Conflict is gonna happen. You may not want it, especially if you were raised to be conflict averse, like me. However it’s necessary if we want to learn a new way of doing business.
“Rocking the boat” was to be avoided at all costs in my family. As African Americans, it was a survival strategy so we didn’t step out of line and get punished in school, or fired from work, or in a previous generation, lynched. This strategy worked toward our survival for generations, however, it’s time for a new strategy.
We live in a multiracial society. Our organizations and businesses are multiracial: even if there is only one Black person, it is no longer a white-only place. Now it’s our job to acknowledge the reality, and learn how to have something new happen in our environments.
When conflict shows up, you may clamp down to fix it immediately. However, when we come together it’s natural to have disagreements because we’re bringing our different experiences and expectations to the table. These differences can spark new ideas; one benefit that comes from a diverse environment. But you need to learn how to navigate those conflicts to use diversity to your advantage.
I was working with a coalition of organizations from across a major U.S. city, when the struggles of being diverse hit us. The group was racially diverse, diverse in terms of class, and had a mix of staff and volunteers. Our first conflict came over raising hands!
When we first met, people shared their excitement while looking around the room. The group quickly developed a norm of raising hands - a behavior many people learned as the right way to communicate in a classroom. But then someone jumped in without raising their hand and I saw the hand raisers draw back in their seats. Tension rose as one white hand raiser said - “There’s someone across the room who is raising their hand.” I acknowledged that other person, and invited the person who jumped in to finish, leaving the tension in the room.
At the end of the night, I asked people to reflect on what happened - and one person pointed out the hand raising conflict. “I’m used to hand raising at work, but in my Latinx family, we just jump into conversation. And here we did both. That was so hard at first, but now I see that it’s giving us different ways to communicate. That there isn’t a right way to be.”
What followed was a discussion about how hand raising is often “the right way” to communicate in white, middle class culture. However, jumping in is often celebrated in communities of color.
When welcoming diversity, notice your impulse as a leader to correct people to do “the right thing”, instead pause and ask what works about what’s happening now. That’s how we notice our default toward racism and instead choose anti-racism - bringing out the strengths of multiracial groups.