3 Things Managers Can Do to Confront Microaggressions Head On
Your goal isn’t to automatically have all the answers — it’s to surface topics in your blind spots and learn more about them
One of your direct reports asks for a private meeting. You expect to hear about an update on one of their projects and are caught off guard when they say, “While eating breakfast, two white employees asked me to clean up after their mess. I am a program manager.” Your employee was mistaken for a food service worker. It’s uncomfortable to hear about. Perhaps you’ve even experienced or observed similar slights yourself. Are you equipped to respond?
The encounter your employee described is an example of a “microaggression.” Microaggressions are slights, invalidations, indignities, put-downs, and insults that can be intentional or unintentional, occur in day-to-day interactions, and are most often experienced by people of marginalized groups.
Report after report demonstrates that microaggressions happen in nearly every field: academia, science, manufacturing, tech — and especially if you are Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, a woman, a veteran, or someone with different abilities. Researchers Aneeta Rattan from London Business School and Carol Dweck of Stanford University surveyed Black professionals…
