What is Othering?

We all feel excluded at times. Many social situations can create these feelings: an inside joke we’re not a part of, to not being invited to an outing that our colleagues are all attending. For many of us, these are isolated experiences of not belonging, but for some people, these are daily occurrences that have a compounding effect.

Othering is a pattern of exclusion and marginalization based on having identities that are different from the norm. In the workplace, othering is an often-invisible mechanism that bars people outside the dominant culture from access to opportunity.

The challenge with othering is that it can take many subtle forms in the workplace. Othering can be as subtle as:

• Ignoring people’s ideas, work, or opinions
• Not giving people the benefit of the doubt
• Failing to share important information
• Avoidance
• Withholding resources
• Excluding people from meetings or social events

Research has shown that othering has real career disadvantages in the workplace:

• Limited access to mentors. Women, particularly women who feel racially/ethnically different from the rest of their workgroup, report the lowest levels of mentorship from CEOs and Senior Executives. These types of mentorships have the highest correlation with career advancement.
• Fewer promotions. Employees experiencing otherness are less likely to be promoted, even when factoring for experience and qualifications are factored. They also tend to have less access to mission-critical opportunities and high-profile projects that can get them recognized.
• Isolation within a workgroup. Otherness creates feelings of isolation, which in turn inhibit innovation and lead to withdrawal from the workgroup.

Implications & Risks

We must be very clear: Experiencing otherness has nothing to do with individual job performance. Employees who are othered may be doing exemplary work, but their work is not noticed like that of the dominant group. They have the same motivation and talent, but suffer from a pattern of being unheard, unrecognized, and not being invited into their organization’s culture.

Othering in the workplace has a palpable impact on those who experience it. Our brains process social exclusion as if it’s pain: We perceive not being accepted as a threat, and that threat causes our brains to enter “fight, flight, or freeze” mode. Over time, feelings of otherness lead employees who feel different from their workgroups to downsize their ambitions and disinvest from a company they see as unreceptive to their input . The cost of otherness to an individual, therefore, is lack of opportunity for growth, fulfillment, and advancement.

Meanwhile, the cost to an organization is a tremendous amount of diverse talent being left on the sidelines. The tendency to reward those similar to you can explain why organizations that have high diversity at the recruitment level may face a homogeneous leadership team. The inability to capture the value that diverse perspectives bring to organizations and workgroups ultimately results in a loss of countless dollars’ worth of untapped innovation .

Tips & Solutions

The conditions that produce otherness in the workplace are often a reflection of society-wide preconceptions about who belongs in certain fields, roles, and levels of success. Combating otherness is about expanding the in-group on your team by inviting people into situations, knowledge loops, and relationships, because being different doesn’t have to mean being excluded. There are many ways a manager can decrease otherness and increase inclusion.

• Reflect on your team dynamics; who talks the most, who is quiet, whose ideas get considered, whose ideas get discounted, who gets interrupted, who engages in side conversation? If there is a pattern, make an intentional effort to manage these group dynamics toward fairness.
• Find ways to value difference within your workgroup. Regularly offer visible praise and recognition to employees who are making valuable contributions and highlight where diversity leads to better ideas.
• Notice workgroup cliques and assemble diverse project teams to promote relationship building across difference.
• Have both structured and unstructured opportunities for people in your workgroup to get to know each other.

Contact us for diversity solutions tailored for your team and workplace.

Originally published at https://eskalera.com on March 4, 2019.