Countering otherness: Fostering integration within teams

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Sabah Alam Hydari for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Exploring our feelings of otherness can help us discover how we are the same.

By all accounts, 2020 was a momentous year. George Floyd’s brutal murder spurred protests and riots across the globe and brought renewed passion to the Black Lives Matter movement. The coronavirus pandemic has been fostering a rise in discrimination toward those of Chinese and Southeast Asian heritage, while also affecting the lives and livelihoods of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people more than it has affected white people.These events have raised the level of awareness of the insidiousness of subtle and systemic racism for nonminority ethnic people—as has the #MeToo movement, which overlaps Black Lives Matter in its goal to dismantle oppression. There is also a rising willingness to recognize and overcome microaggressions at both the personal and the professional level; these ostensibly “casual” comments or behaviors perpetuate racial and gender stereotypes and reinforce a sense of otherness. For companies, especially those that, as a result of the pandemic, are shifting toward a hybrid mix of virtual and on-premises workers, these changes present an opportunity. What if business leaders could use this moment to increase the trust and performance of the teams they depend on by eliminating the interactions that cause some workers—whether virtual or on-site—to feel disadvantaged, excluded, minimized, or deflated?

My own path

As the daughter of the Pakistani ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Egypt, and Moscow, I grew up moving around the world, being the “other” in the countries we lived in. And yet, with the exception of a period of time during my high-school years, I forged my own path by not seeing myself as “other.” This path led to studies at the London School of Economics and INSEAD, consulting at PwC, founding my own business, and serving in an advisory role at Aberkyn, a McKinsey company: it also led to work as an independent transformation consultant, coach, and facilitator. Most recently, my personal and professional experience has come together in the form of a process I call the forging team inclusiveness loop (FTIL).

This powerful mix of personal and professional experience felt particularly acute and bitter-sweet on a cold afternoon in October of 2017, when I left the hospital bedside of my ailing father—the ambassador, whose career and character had so directly influenced my own—and made my way to the London offices of a global tech company for which I was consulting.

I had been invited to the company to meet J, a recently promoted senior vice president. J already ran one highly diverse, multicultural team and had just inherited another. She was seeking the most effective way to integrate these disparate team members, who comprised old and new guard, men and women, several religions, various nationalities, and even different geographical offices. How could J, as their leader, quickly create a sense of shared identity and direction? How could she better assimilate and connect with the whole team and foster trust?

As I dashed from the hospital toward the client, I knew, as a team specialist and leadership coach: this is my niche. The confluence was painful and striking—my father lay dying at the very moment when I was about to give the inclusiveness loop its first tryout with a client.

What if business leaders could use this moment to increase the trust and performance of the teams they depend on by eliminating the interactions that cause some workers—whether virtual or on-site—to feel disadvantaged, excluded, minimized, or deflated?

Identity threat

The idea for the forging team inclusiveness loop first came to me after the string of devastating terror attacks in London in 2017. Alongside my visceral reaction to the atrocities, I felt the familiar sense of otherness creeping back into my being. It brought forth echoes of my high-school days, when I was on the receiving end of physical and verbal racial abuse—the racist slur “Paki” was hurled at me regularly. While mourning the senseless loss of lives, I was simultaneously compelled to recognize that my identity as a Muslim—a community being categorized indiscriminately, in an emerging global narrative, as “villains”—had begun to overshadow all my other identities. I found myself responding defensively during conversations with colleagues, referencing Muslim-led antiterrorism protest marches, for example, and citing instances of high-profile Muslims publicly condemning the acts.

Given my background and training, such defensiveness prompted introspection, during which I recognized how my feelings connected to a sense of “identity threat.” Part of everyone’s self-identity, of course, derives from belonging to social groups whose membership has a certain social significance attached to it. When a group we belong to does well, we relate that success to ourselves. But it works the other way around, too. Belonging to a minority group can lead its members to feel marginalized, disconnected, and deprived of opportunity. Belonging to a minority group with a stigma or negative association attached to it can compound these feelings. When people attempt to hide their threatened identity or to make an increased effort to fit in, authenticity can be diminished, fueling resentment within the person and further feelings of separation from colleagues or society as a whole.

With my father critically ill in the hospital, I needed to make a concerted effort to acknowledge and “park” my anxiety, and to shift toward being present and open.

As I began to understand my own internal dialogue, I became interested in finding ways to support others who shared these feelings. Leaders, after all, have to manage and maneuver within a complex melding of self- and social identity. Being perceived as out-group or other is likely to affect and even reduce their influence in organizations. Successful leaders must therefore be skilled entrepreneurs of identity, managing their own internal and external responses in the face of perceived identity threat. It was exactly then, during the aftermath of the London bombings, when I decided to devote my professional energy toward creating inclusion for minorities and minority leaders and countering otherness within their teams.

These thoughts—and my thesis research at INSEAD—led to the four-part, interrelated inclusiveness-loop process. During my research, as I interviewed multiple leaders and team members, it became apparent that while being an obvious minority creates its own complexities, otherness can be inherent in everyone’s experiences, including those of the archetypal white male. Research shows that perceived dissimilarities can affect the climate of inclusion that is crucial to team success. 1

Shared identity

At the tech-company offices, the team’s diversity was clearly a strength. J described them as a team that was accustomed to comparing experiences, asking broader questions, and reaching innovative responses to problems. Their diversity also made them an ideal test group for the inclusiveness-loop process. J and I had discussed the importance of nurturing each member’s voice and sense of equality by addressing any feelings of otherness within the team. The goal was to increase empathy, alignment, and belonging, not just for team members but also for J herself, since leaders who practice inclusion help ensure team success. Social-identity theorists propose that effective leadership and influence depend greatly on the ability of leaders and teams to share a sense of direction and group identity. Leaders also act as a critical force in team development and success given their positional power and authority to implement formal and informal policies and accountability systems, which can help ensure team members treat one another with respect, value one another’s contributions, and are rewarded in line with their contributions through performance reviews, informal acknowledgments, and other means.

FTIL is represented structurally as an infinity sign in order to symbolize the flexible and adaptable nature of the synergistic process (exhibit). Its structure also indicates that there is no start or end to the process of working to create powerful bonds, acceptance, and fairness among teams and leaders.

The inclusiveness loop consists of four parts. Before starting the FTIL process, however, a facilitator (who may come from within or outside the organization but who typically isn’t a member or leader of the team in question) must make a crucial judgement: Is there sufficient psychological safety to undertake a process in which participants reveal vulnerable aspects of their inner lives? To make this assessment, and to proceed with the process, the facilitator will need to play a dual role—as a part of the process and as the person who both holds and contains the space. This dual role won’t always be easy, and it requires skillful navigation of one’s own inner landscape, since the facilitator’s inner state will affect the ability to create the conditions of safety and containment that the process needs. In my own case, with my father critically ill in the hospital on the day of the workshop with J, I needed to make a concerted effort to acknowledge and “park” my anxiety, and to shift toward being present and open.

Facilitators will also need perspective on the team’s culture, and its intrateam-leader dynamics, which will help them gauge the openness and commitment the leader has toward creating team integration. Some leaders may have come of age in an “achievement” environment, in which they were encouraged to compete, strive, and attain goals: grades, plum jobs, promotions, and so forth. In such an environment, and as a generalization, they may have spent less time learning about or developing themselves and their self-awareness than they have spent pursuing achievement goals. For example, many people remain unaware of the influence their past has on their present. Under stress, they can unconsciously transfer the past onto the present moment and behave destructively as a result. Moreover, if they are struggling with enough unexamined childhood trauma, leaders can be resistant to facing, owning, or healing their unconscious impulses—it can just seem too dangerous for them to do so.

That’s why it’s crucial that the facilitator be capable of gauging the emotional capacity of the team leader, as well as the psychological safety of the team. If the leader lacks that capacity, the facilitator would first need to help the leader toward a more open place of self-understanding.

Successful leaders must be skilled entrepreneurs of identity, managing their own internal and external responses in the face of perceived identity threat.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Sabah Alam Hydari, the founder of teamitexperts, is a leadership and team transformation coach and a UK-based affiliate adviser to McKinsey subsidiary Aberkyn, which offers transformational leadership, team, and organizational programs.

This article was edited by Lang Davison, an executive editor in the Seattle office.

 

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