Commentary: People want to tell their story

By AMY NARISHKIN, PH.D.

“How do leaders create an environment where everyone feels valued and heard, even across gender identity and orientation?” That’s the question my clients—the executive leadership team of a rural hospital group—were asking. They wondered because they wanted to be sure that, when people of the LBGTQIA+ community came to their hospitals for care, nobody felt sidelined or silenced.

But before meaningful change like that can take place, individual leaders and caregivers first need to feel confident communicating one-to-one with anyone who has a different perspective or experience.

What keeps people from confident communication

People’s hesitation to engage with people different from them doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a reflection of a larger system. Dr. Edward Deming (1900–93), renowned management consultant, argued that 94 percent of problems are caused by the system, not the individual.

To see the sometimes-hidden systems that influence the way we think, talk and act, we need to recognize a very common sticking point at play in our culture (and many cultures worldwide): minimization. Fully 66 percent of people who take the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI) worldwide are right in the middle of the five stages of Cultural Intelligence, the stage called “Minimization.” The percentage is that high because it’s the default mindset of the dominant culture of an organization as well as of society as a whole.

Minimizing or ignoring different-ness creates an environment in which people tend to focus on what “everybody” (aka the majority) has in common and then assume others are “like us.”

Focusing on what “we all” have in common may be well-intended, but the impact of this minimization on those who are or feel different is the feeling that they’re being dismissed – that their humanity’s being minimized, even erased – which is demoralizing.

Not any one person’s fault

The problem, then, is not that anybody’s inherently evil, but that people of dominant cultures have an inherited ignorance of the system. And here’s the good news: If ignorance is the fundamental problem, we are dealing with a fixable problem.

The antidote is to become more aware of the systems that influence us and others, making us less likely to perpetuate them.

To upend minimization, people of dominant culture can become aware of their culture and its impact on themselves and others also recognize that each person’s experience is just one of many cultural patterns.

What a leader knows now

I asked one of the organization’s leaders, “Jenna, before you started developing your cultural intelligence and were inadvertently minimizing yourself and others, how did you handle conversations with people who are from historically marginalized groups in your hospital?”

Jenna responded, “Before, I would have done nothing – not even had the conversation. If it hadn’t been for your training, I wouldn’t have spoken with anyone about it. Before, my assumption was that, because I don’t have a problem with transgender people, why bring it up? Why would I dive into all that awkwardness with questions that don’t really concern me?”

I said, “I get that, because, when a person is unconsciously expressing minimization, they don’t tend to think another’s experience is particularly different from their own. It wouldn’t have even occurred to you – or anyone else, for that matter – to bring up the topic because, within the mindset of minimization, everyone supposedly thinks like you do.”

Jenna said, “That’s it.”

I asked, “So what’s different now?”

She said, “With cultural intelligence, I know not to assume I know how it is for other people. Now I know to slow down and wonder what it’s like for them. I’ve learned even if it’s initially awkward, I need to be willing to have the conversation, because people want to talk. People want to tell their story.” To be heard confirms for us that we and our story matters.

In any organization where minimization is inadvertently at play, people feel sidelined and silenced. But when leaders strive to create a culture where members of both historically non-dominant and dominant groups together are engaged and heard, people feel valued and organizations retain their people.

Dr. Amy Narishkin is a speaker, author and coach. She and her team work with organizations and their leaders who want to be confident communicators so that they can attract and retain diverse talent. Click to discover more skills through Empowering Partners’ online course and executive coaching.

(Editor’s note: This commentary piece also appears in the August 2024 print edition of the Illinois Business Journal.)