces some difficult questions: Do current requirements penalize women? Do they overshadow expertise and intellectual preparation? [Read the story]
  • "We're scared, we're shaken and we're intimidated." After Sarah Everard disappeared in London last week, thousands of women across Britain shared their own stories of harassment and fear of being alone in public spaces. [Read the story]
  • "Maybe women were political rulers, but not alone." A tomb unearthed in Spain of a man and a woman prompted archaeologists to reconsider assumptions about women's power in Bronze Age European societies. [Read the story]
  • "Multiple and growing credible allegations of sexual harassment." A sixth woman has now accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of inappropriate behavior, claiming that the New York governor reached under her blouse and began touching her at his private residence in the Executive Mansion. [Read the story]

Vital Voices: Meghan Markle

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, uses her platform to be an advocate for women's rights globally.Art by Gayle Kabaker | Courtesy of Assouline

"When women succeed, we all succeed, and when we learn to believe in one another's worth, we will all come to know our own infinite worth."

[In March, In Her Words is featuring portraits of female leaders from the book "Vital Voices" as we consider the question: What makes a leader?]

In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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On Politics: Will Republicans Pay a Price for Opposing the Stimulus?

It's complicated. But so far, their messaging has been scattershot.
Author Headshot

By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host.

No Senate Republicans voted for the stimulus bill.Senate Television, via Associated Press

There are plenty of numbers in the $1.9 trillion relief plan signed into law by President Biden this week. $1,400 for stimulus checks. $130 billion for schools. $350 billion for state and local governments.

But the most politically significant number might just be zero.

Yes, zero. That's the number of congressional Republicans who supported the legislation.

Looking at the lack of G.O.P. support, you might assume the bill was unpopular, at least with Republican voters. You'd be wrong. Americans overwhelmingly support the package, including a significant portion of the Republican base. According to some analysts, the bill is the most popular piece of major legislation in over a decade.

So Republicans will definitely pay a political price for opposing a measure that the country, including a large portion of their base, seems to want, right?

Well, it's complicated.

We are now in the post-passage phase of the American Rescue Plan, a battle likely to last through the midterm elections next year.

During the weeks of negotiations over the legislation, Republicans were unable to coalesce around a comprehensive argument against the bill. Instead, they offered a scattershot list of complaints. After the legislation passed, Senator Mitch McConnell's main argument seemed to be that the economic recovery would have happened anyhow.

"We're about to have a boom," said Mr. McConnell, the minority leader. "And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion."

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Others seemed far more focused on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, culture war bait that fires up their conservative base. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, even took the issue to the House floor. "First they outlaw Dr. Seuss, and now they want to tell us what to say," he said during a debate over a Democratic voting rights bill. (It was the company overseeing the author's estate, not any Democrats, that recently chose to stop publishing several of his works. And Republicans' focus on Dr. Seuss did deliver some economic benefit: More than 1.2 million copies of stories by the children's book author sold in the first week of March — more than quadruple from the week before.)

The Republican predicament is simple: People like getting money, especially when they are struggling, and this bill will deliver. Roughly 90 percent of American households will be eligible for stimulus checks. More than 93 percent of children — 69 million — will receive what is essentially a guaranteed income for families. Even those who don't receive a payment will benefit from new funding for reopening schools and vaccine distribution.

Former President Donald J. Trump taught Republican voters to love that kind of government spending by championing stimulus measures that were even larger than this bill. That makes it difficult for G.O.P. lawmakers who backed those measures to argue against the cost of this legislation, without facing charges of hypocrisy or possible pushback from portions of their base.

To shift public opinion, Republicans will have to settle on a clear argument against the legislation and find the party discipline to drive it. To that end, they'll be keeping a close eye on how the money is distributed, hoping to find examples of waste or fraud that they can highlight to undercut Mr. Biden's policy agenda. One area ripe for discontent is the aid to state and local governments, which polls significantly lower among Republicans than Democrats. But it won't be easy: Republicans are already struggling to overcome deep divides in their ranks.

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Mr. Biden, acutely aware of the potential pitfalls, wants to ensure that Americans understand the benefits of this bill — and that they give him credit. His address on Thursday evening was the start of an administration-wide push to promote the legislation across the country. It's a strategy to avoid the struggles of former President Barack Obama, who some Democrats believe was not aggressive enough in selling his 2009 stimulus package to voters.

The situation isn't exactly the same: Unlike Mr. Obama, who faced the challenge of a slow recovery, Mr. Biden is likely to benefit from a quickly expanding economy, with forecasters predicting growth to speed up in the coming months as more Americans get vaccinated. He also starts his campaign with more good will. Biden's legislation is roughly 20 percentage points more popular than the 2009 bill was immediately after passage.

Still, the 2009 stimulus package provides an instructive example on how quickly public opinion can change. No House Republicans voted for that $787 billion package and only three moderate Republicans in the Senate backed it, even as nearly two in three Americans supported the bill.

Republicans calculated that they could make the bill a centerpiece of their efforts to win control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. They began arguing that the legislation was "chock-full of wasteful government spending" and failed to create jobs, even as dozens also trumpeted the federal dollars flowing into their states. Voters conflated the stimulus bill with the bailouts of the banking and auto industries, confusion that helped incite some of the fiercest opposition to Mr. Obama in the form of the Tea Party movement.

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By January 2010, about 75 percent said half or more of the stimulus money had been wasted. Three months later, 62 percent said the legislation had not created jobs. And in exit polls after the 2010 midterms, only about one-third of voters said the package had actually helped.

White House officials eventually conceded that they had made mistakes in framing the public discussion of the measure. But by then, it was too late: Republicans won control of the House and gained six seats in the Senate.

Drop us a line!

We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We'll try to answer it. Have a comment? We're all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or send me a message at @llerer.

Pressure on Cuomo is mounting.

Is Andrew Cuomo in free-fall?

That's the question many Democrats are asking after what has been an extraordinarily damaging week for the New York governor.

After six women accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment, even more serious charges of misconduct surfaced: that when he was alone with a female aide in the Executive Mansion last year, he closed a door, reached under her blouse and groped her. On Thursday, Albany Police Department officials said they had received a referral about the accusation, and Democratic officials took the first step toward potentially impeaching Mr. Cuomo. The next day, most of New York's congressional delegation called on him to resign, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand; and Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While Mr. Cuomo's approval ratings have dropped precipitously since last spring, when he rose to liberal stardom for his pandemic news conferences, he's kept support from many voters in the state. A series of surveys have found that most voters do not want Mr. Cuomo to resign, even as a majority say that they do not want him to run for a fourth term.

His strategy is to play for time. On Friday afternoon, he asked people "to wait for the facts" to emerge from the investigation, which is being overseen by the state attorney general, Letitia James, and could take several months. "A lot of people alleged a lot of things for a lot of reasons," he said. Such a drawn-out timeline could make it more difficult for other Democrats to build support and momentum for a potential primary challenge to him in 2022.

Voters may not be willing to wait that long. There are whispers of more allegations to come. Reports are circulating describing a deeply toxic workplace in the governor's office. The investigation allows accusers to bring their claims anonymously, perhaps encouraging those who don't want to face public scrutiny of a traumatic experience. And don't forget, Mr. Cuomo also faces state and national investigations into an apparent effort to conceal the number of nursing home deaths during the pandemic and into a possible cover-up of structural problems in the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge — a signature infrastructure project named after his father.

By the numbers: $410 billion

… That's the approximate cost of sending stimulus checks to nearly every American, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

If you've found this newsletter helpful, please consider subscribing to The New York Times — with this special offer. Your support makes our work possible.

… Seriously

Who knew that a singing montage of Federal Reserve chairs could be so mesmerizing?

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Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.

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