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Fostering Mutual Understanding: Signal Your Capacity to Lead with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
There’s two ways to look at issues of diversity. Clearly what the most important thing is to think about it from an institutional perspective. What can a company do to break down barriers and stereotypes? But until that day comes if you are a member of an underrepresented group there are many, many books, articles, ideas now that are suggesting that it’s important to signal, to convey in a variety of ways that you have executive presence. And so I do think that members of underrepresented groups need to know what these signals are and then make a decision about whether or not they’re going to use them and in what capacity.
Signal Your Capacity to Lead
It is important to signal that you understand the workplace culture. And you could do that in a variety of different ways. You can do it by talking about your previous experience in a company. You can do it by signaling connections that you may have. You can do it by asking for stretch assignments and then of course producing in those assignments. I teach negotiations now in the business school and the critical thing that we keep finding is members of underrepresented groups don’t ask for things that they think that they want. They don’t ask in assertive ways or they might ask at inappropriate times. One of the keys is to be a detective. You’re sort of an identity detective to look for situations where you can assert your leadership ability and don’t assume that other people are seeing you as executive ready. So you need to take responsibility to also signal that in a variety of different ways. This is an old idea but one of the seductions of diversity is that people might think that we don’t need to do this anymore. And it still is the case of ask, ask, ask. Of showing leadership capacity pretty much every day in a company. There are very subtle ways that it can be done. I think the key is often subtle critical and not in an overbearing kind of way.