I’m a ghostwriter and editor who helps executives craft their thought leadership practices.
I’m a ghostwriter and editor who helps executives craft their thought leadership practices.
When we start talking about culture with teams, peers, and clients, one thing becomes really clear really quickly: there are a lot of myths about what culture is and how it operates at work. These myths take hold and grow because the human brain loves to make up stories. Perhaps you once heard of a company trying [fill in the blank] to improve their culture and you also heard that it didn’t work. Now that thing, whatever it is, is lodged into your mind as something that doesn’t work without any context about the thing or the circumstances in which it was tried. It’s a bit like culture Mad Libs. Do you remember those from your childhood road trips? It was a two-person game, one person asked the other to say nouns, verbs, and adjectives based on the blanks in the Mad Lib story. The person saying the words had no context, they simply said random words. In the end, you read back the story with their words, and it was always absurd and borderline nonsensical. That was the fun of it! But in real life, the same effect gets us in trouble. We end up with all these ideas of what culture is, or isn’t, based on stories we hear often with context lacking. And that all becomes our truth, even if it’s based on myths. And what happens is those myths turn into blockers and excuses for people to not even try to improve their culture. We want to confront some of the myths head-on. There are too many to tackle one by one, so instead, we’re going to share five truths that dispel some of the most persistent myths.
Culture is Not Just One Thing
One of the biggest myths people believe is that culture is the “fun stuff.” You know, the foosball table, the suites at sports arenas, and team bar-b-ques. Business is the business stuff, like projects, pitches, and clients, and then culture happens between and around the business. Yes, the fun, or social, elements contribute to the way people develop relationships with their peers, but building relationships can’t compensate for a culture that’s weak in other ways.
When we talk to clients who aren’t initially convinced their culture needs any improvement, we like to ask what they currently do to develop their culture—maybe they’re onto something good! But they almost always share a version of, “We installed a kegerator in the breakroom, created a hangout space where we encourage them to take a break from projects, and offer season tickets for teams to use to celebrate big accomplishments.” We ask, “How’d that work?” And we get a response like, “It didn’t seem to impact anything, so we just don’t think it’s worth investing more.” In fact, we had a client come to us to help them after they suffered from the it’s-the-fun-stuff misconception. The year before, the company invested nearly $100,000 on an office renovation with a focus on cool collaboration areas, play elements like a ping pong table, and other “fun” details that encouraged hang outs. Just after they finished the renovation, their engagement survey scores actually went down. As you can imagine, that was frustrating for the leaders. They spent all this money to make the office space better for people and employees were less engaged? So, we went to work on focus groups and small round table conversations with the teams to figure out what went wrong. It turns out, their employees were hard working but also burnt out. The last thing they wanted was to spend more time at work, even if it was playing games. And when they saw the office renovation, it actually negatively impacted them because they knew that all that money that went into the office could have been used giving employees a few extra days off, which is what they really wanted. The leadership team unfortunately missed the mark entirely by assuming what people wanted rather than asking. Moreover, they also assumed that fostering a good culture was equivalent to fostering playtime at work when really a good culture starts by talking to your people and creating the culture together.
We’d like to correct the statement above a bit because buried within it is the myth that culture is a single thing and if you try a single thing it should work. The original statement was, “It didn’t seem to impact anything, so we just don’t think it’s worth investing more.” Our correction is: “It didn’t impact culture because culture includes so much more, so it’s not worth investing more effort in only that one piece of culture.” Imagine an employee who enjoys hanging out with their coworkers and playing a game of foosball with them every once in a while, yet every day that employee comes to work, and those same coworkers aren’t held accountable for the projects and goals the company has set. If that employee is working their butt off to contribute to the bottom line and sees coworkers not taking the same amount of responsibility, the employee won’t feel a strong sense of culture. That foosball bonding won’t do much to offset the unfairness, or possibly even resentment, they carry, and that hard-working employee will probably jump ship. Because without accountability, it’s just a crappy work environment with some intermittent socializing. Who really wants that? No matter what “one thing” you think encapsulates culture, it’s always more. If you’ve invested in one way and didn’t see results, that doesn’t mean culture can’t impact your business positively, it just means that one thing didn’t impact your culture positively. And because culture is never just one thing, you generally have to focus on a few areas at one time to actually see the impact.
Here’s another “one thing” that clients often use to excuse not working on their culture: “We do annual engagement surveys and get positive results.” Hear us now: engagement and culture are not the same. Engagement surveys measure how an individual feels, the respondent is answering questions about themselves, “How do I feel? Do I feel like I am contributing to the company mission? Do I align with the values?” Me, me, me. A culture survey, or a real assessment of your culture, will ask those ”me” questions but also ask questions about the collective, like “How do we work together? How do the teams interact? Does leadership demonstrate accountability?” Culture assessment is about how individuals feel and about the greater good: it’s me and we. Both are important because an individual can feel engaged and yet the culture as a whole can be inconsistent or accidental. The only way to know if the engagement is a result of the culture, is to also ask bigger questions that place the individual within the context of the whole. Positive engagement is great! Engagement is one of the results of a good culture and can help make your business successful, but again, it alone doesn’t equate to culture as a whole.
Culture is not just the social stuff, the surveys, or team building, it’s all that plus some. Culture is multidimensional and because it’s made up of all those thoughts, actions, and interactions we mentioned above, it’s dispersed and can be hard to see. It’s like an iceberg–there are a few elements like the social stuff and engagement surveys that you can see and easily do. But those are just the elements above the surface, while so many of the other elements are below–like how well the company’s vision and purpose are understood and expressed. The clarity of core values and people’s ability to live the values. These are dimensions that are more difficult to see, but you can feel them simmering beneath the surface. Individuals feel all the dimensions and express them in various ways nearly every moment at work. Culture weaves its way through every thought, action, and interaction that unfolds and so we have to look at all the dimensions together. This leads us to…
Culture is Complicated
We’re not going to lie: culture is complicated. It’s so tempting to think culture is just one thing because, damn, that would make it so much easier to understand. Yet, it should also be a relief to hear that it’s complicated because that’s why you haven’t mastered it already! If it was easy, and it was simply buying enough baseball game tickets, then we’d all have the happiest, highest-performing companies possible. And we don’t. So, it must be more complex than the “one thing” myth.
As we mentioned above, culture is multidimensional. Our current model has 21 building blocks, and we realize that may evolve over time. We might add more or we might take some away because what is meaningful at any given time can be different from previous times. What individuals wanted and needed out of work in 1985 is different from what people in 2010 wanted and needed. We’ll speak more to evolution (and the patience required for evolution), but what’s important to note here is the multiple dimensions mean there are exponential combinations those dimensions can take. In fact, quantitatively speaking there are over one million ways to combine 21 things. And that’s assuming each of the 21 things only manifests in a single way–and in the case of culture, that’s not true. Qualitatively, mentorship can look so many different ways, so even within each of the 21 building blocks, there is a lot of variation.
There is no standard or “right” way to express any of the culture building blocks. It’s just about clarity, alignment, and right-fitting people. We can look to some big brands as inspiration, like Zappos or Netflix, that in their own ways blazed the culture path and showed us what is possible when companies invest in culture. Zappos made headlines with their adaption of Holacracy and Netflix published a deck about their culture in 2009 that transparently shared what made their culture their culture. Much has been written about both of these companies, but if you read everything and tried to emulate them with the intention of “creating a great culture,” it wouldn’t work. Zappos’ culture reflects Zappos, no other company. Netflix’s culture reflects Netflix. Neither can be transferred to other workplaces.
You have to find your culture and that’s the complicated part. Again, we’re not trying to scare you. This is where the real opportunity and potential come in for you and your company. You can find your way! But it’s like therapy. You have to dig into the different parts of your company, carefully assess behaviors and sentiments (including your own), listen to what everyone has to say about your culture and evaluate what you really want it to look and feel like, and then map out changes to try and get there.
We think the complexity of culture is why so many books about work culture are often theoretical and vague. They tout things like “consciously collaborate” or “align policies, processes, and procedures” but how individual leaders inside their own organizations do this is often ignored. I think we can all agree that if we could align by saying, “We’d like to align,” we would be better off. But we need more than that in a practical environment. We need to be able to point to something to align around and then figure out an intentional path to get there.
Culture is Not Aspirational
Before we get too far along here, we have to make a point here: culture is not aspirational. Culture is how people are thinking, acting, and interacting right now. You can aspire to evolve and grow your culture (you should, in fact), but the vision for where you want to be cannot be confused or mixed up with how things are right now. This is important because we often hear people talk about their work culture more as how they want it to be, not necessarily how it is every day for the people in their organization.
Having a vision for how you want your culture to grow and change is a good thing, but it’s risky to confuse the vision with the current reality. We had a client, we’ll call them Build Corp, that acquired another, smaller company. As they completed their merger, the leadership team at Build Corp was really interested in bringing the culture they had created over the years to their newly acquired company and teams. So, they started to roll out their vision and values, and other building blocks that introduced their core culture to the new organization. A year or so went by and even after the rollout, there was something that the smaller company wasn’t quite feeling. See, the parent company had a vibrant community involvement aspect to how they worked–their staff volunteered, they actively sponsored events, etc.–so “being a part of the community” was a big part of how they all thought, acted, and interacted at work. But that simply wasn’t the case for the newly acquired company. The leadership team at the acquired company thought community involvement sounded well and good, but they just didn’t do that as part of their day-to-day activities. This gap between what the culture proclaimed to be and what actually happened at the workplace meant that “community involvement” wasn’t yet a part of their culture, no matter how much it was written in a handbook or on the intranet. We had to break it to Build Corp that you can’t claim aspects of a work culture if it’s not evident in the feeling of your workplace and the actual ways people are taking action. You can work on it! But you can’t claim it.
Culture is Everyone’s Responsibility
Every single person is responsible for culture. We’re going to take a two-step approach to explain this point. First, let’s talk about leadership and HR, then we’ll open it up to “everyone.” See, traditionally, the “people stuff” has been delegated to HR so we often see companies that explicitly or implicitly believe culture also lives in HR’s court. Leadership focused on the business; HR focused on the people. But if you divide responsibilities up in that way, intentional culture can’t take hold. What it means to be an effective leader has changed from the times when that division made sense (if it ever did, but that’s another topic). In the early 1900s, whoever was the most dominant person was the best leader because that attribute was what drove business. Then we moved into the information and intellectual age, and whoever had the most information and the most smarts were the best leaders. And now we've moved into the people age, and whoever can best relate to and understand people will be the best leader. If you want to be a good leader in today’s business environment, you have to own the people stuff, too.
Okay, now let’s broaden this a bit. Perhaps you get why leadership and HR need to come together and make great workplaces for employees, but why does everyone get a role in culture? If culture is made up of people’s thoughts, actions, and interactions, then one person’s inappropriate or inconsiderate actions can impact the feelings about the environment. Think of how dispiriting it can be if someone keeps showing up at meetings under-prepared and overconfident, derailing conversations without any consequences. And if they do it routinely or have even more off-culture interactions, then it introduces some issues and even negativity. On the other hand, every person at every company has the opportunity to support, empower, and recognize the people around them every day–to create a positive work culture. Peer-to-peer culture can be as impactful and as positive as top-down culture. Think of how awesome it is when someone at a meeting tells you that you crushed it—it doesn’t matter if it’s your leader or a peer, you feel great and your day is a little better.
Because culture is everyone’s responsibility, every individual will influence the culture. You can’t gloss over that one person who is a culture problem but who is also a high performer. You can’t hire a new cut-throat, go-for-the-jugular Finance Director and think it won’t impact the benevolent nature of the rest of the team. It will. Every person will contribute something to the collective pot. That fact alone isn’t good or bad, it’s just a fact.
Nothing Is As It Appears
Hey Siri: “What are cumulus clouds?” “How many feet are in a mile?” “What does it mean to be right-brained?”
Hey Alexa: “What does prix fixe mean?” “Who shot J. R.?” “What is throwing shade?”
If we went to your computer or phone right now and looked up your search history, what would we find? I bet it would be a whole range of topics, from random facts to home improvement how-tos to some takeout options in your neighborhood. We all seek out information about a lot of things throughout our days, out of practicality or necessity, but often out of—you guessed it—curiosity. At that moment, you just want to better understand something you don’t currently, or you want to know more about something you know a little bit about.
Accomplices know there is always more to learn about history, people, situations, and moments. There is always more to know, period. About everything.
CURIOSITY IS THE SEED OF OUR LEARNING. WHATEVER WE ARE CURIOUS ABOUT WE WILL TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN MORE ABOUT.
We will research, read, and keep pursuing those topics. What you’re willing to work for and curiosity go hand-in-hand in a critical way; once you know what you’re working for, a culture of curiosity enables you to fully and wholeheartedly pursue the topics and issues that you care about with a race-first perspective. As we think back to the Three A’s—awareness, analysis, and action—curiosity plays a major role in driving this cycle. As the seed of our learning, it drives us to inquire about what we don’t know (awareness), and when we learn more, we have more to access as we embark on our learning and understanding journey (analysis). Then, when we know more, we can act in more knowledgeable and appropriate ways (action).
A culture of curiosity for an individual, team, or organization is rooted in asking questions and not taking things at face value. I always say, “Nothing is as it appears.” Every sentence, headline, data point, moment, interaction, and conversation has so many aspects that are not apparent unless we intentionally dig into them. For example, an apparently innocent request to take notes could make the Asian woman who was asked really upset. On the surface you might think, “Wow, she seems disproportionately angry at such a small request.” But if you ask yourself a few more questions you might start to perceive that moment differently. What happened to her before that request that primed her for the response? How might biases and assumptions about Asian women and the horrible stereotype that they’re docile or submissive play into what happened?[1] What else has the individual who made the request asked of her and other colleagues? How might different identities be playing out at this moment? Or, in another example, say you get survey data from your staff that shows 75 percent of white employees feel supported by their manager, while only 51 percent of your BIPOC employees feel the same. A curious accomplice would drill down into discrepancy. Who are the managers that the BIPOC report to? How might race and racial identity be playing into this scenario? Are the managers exhibiting racial bias? What are the common characteristics of the managers who effectively support their reports? If we break apart BIPOC into specific racial identifications, what do the numbers show us?
There is never an end to a pursuit of inquiry if it’s rooted in curiosity. There is no “Okay, that’s done!” moment. Likewise, being an accomplice is a lifelong journey—there will always be more to learn. The more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the more you know what needs to change and how. It’s that whole “Once you see injustice, you can’t unsee it” factor that keeps us going deeper and recommitting along the way. Building curiosity into your practice can keep you asking the questions we must always be asking.
A culture of curiosity prioritizes inquiry over answers. This does not mean that we don’t seek answers. It simply means that exploration and inquiry must be part of the process and motivation if we are to get good answers. A culture of curiosity refuses the status quo for the status quo’s sake. Have you ever hung out with a kid in the three-to- five-year-old age range? If so, you know what kids do: ask questions. All. The. Dang. Time. Why this? Why that? How does that work? I can remember watching Family Guy with my nephew when he was about four years old. Because it’s really adult content presented in cartoon form, we each liked it for different reasons. (I know, it’s not what I should be watching with him, but I’m the cool auntie!) I would, of course, be cracking up at the adult jokes or talking to the TV, and he would ask questions like, “What are you laughing at? Why is he going to the car? What’s so funny about that?” The questions were both frequent and endless. This isn’t always fun when you’re trying to just get through a book or television show with a kid, but the reality is, we should all approach the world in a more childlike manner. At every turn we should be asking: What’s behind that? How did we get here? Who does this circumstance benefit? Who is left out? What is the history of this concept or idea? If we do this consistently, we won’t take what we “know” for granted. We won’t just roll with the status quo simply because it’s always been that way.
One of my clients, Jennifer, exhibits such a great spirit of curiosity. If curiosity is the seed of our learning, her seed was planted after the 2016 US presidential election, when the election results revealed that the world she thought existed wasn’t real. She was confused; all of a sudden, things didn’t seem just and she couldn’t put her finger on the what, the why, or the how of it all. Her first steps were entirely personal—she joined the From Ally to Accomplice community outside of work and embraced her antiracist journey as a white woman. As she learned more and more, she started to broaden how she understood the issues. One evening, after a session, she and I had a short but powerful conversation. “As I go through this journey, I keep thinking about how much all these conversions and topics intersect with my work. Because this work was so transformational for me, I can only imagine what this work could do for my organization!”
I couldn’t have agreed with her more. She was the executive director at a small nonprofit that connected corporations with volunteer opportunities in the community. When she started her job, the organization was in a bit of a flatlined place. Financially they weren’t growing, the staff was all white, and the right roles weren’t filled by the right people. She knew she had to make changes, but she wasn’t sure what those specific changes were. After joining From Ally to Accomplice, she realized accompliceship could drive not only what she changed at the organization, but also how it changed. And so we engaged in a program that included our signature components plus some specialized modules. She and her team relentlessly examined themselves and their organization with the bold, guiding question “Are there ways we are unintentionally causing harm in the communities we seek to serve?” We dove into some pretty big issues that were important to their context. We started with the self-awareness piece around Jennifer’s racial identity and the racial identities of the people within her organization. Then we got into the history of nonprofits and why they exist in the first place. We explored the dynamics of bringing corporate employees (who we know are disproportionately white) into community organizations (many of which serve communities who are not white) and the kinds of entitlement and white saviorism that may permeate those interactions and relationships. We reviewed the company’s policies and procedures, and we carefully dissected the language they used in their mission, vision, and values. Then we facilitated conversations and engagements with some of their corporate partners to extend and expand how deeply they explored their guiding question and to fully understand the implications of partnerships.
“It’s funny, Seena,” Jennifer said, “but when I started my executive director role, I wrestled with how to be the best leader I could be. I knew I needed to engage with tools and knowledge beyond my existing perspective, but I had no idea what that meant for me within the context of this organization. When I learned about being an accomplice, and especially the idea of using a race-first lens, I realized that was it. It has changed the way I approach my work as a leader, and it has truly transformed how I see everything around me. It’s a new lens by which I view the world.”
Jennifer allowed her curiosity to lead her in a deeply personal transformation, and she was so open that it led her to take a bold next step to examine everything about the organization. In her own words, “We are able to hold each other accountable and apply an antiracist framework to everything we do. We repeatedly step back and reflect on our language, the way we’re showing up, and the role that we play as an organization.” She has more BIPOC employees than she’s ever had, she has the right people in the right roles, and she is having the right conversations with her corporate and community partners. She is a thought leader on equity and inclusion in the volunteer sector. And it all started with basic questions about herself and her circumstance that she pursued with great energy.
Jennifer’s story demonstrates that when we’re genuinely curious, and when we are okay with what we learn along the way, even when (maybe especially when) it contradicts or upends something we knew before, we find something deeper and more truthful on the other side. Curious minds want to get to the truth, even if it is challenging. And when we get there, it’s not always easy to engage with the truth, but it’s necessary.
A culture of curiosity can challenge traditional ideas of leadership. If one of the primary qualities of a fierce accomplice is knowing that you can always know more, then the reverse is also true: you must admit and humbly lean into the fact that you have a lot left to learn. Creating a culture of curiosity requires that you move forward always assuming that you don’t know everything you need to know in any given situation. This isn’t a natural disposition for a leader, I know. For leaders who have been conditioned to believe they are, or have to be, the smartest ones in the room, this can even feel like an affront. Yet it’s a necessary adjustment because, given the high percentage of white-identified people in leadership positions, I can confidently say that no leader knows everything about racialized experience or race and its history.
A culture of curiosity is one in which everyone can and should ask questions. This upends the typical workplace hierarchy in which the person in the leadership role is considered the smartest and the entry-level folk are considered the greenest, the ones with the most to learn. Yet when you value curiosity and different perspectives, there is no hierarchy. No single person is holistically more knowledgeable; in a culture of curiosity, the best questions are the best tools, and good questions can emerge from people in any role.
CURIOSITY CAN FIX A LOT
While it’s challenging at times, curious questioning is one of white leaders’ most direct antidotes to the fear that comes up when talking about race, racism, and all of their implications. When I talk to white clients about their fears, we often find that fear rooted in being afraid of messing up—they don’t want to offend or come across as ignorant. In all these emotional situations, a culture of curiosity can help.
When you are genuinely curious, you seek understanding, not knowledge. You want to make sense of things, not acquire pure, objective knowledge. When approaching race and racial lived experiences from a perspective of understanding, without expecting a single simple answer, you’re already in a more productive mindset. Understanding requires more in-depth work than searching for knowledge. A curious perspective helps you ask better questions, which you’ll frame as open-ended rather than limited to yes/no or one-word answers.
Perhaps most importantly, getting curious can help fix one of the most insulting things that BIPOC experience: the willful ignorance of white folks. Willful ignorance is making a bad-faith choice to avoid becoming informed about something so as to avoid having to make the decisions that such information might prompt. Ignorance shows up so many ways: as someone being completely unaware of the concerns and issues facing groups of people unlike themselves, as not understanding or wanting to understand how microaggressions harm folks, and more.
Getting curious about issues confronts the ignorance we’re all walking around with every day. Consider the examples above and other situations, such as boards of directors or professional associations. People say they want diversity and then act counter to that goal by pretending they don’t know why they are not achieving the diversity that they seek. There is always something that we don’t know, and oftentimes we know we’re ignoring certain issues. Again, turn to questions like: What’s behind that? How did we get here? Who does this circumstance benefit? Who is left out? What is the history of this concept or idea? You will learn if you ask, and the more curious you get, the less uninformed and more aware you’ll be. Understanding is a natural byproduct of curiosity. The truth is, all of the information you need to know more, learn a different perspective, and go beyond the basics is at your fingertips.
Emotional Labor or Emotional Tax
Curiosity can go completely off the rails when folks ask BIPOC inappropriate questions about their race, their background, or the cultural group to which they belong (or are perceived to belong to). Asking BIPOC to explain personal details or to be stand-ins for an entire group of people is asking them to engage in emotional labor.
Emotional labor is the invisible energy and time that people put into tasks, conversations, or interactions at work that make them labor on behalf of someone else. To be clear: not in support of someone else, but on behalf of someone else.
The term was first used by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart to describe paid work that involves managing—and sometimes suppressing—your own feelings to fulfill the emotional requirements of a given job. The term was subsequently expanded by journalist Gemma Hartley in her book Fed Up to include “the unpaid, often unnoticed labor that goes into keeping those around you comfortable and happy.” It’s a larger concept, but what is most important for our learning here is how folks from historically excluded groups might experience that at your workplace. Here are a few common emotional labor scenarios in the workplace:
Asking a BIPOC about their racial identity or racialized experience with the goal of informing yourself.
Expecting a lone Black or brown person to have an opinion that represents their identity. For example, feeling like you’ve done due diligence if you had a Black employee read a statement about Black Lives Matter.
Talking to a colleague about a recent event that could trigger their individual or collective trauma.
Assuming that someone from a particular identity group will support, assist, or act as a caretaker. For example, expecting a woman to take meeting notes or a Black person to clean up the room after a brainstorm. (This happens. A lot.)
The mistake of requesting emotional labor is what occurs when people are unaware of their biases and assumptions. This is why awareness is the foundation of this book. Biases and assumptions hurt people from historically excluded groups and force them to choose between doing uncompensated, burdensome work or saying no, which might be taken as confrontational or uncooperative. Do your own work, lead your own learning, and remember that no group is a monolith.
PERSONAL VERSUS SITUATIONAL CURIOSITY
Let’s call out a giant elephant in the room: Folks can ask some very insulting questions and make some very uninformed choices under the guise of curiosity. Curiosity itself is neutral; it’s how you use it that matters. Learning, exploration, and inquiry can be helpful in some circumstances, but they can also cause hurt. For example, it’s useful to learn from the world around you and to put yourself into new situations and simply observe. It’s harmful to ask an individual probing questions about their identity without first building a relationship with them or to touch someone’s body (meaning their person in general) or clothes without permission. That’s just being nosy—when a singular person becomes the source or subject of your inquiry, questions are never okay.
The biggest mistake I see people making here is pursuing personal curiosity when they should be pursuing situational curiosity. Personal curiosity is asking an individual about themselves without contextualizing it within the situation. Situational curiosity is an inquiry about the context and circumstances of a given situation. If a detail or fact is irrelevant to the situation, then it will not rise to the level of an inquiry to pursue. Let’s use one of the most common microaggressions that I witness: “Where are you from?” There are very few situations in which the answer to that question is relevant. You might want to know for your own personal curiosity, but that is wholly distinct from employing curiosity to understand the moment or situation at hand better.
Before you pursue a line of inquiry, ask these questions to proceed in more productive and meaningful ways:
Am I asking something personal? If so, is the context for my inquiry clear and relevant to the situation?
Can I pursue this line of inquiry on my own, without burdening a BIPOC with it?
What am I really trying to understand by asking this question, and does the phrasing of the question convey my real intention? How else might this question be interpreted?
Is there any research I should do before asking this question?
Are there people in my close circle with whom I can explore this topic and hold each other accountable?
Do I expect the person I am engaging with to speak on behalf of others? Is that a fair and reasonable expectation?
Have you ever thought, “Should I ask this question? Is it appropriate?” I often share this tip with my clients: if you’re nervous about asking a question, it’s probably because it’s at least a little inappropriate. Listen to that inner anxiety and take that question to the internet. While the internet is deeply flawed in many ways, it is also an incredibly useful first step for questions that might be considered ignorant or demanding of emotional labor. Remember that most of our internet search histories will never be viewed, and take advantage of that.
If you don’t know how to ask someone something, look it up. If you don’t know why hair is such a personal topic for Black women, look it up. If you’re unsure why some religions require prayer times, look it up. If you don’t know why certain Halloween costumes are offensive, look it up. There is no excuse for not knowing these days because we have so much information available at our fingertips. Putting some work into exploring and inquiring is more important to you as a leader than knowing everything (which you can’t—that’s impossible).
Curiosity can be very harmful when folks act on impulse, without getting curious about the reason for their actions. Such unchecked curiosity often stems from a place of privilege. For example, I once attended an event with people I mostly did not know after getting new braids put in my hair, and a white woman—a very wealthy and influential white woman—walked right up to me and gently grabbed some of my braids. She stroked them a bit while asking me about the braiding process. I did not know this woman well, and she definitely should have known that touching strangers is always, under any conditions, rude and very uncomfortable. But layer racial dynamics into the interaction and we have this individual, who is used to doing whatever she pleases, trespassing in my personal space and talking about something that is none of her business. She never considered how she would respond if I had run my fingers through her hair in response. This happens to others who fall outside what the dominant culture deems “normal.” A close friend of mine is Muslim and wears a hijab, and people she barely knows often walk up and “admire” the fabric by touching it. Another friend of mine who uses a wheelchair tells me that people frequently approach her and move her wheelchair or begin to push her. Most believe they are “helping” her, but they are in fact radically invading her personal space. The fact that these invasions happen over and over again tells us that people don’t ask themselves curious questions before engaging with people they see as different. They just act without considering how those actions may impact others. I believe that people sometimes feel like their curiosity can and should be honored (“I can touch her hair,” “I can push her chair”) no matter the cost to other people in the scenario.
An accomplice will check their curiosity by asking:
Why am I about to take this action?
What assumptions am I making about the people involved in this scenario?
What assumptions am I making about what I have access to?
What is my intention?
What possible impact will my actions have on me, the other people, or the interaction?
[1] This study explores some of the ways Asian women have experienced discrimination in the workplace, including expectations of submission: “From Exotic to Invisible: Asian American Women’s Experiences of Discrimination,” July 26, 2018, American Psychological Association, accessed July 29, 2022, https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/ spotlight/issue-119.