Supercommunicators, page 21
He had just described a situation that, in another setting, was ripe for identity threat. His white friend might have questioned if racism was actually at fault (“Maybe there were other reasons for the clerk’s behavior?”) or could have downplayed his partner’s concerns (“Your friends aren’t racist, though”). In a misguided attempt to console his Black friend, he might have minimized this experience by implying that he was being oversensitive or needlessly anxious. And the Black participant, in reply, might have suggested that his white partner was unwilling to acknowledge racism, was blinded by white privilege, and was inadvertently perpetuating a supremacist mindset. Both of them might have threatened the other’s identity without intending to do so.
Instead, when the Black participant stopped speaking, his white friend, though clearly uncomfortable, began by acknowledging and validating what he had heard. “Anyone in our friend group seems shadier than you,” he told him. “The idea that someone would…” He trailed off, looking upset. “I feel like, even though our friend group is really multiracial, we don’t talk about it too much.” The white participant didn’t downplay or diminish his friend’s emotions or question the details. He didn’t offer solutions. He simply acknowledged what his friend had said.
“I appreciate that,” the Black friend replied. He said there were tensions that came from being a Black man in a largely white environment, but “especially around you guys, it’s always good. It feels like I can forget about those external racial pressures and just hang out.”
During this and other conversations, there were few dramatic moments, or big revelations, or passionate outbursts. But to researchers, that was the point: These kinds of dialogues were noteworthy precisely because they seemed so normal. They were two friends discussing a tough subject, rather than avoiding it.
When the researchers tallied their data, they found that, after these conversations, participants often felt closer to each other and more comfortable talking about race. Black participants, especially those who had received the special training, said they felt they could be more authentic around their white friends. One of the researchers, Kiara Sanchez of Dartmouth, told me she thinks those results emerged “because, when you listen to the conversations, you hear a lot of support: ‘That must have hurt,’ ‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ ‘It’s awful you were discriminated against.’ Sometimes just acknowledging someone’s experiences and feelings can make a big difference.”
There are lessons here for tough conversations of all types, even beyond those related to our identities. The first insight is that, as we’ve seen before, preparing for a conversation before it begins—thinking just a little bit more when we open our mouths—can have enormous impacts. Anticipating obstacles, planning for what to do when they arise, considering what you hope to say, thinking about what might be important to others: Before any challenging conversation, think for a few moments about what you hope will happen, what might go wrong, and how you’ll react when it does.
The second lesson is that just because we’re worried about a conversation, that doesn’t mean we ought to avoid it. When we need to deliver disappointing news to a friend, complain to a boss, or discuss something unpleasant with our partner, it’s normal to feel a sense of hesitation. But we can reduce that tension by reminding ourselves why this conversation is important and diminish our anxieties by acknowledging, to ourselves and others, that these conversations may be awkward at first, but will get easier.
Third, thinking about how a conversation will occur is just as important as what is said, particularly during a Who Are We? conversation. Who will speak first? (Studies suggest the person with the least power should begin.) What kinds of emotions should we anticipate? (If we prepare for discomfort and tension, we make them easier to withstand.) What obstacles should we expect? When they emerge, what will we do?
Most important, what benefits do we expect will emerge from this dialogue, and are they worth the risks? (Almost always, the answer is yes—nearly everyone in Sanchez’s experiment said afterward they were glad they had participated.)
There’s a final lesson here, as well: In any hard discussion, and particularly in a Who Are We? conversation, we are wise to avoid generalizations—and to speak, instead, about our own experiences and emotions. Identity threats typically emerge because we generalize: We lump people into groups (“Lawyers are all dishonest”) or assign others traits they loathe (“Everyone who voted for that guy is a racist”). These generalizations take all of us—our unique perspectives and complicated identities—out of the conversation. They make us one-dimensional.
However, when we describe our own experiences, feelings, and reactions—when we feel safe enough to reveal who we are—we start to neutralize identity threats. This requires some work, because avoiding generalizations means not only describing ourselves with honesty, but also listening closely to our companions so we can hear their specific pain and frustrations. We must not give in to the temptation to minimize someone’s struggles, or try to solve their problems, simply because witnessing their discomfort is so difficult. We must not imply that, because we have not personally experienced their suffering, it therefore is not real.
But when we embrace how others see the world and their identities within it, when we listen to their specific stories and acknowledge their feelings, we start to understand why two people, who otherwise agree about so much, might see some aspects of life—like policing, or parenting, or romantic relationships—so differently because of their dissimilar backgrounds. We begin to appreciate how our worlds have been shaped by our upbringings, our race and ethnicity, our gender, and other identities. We start to understand how much discussing Who Are We? can reveal. We begin to connect.
NETFLIX’S NO RULES RULES
When Vernā Myers arrived at Netflix as vice president for inclusion strategy, four months after Jonathan Friedland was fired, the company was still in turmoil. Everyone at Netflix said they abhorred discrimination. Everyone said they aspired to create an equitable workplace. But that didn’t mean everyone was certain the company needed to change. “There were a lot of well-meaning, kind people who thought if you hate racism and believe in equality, that’s enough,” Myers said. “That’s not how it works.”
Before joining Netflix, Myers had worked as a lawyer and then had served as the executive director of a consortium of law firms pushing to increase racial diversity in the legal profession. She became deputy chief of staff to the Massachusetts attorney general, leading the office’s diversity initiatives, and then had founded a consulting firm to help companies become more inclusive. “She’s maybe the most charismatic person I’ve ever met,” one of her former consulting employees told me. “She can make anyone feel comfortable.” Myers had started spending time with Netflix as they grappled with the Friedland situation, so she had some sense of the culture. Most important, she knew how to help people think more deeply before they opened their mouths.
The issue at Netflix, however, was that the firm’s culture was designed to push people to speak and act quickly, often before ideas were completely thought out. The company’s culture deck proclaimed that the “goal is to be Big and Fast and Flexible,” and “as we grow, minimize rules.” Employees were encouraged to be unconstrained and unstructured, to challenge anything and everything. “You may have heard preventing error is cheaper than fixing it…but not so in creative environments,” the culture deck decreed. When Hastings wrote a book about his experiences, he urged readers to “operate a little closer toward the edge of chaos,” and “keep things a little bit loose. Welcome constant change.”
But when it came to the toughest, most sensitive topics—including prejudice and bias—that kind of unconstrained, chaotic culture could be disastrous. “No one at Netflix knew how to discuss this stuff without it going nuclear,” an employee told me. And since Friedland’s firing, there had been confusion over what kinds of conversations were okay. Is radical candor appropriate in discussing Who Are We? Are there topics that should be avoided? “No one understood where to draw the line,” the executive said. “So everyone just completely stopped talking about it.”
Myers’s team sensed that this kind of silence was part of the problem. They needed to get the company talking about hard, sensitive issues so that people could understand what their colleagues were experiencing, could wrestle with inequities inside the firm and the world and grasp how they, without meaning to, might be contributing to problems.
But those conversations had to happen the correct way. They had to occur in a manner where everyone felt safe. Netflix’s culture of ruthless honesty had to be nudged just so, in order to push people to ask themselves, and each other, the right questions.
In other words, Netflix needed some rules.
* * *
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Of course, they couldn’t call them rules. Rules were verboten at Netflix! So Myers and her team called them guidelines. As they began conducting employee workshops, hosting conversations with various divisions, and offering training sessions for leaders on diversity and inclusion, the guidelines were always made clear: When discussing issues of identity, no one is allowed to blame, shame, or attack anyone else. It is okay to ask questions, if they are asked in good faith.[*2] Goals were detailed at the beginning of each session—“Do your best to connect with compassion and courage”; “Embrace the discomfort and sense of not knowing”—and conversations were structured by moderators through reminders such as “I want to bring our attention to some things that were just said” or “Some people are very emotional about this issue; maybe we can all take a breath.”
It was acknowledged, up front, that these conversations would likely be awkward and that people would inevitably make mistakes. That was okay. Attendees were told to speak about their own experiences and describe their own stories. Don’t generalize. When a colleague talks about something painful, listen. Don’t solve or diminish. Tell them you’re sorry it happened and acknowledge the pain that was expressed.
Everyone was encouraged to speak—it wasn’t fair for some people to do the work of describing their lives, while others observed—and to reflect on how race and ethnicity and gender and other markers of identity had shaped their lives. This was important: Everyone has a racial and ethnic identity, employees were told, as well as a gender identity and a multitude of other selves. All of us can recognize the sting of exclusion. This commonality, instead of dividing us, can help us empathize.
Myers typically began her workshops by emphasizing her own mistakes. She would share how she had misgendered people; how, to her embarrassment, she had once told a trans friend that plural pronouns like they and them might not be the best way to go. She described one time when she was “on a plane and heard the voice of a woman pilot on the PA system, and it started getting turbulent, and I thought, ‘I hope she can drive!’ ” Then she realized she had never wondered about the pilot’s abilities when the pilot was male. “I didn’t even know I had that bias inside my head,” she told a group. “But there it was.”
Next, she would ask participants to describe a time they had felt excluded. There was often a long silence, and then a smattering of quiet dialogue. Eventually Myers would raise the stakes and ask people to describe when they had excluded others, what they wish they had done differently. That was even more terrifying.[*3]
In another workshop for executives, Wade Davis, one of Myers’s lieutenants, began the session by describing his background: He was a gay Black man who had grown up poor in Louisiana and Colorado. Once an NFL cornerback, he had been released multiple times until he was out of the league completely. It stung to be rejected like that, he said. He had made plenty of mistakes in his life when it came to racism and sexism. He had made ignorant assumptions, had unwittingly said offensive things.
Then Davis asked the group to reflect on their own experiences with privilege and exclusion. Eventually, he mentioned that he had spent a lot of time talking to managers about Netflix’s hiring practices. A number of people had told him they were committed to finding diverse candidates, but he had also noticed that some Netflix job applicants, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, were ultimately rejected because someone said they didn’t “meet the bar.”
“So, what is the Netflix bar?” Davis asked. “And how do you know someone meets it?”
The executives in the room began describing what they looked for in hiring. A middle-aged designer said he sought out applicants who had studied at schools like RISD or Parsons, and who had experience at firms like Apple or Facebook. “Diversity is important to me,” he told the room. “But what’s most important is knowing someone can succeed here.”
He stopped talking. “Oh, shit,” he said. “I’m listening to myself, and I’m realizing, I just described me. I described my own background. I define the bar as myself.” He looked around. “That’s not good, is it?”
Davis later told me that, in these kinds of conversations, what’s important is realizing how we might inadvertently contribute to problems like inequality. The aim is not to say the exact right thing, or to arrive at the perfect insight. Perfection can’t be the goal, “because if you’re trying to say the perfect thing, nothing authentic is going to happen,” he said. “The goal is staying in the conversation, finding space for messy learning and supporting each other.”
These workshops, at first, alarmed some Netflix employees. They didn’t want to attend. When they did attend, they didn’t want to speak. When they did speak, they didn’t want to go first. People were scared of saying something offensive, of accidentally asking an insulting question, of revealing something about themselves that might indicate they were racist or sexist. But, slowly, word got out that the workshops weren’t as risky as employees feared. People could be honest and ask questions. No one was attacked for making a mistake. The workshops got bigger, and talking about these topics became easier until, eventually, thousands of employees had attended a session, many of them more than once. They began asking one another the kinds of questions that can lead to real understanding: What does it mean to be transgender? As a Black mother, how do you feel about the police? As a parent, do you worry about juggling work and fatherhood?[*4] And because these discussions were shaped by guidelines, everyone understood there would be uncomfortable moments and that some people would misspeak—but grappling with that discomfort, and seeing how our words impact others, is part of the point.
In the toughest Who Are We? conversations—those where, say, we don’t have the opportunity to play soccer together, or can’t experiment with different approaches to discussing vaccines—what are we to do? How do we talk about racism, sexism, or other sensitive topics when we know that getting it wrong might impact friendships and careers?
Netflix’s approach offers one solution: Establish guidelines and make sure they are clearly communicated. Invite everyone into the dialogue and give everyone a voice—and let everyone know they are expected to examine themselves. Focus on belonging, and creating a sense that everyone is welcome. “If the first lesson you hear is that you’re biased and inherently prejudiced, that’s not a comfortable place for most people to begin. It feels threatening,” said Greg Walton, a professor of psychology at Stanford. But when conversations focus on creating belonging for everyone, as well as diversity and inclusion, “you’re inviting people to participate and learn, to take responsibility for improving things.”
It is important to note that these kinds of discussions will almost never be perfect. But perfection is not the goal. As Myers told me, “most of the work is about gaining awareness of yourself, your culture, and the culture of others.” The goal is to recognize our own biases, “who we might be excluding or including.”
Or, as Kiara Sanchez put it, the aim is not to “neutralize the discomfort, but rather give people a framework for persevering through it. It seems like a minor distinction, but the underlying theory is that discomfort can be helpful.” Discomfort pushes us to think before we speak, to try to understand how others see or hear things differently. Discomfort reminds us to keep going, that the goal is worth the challenge.
THE IMPACT
By 2021, nearly every Netflix employee had received some form of training on the concepts of belonging, diversity, and inclusion. There were employee resource groups for Black, South Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous, trans, and gay and lesbian employees, and for those who were veterans, parents, or impacted by disabilities or mental health. Whereas researchers had found that some prejudice-reduction programs were ineffective because they were too brief or did not draw everyone in, at Netflix, the prolonged interventions and clear guidelines had made it easier to talk about Who Are We?
Just three years after Myers was hired, Netflix released data showing that it now outpaced nearly every other big firm in Silicon Valley, as well as Hollywood, in hiring from underrepresented groups. Women made up 52 percent of Netflix’s workforce, and 45 percent of the company’s senior leadership. Half of Netflix’s U.S. employees were from at least one historically excluded ethnic or racial group, and 19 percent of U.S. employees were Black or Hispanic.
Within the tech industry, those figures are astonishing. They are equally uncommon within the entertainment industry. When researchers from the University of Southern California compared Netflix to other entertainment companies, they found Netflix shows had more women writers than most studios, and an uncommonly large number of Black and other underrepresented filmmakers, actors, and producers. Netflix finally felt, to many employees, like a different company from the one where Jonathan Friedland had said a racial slur.
