New hire thinks pushback is due to implicit bias

[Anonymous]

I think it’s possible she is a terrible manager and that people are more likely to attack and complain because she is a Black woman.

In my supposedly woke field. women in leadership are far more often fired for performance than men, even though there are fewer of them and plenty of terrible male leaders. I think when a woman in leadership faces trouble team building (eh esp doing the emotional work of collaboration) it’s especially difficult for them to come back from..

In my current org, one of our senior directors is a disgusting (white male) alcoholic frat boy who drinks to serious excess at work events, hits on women and is MIA at half his meetings due to being hungover. People openly talk about this and that he is a liability . Yet he has managed to stay on and his team is afraid of retaliation if they complain. There would be no tolerance for a woman esp Black woman doing that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hi, I’m looking for some advice about handling a tricky workplace situation. We recently hired a new senior manager, who is a black woman. She is supervising a diverse team, and has been breaking a lot china in her first few months on the job, leading to a lot of unhappiness and complaints from her staff. She has also been ignoring various institutional processes. She is very smart and very capable, but she tends to spend a lot of time telling everyone else how important and smart she is, and not a lot of time listening.

As her supervisor, I finally had to have a hard conversation with her, a very similar conversation to one I have had over the years with many others, in which I told her she’s great, and has a wonderful ideas, but that we need her to do a little bit more listening and checking in with people before she charges ahead on things. She did not take this well, and responded with a long email saying that she thinks the pushback she is getting, both from her staff, and from me, is due to the implicit bias people have about working with a black woman in a leadership position. (I am a white woman.)

I don’t for a moment dispute the fact that black women face all kinds of micro aggression and bias that white men or women would not. And, of course, telling someone their behavior is affected by implicit unconscious bias is a non-rebuttable proposition. However, this woman is doing what I have seen many other people, black, white, male, and female, do over the years, which is alienating everyone around her by grandstanding and being heavy-handed, instead of turning her staff into her allies and supporters.

Any thoughts on how to respond to her? On the one hand, I don’t want to do anything that further convinces her that all criticism is coming out of unconscious racial bias on the other hand, I don’t think the existence of racism in the world should be a free pass for anyone to be a jerk in the workplace, which is frankly what she is doing. Advice?

I feel like I know this woman. I worked with someone very similar at a federal agency. the woman was a nightmare and they ended up firing her--she was SES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Any black folks out here on this board with suggestions?

Weird.Why would you assume that other people with the same skin tone as the woman in OP’s story (whom none of us know) would automatically have some insight that others reading this do not? That seems super racist to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any black folks out here on this board with suggestions?

This.

I’m Black and am not here to fix your problems.

Right? Thank you.

I mean Dylan Roof was white and so am I. And that is the sum total of what we have in common, as far as I’m concerned. I have no effing clue what made him go on a murderous unhinged mission to kill black people—and I don’t presume to have any suggestions or answers about why certain “white people” who aren’t me do or say what they do or say. We are all of different minds that are not wired together by melanin.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it’s possible she is a terrible manager and that people are more likely to attack and complain because she is a Black woman.

In my supposedly woke field. women in leadership are far more often fired for performance than men, even though there are fewer of them and plenty of terrible male leaders. I think when a woman in leadership faces trouble team building (eh esp doing the emotional work of collaboration) it’s especially difficult for them to come back from..

In my current org, one of our senior directors is a disgusting (white male) alcoholic frat boy who drinks to serious excess at work events, hits on women and is MIA at half his meetings due to being hungover. People openly talk about this and that he is a liability . Yet he has managed to stay on and his team is afraid of retaliation if they complain. There would be no tolerance for a woman esp Black woman doing that.

That’s definitely possible. But I have also found that organizations will go out of their way to support talented women who aren’t complete AHs. Mediocre and abusive men need to be held to account, but relaxing our standards doesn’t help achieve that. We must be the change we wish to see in the world, right? In other words, we have to model the behavior we expect and demand from leadership.