Laura Huang, associate professor at Harvard Business School, has studied groups that face bias in the workplace, from entrepreneurs with accents to women and people of color. She says that the best way for individuals to overcome this type of adversity is to acknowledge and harness it, so it plays to their advantage instead of holding them back. Start by recognizing your outsider status and the preconceived notions others might have about you, then surprise them by showing how you defy their expectations and can offer unique value. Huang is the author of the book Edge: Turning Adversity Into Advantage.
TRANSCRIPT
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, I’m Alison Beard.
Whether you’re interviewing for a job, angling for a big assignment, or pitching a new idea to a boss or investor, the goal is always the same: you want to persuade people that you have the talent to succeed, and even to outperform. But how do you do that, especially when you’re not the kind of expecting to hire, or promote, or fund? Maybe you’re a female mathematician, or a disabled politician, or a non-native speaker working for a foreign company.
Our guest today says that we all have the power to control how we’re perceived by others, even when those perceptions begin with bias. The key is to find our unique edge, this includes working hard, of course, but that’s not enough, we also need to delight people, enrich, or add value to their lives, and deliberately guide assumptions and expectations about our worth. She’s studied entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, Olympians, and hairdressers, and she’s here today to tell us what she’s learned.
Laura Huang is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and the author of the book Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. Laura, thanks so much for being here today.
LAURA HUANG: Great, thank you so much for having me.
ALISON BEARD: We like to think that business can or should be a meritocracy, but it’s not. There are politics, there’s bias, there’s bureaucracy, so have you really found a recipe for powering through all of that?
LAURA HUANG: Well, so I think even from a young age we’re sort of taught that hard work is sort of the path or the recipe to success. We teach our kids, work hard, work hard, work hard. A lot of times the underlying assumption is that hard work will speak for itself. But what we found, and what we see a lot in our lives is that you can take two people who work equally as hard, and one person will be inevitably be more successful than the other. It could be because of perceptions, and signals, and cues in the environment, it could be because of the way that the decisions are made, but inevitably sometimes that hard work leaves us frustrated. And so, what I’ve tried to outline here, and what this book is trying to show, is that there are ways that we can make our hard work work harder for us.
ALISON BEARD: And it’s more than just playing the game of organizational politics, or charming someone in a first meeting?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times we don’t even have the opportunity. We go into situations, and we may not belong to certain circles, or we may not be given those opportunities, and so, part of being able to make your hard work work harder for you is going into situations, and allowing them, having people give you that opportunity. It’s not about just charming them, it’s about creating this platform, or creating this canvas from which you can then show them how you can enrich and really provide value.
ALISON BEARD: And so, you’ve seen people who started off from that say negative five position, in that they were underestimated or pigeon-holed, and succeed unexpectedly?
LAURA HUANG: Absolutely. People who are underestimated, or people who are disadvantaged, not only can they level the playing field sometimes by flipping the stereotypes or the obstacles that they’re facing in their favor, can actually even outperform.
One example is I’ve done a lot looking at people who have non-standard accents. You know, is it indeed about how well someone communicates? And what I found was that, in fact, people are able to learn just as much, if not more, from people with accents. So, it wasn’t about communication. And so, then I was like huh, okay, well then what is it?
And what we see happening is, for example, a lot of times in organizations we know we can’t discriminate against people because of things like gender, or race, or accent. We know that we can’t, and we shouldn’t, but instead we come up with factors, things that we have decided that we can hire people based on, fund entrepreneurs based on, and it’s things like how interpersonally influential are they, how well are they able to negotiate resources for their team. And then when we rate people based on those sorts of factors, we find that those who have accents are most likely to be rated the lowest on those kinds of things.
ALISON BEARD: Or women, or minorities.
LAURA HUANG: Or women, or minorities, and so on, and so forth. But what I’ve also found is that when they realize that these are the perceptions that others may have of you, for example, that you’re going to be less interpersonally influential, you can go into an interview situation, for example, and say things like, I know it may seem like X, Y, and Z, whatever those perceptions are that other people have of you, but then let me tell you about a time where I fought for resources for my team, or let me tell you about a time when, and by sort of pinpointing that in a benign way, but also addressing those perceptions and attributions that other people are making of you, you can sort of flip those perceptions, and actually see outcomes that are much better than you would have achieved otherwise.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, how did you get interested in studying this idea of overcoming adversity, and then achieving beyond where people expect you to?
LAURA HUANG: For years I have been sort of studying just dichotomies and disparities, and at some point in my career I sort of got frustrated by all of this negativity, and I started thinking how do we prevent these sort of things from happening? And so, I spent the last couple of years studying ways in which we can think about leveling this playing field.
To some extent, should individuals have to do this? No, we should have structures in place so that there is much more of a meritocracy, that it is much more about the hard work that you’re putting in, and that the rewards are going to those who are most deserving. But I also recognize that while we’re waiting for these structures to change, people can empower themselves to do something.
ALISON BEARD: So, let’s talk a little about delight. How do you delight someone, especially when you’re not natural charismatic, or funny, or charming?
LAURA HUANG: So, delight is about showing someone an aspect of yourself that they didn’t quite come up with on their own, and now you’re sort of giving them this opportunity to be like, huh, now I see you, and now I want to give an opportunity, now I want to engage with you in a different way. And that’s what allows you then to show how you’re going to enrich, and provide value, and be something that was different from what they expected.
ALISON BEARD: And you have your own story about delighting someone before you got thrown out of a room, right?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah. So, I had this colleague who was talking to me about Elon Musk, and all these innovative new things that he’s doing, and how he’s really trying to disrupt multiple different industries. I had a meeting with him, and he took one look at a colleague of mine and I, who had been scheduled to meet with him, he looked at us and he was like, get out of my office. And I was sort of stunned for a second, I was like wait, what?
And as he repeated, get out of my office, I sort of noticed that he wasn’t looking at us, he was instead looking at something that was in my colleague’s hands. We had actually, we had done so much homework on that meeting, we had prepared, we prepared to the extent that we had even brought him a gift. And we realized that he was looking at this gift we had brought him, and he thought it was a product prototype, and that we were entrepreneurs that were pitching him.
And so, he was understandably no, get out of my office, and so I sort of in that moment started laughing nervously. Because I was like I don’t know what to do in this situation. And so, I just started nervously laughing, and then he started, Elon started nervously laughing. And then he started laughing, and I started laughing back, and then we were just like hysterically laughing at each other, and somehow during this burst of laughter I said something along the lines of oh, you think we want your money, like you have money or something.
And he thought that was hysterical, started laughing more, and said, please come into my office. By the end of that meeting he was offering things to us that we couldn’t have even dreamed of him giving us, even if he had welcomed us into his office from the beginning. We somehow had managed to gain an edge over one of the most powerful men in the United States by having this moment where he was caught off guard, it was unexpected, it was different from what the normal type of interaction that he would have had with people, especially people who are trying to get something from him. And we left having just this wonderful rapport and just him sort of offering resources and introductions to people that we never would have gotten otherwise.
ALISON BEARD: Sure, okay. So, before you get to the step of trying to delight someone, you should know what you’re going to bring to them, right? So, how do I begin to think about what my, what do you call it?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah, I mean, delight comes first sequentially. You delight someone, and then they allow you the opportunity. But before you even get there, you’re much more equipped to delighting, and delighting someone effectively, or delighting effectively, when you know what value you bring to the table. I talk a lot about knowing your basic goods, knowing how you enrich, how you provide value. What are your superpowers? What are the superpowers that you bring into a situation? And that may differ based on the context, but what are those strengths? And what are those weaknesses? Because your weaknesses, and the constraints that you face also can be flipped to be your assets as well. And so, the first step is really having this really authentic understanding of who you are, and all of the different selves that you bring.
When we think of all of the versions of ourselves, it’s like a diamond. You have one diamond, just like you have one person, but a diamond sparkles in so many different ways, and every time you look at it at a different angle, it sparkles in a different way. And it’s the same with people, in different contexts, with different people, you’re still the same being, you’re still the same self, but you’re going to sparkle in different ways, and you want to show people that angle, the perspective where you’re going to shine the brightest.
And when you know the strengths and the weaknesses that you have, that’s when you’re able to show that angle, and that’s what allows you to recognize perhaps the mistaken angle that someone sees you at, so that you can then delight them by just shifting or changing slightly to show them a different version of who is still the same you.
ALISON BEARD: How do you recognize when someone is making an assumption about you that isn’t correct? And that you need to start working harder to change their perceptions?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah, I mean, there’s really, there’s two different ways to sort of think about this. The first is that we sort of know, we have an intuition in every situation. Sometimes the intuition is overall net positive, or overall net negative, but we sort of go into situations where we know, hey, how much of a hurdle do we have here?
There are other situations in which we have much more nuance, where we can go into a situation and say, here’s the context, here’s the sort of stereotypes that one would have about someone like me in this situation, and so, we have sort of that sense of how people are seeing us. But, in other situations where we don’t necessarily have that intuition, there’s lots of ways we can practice, and hone, being good at, that self-understanding.
Or I often tell my students, try lots of different things. For a couple of days, for example, try approaching people with, in different circumstances, in different settings, try approaching people with more of like a factual data driven approach. And a couple of days later, everyone you’re meeting, every situation you’re in, try approaching people where you sort of listen to what they say, and you agree with what they’re saying, and then you add one layer of something that they may not have considered. And then for the next couple of days maybe approach situations and people where you agree with what they’re saying, and you’re listening, and then you add one dimension of something they may not have considered, but that they may disagree with. And at the end of it, all of that is information, it’s ways for you to hone your intuition about how you can gain your own edge, and create your own edge.
ALISON BEARD: One of my favorite chapters of the book was the one on trajectories, and sort of defining the point where people see you started, and the point where people see you are now, and making sure that they see the potential upside in the future, so how do you go about describing that for people, and making them see it the way you want them to?
LAURA HUANG: Absolutely. I mean, when we talk about be yourself, or be yourselves, we a lot of times think about these static qualities, this person is trustworthy, or this person is competent, or this person is committed, or this person is passionate. We forget that in our minds, and in the judgements that people are making of us, it’s often not a static quality. It’s projecting, it’s thinking about where’s this person going to be in five years, what’s this person going to look like down the road, even when it’s sometimes explicit. Right? We don’t always explicitly think, hey, what’s this person going to do for me later on.
We also make assumptions around where people have been in the past, and what sort of got them to where they are now. And again, it’s not always something that’s explicit, it just goes into our quick cognitive calculus that then lands on here’s what I think about this person. And so, the more that we guide people on here’s where I came from, and here’s where I’m going, and here’s the trajectory that I’m on, the more they’re going to be able to see how you enrich, and how you provide value, and why they want you to be a part of whatever it is that they’re working on.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Who are some of the people that you’ve seen that have faced initial bias, and have managed to flip the script so that they not only overcome, but it helps them go ever further?
LAURA HUANG: One of the leaders that I had in an organization very early on in my career, it was this woman who had become an executive at the company, and she once was telling me this story about how early in her career, that she had gotten laid off. And a number of people had been a part of this downsizing, and they were all told you have one month, we are giving you a month to sort of figure out your next steps, you’ll continue to be paid your salary, feel free to come into the office if you want, but we give you this time if you don’t want to come into the office it’s also okay.
And this woman, she was telling me this story and saying, and I just kept going into the office because the organization was in such a state of disarray. She had been told that she was being laid off because she was young, and experienced, and a woman, and so, she felt sort of affronted by that, but she kept coming in, and started signing up for things.
They needed people to join this committee to take care of this issue, or that committee to take care of something else. She said, at the end of the month they realized that I was part of all of these committees, and they said to her, you know what, we can’t afford to let you go, we need to keep you in this organization. And she took that as fuel, somebody telling her we don’t need you, and sort of like, I will show them, I’m going to sign up for all of these things, I’m going to do these things, and worked her way up to a very senior position in the organization. And so, she took that disadvantage and made it work in her favor.
ALISON BEARD: So, you are an Asian woman, you started out as an engineer, you got your PhD at UC Irvine, how in your career have you had to flip the script to make people see how you can succeed in ways they didn’t anticipate?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah, there’s been a number of times that have been, that have really stuck with me that I’ve had to do that. There’s been lots of times where I’ve had to do that and have failed miserably. In high school actually, I had this situation where there was a teacher of mine, he was my math teacher, and I adored him. I loved math, it was something that I was just naturally good at. I know this sounds so dorky, but everyone has things they’re good at.
ALISON BEARD: Right, it was your super power.
LAURA HUANG: They’re good at sports, I was not good at sports, and so, it was math, right? And I just adored this teacher. And he had this thing where when you got 100% on a test you would get a gold star. And it wasn’t just a gold star like a sticker, it was the mother of all gold stars. And he would put it on the wall right on top of the blackboards, and it would stay for the rest of the year.
And this was like for that dorky math loving high schooler that I was, I was like there’s nothing I want more than one of those gold stars. And I remember that I had a test, and I had gotten a 99. And the point I had lost was something where there was the final answer seven, and I had written, you know, I had solved this equation and I had written equals seven. And he had taken off a point because I hadn’t written seven over one equals seven, that I had taken one shortcut. And I was devastated.
And went to him, and in my very shy way was like, is this wrong? And he said, yes, it’s wrong. I was also at the same time observing that this other girl in my class, this very perfect looking girl who, to her credit, was very, very smart. And I looked at her test, and realized that she had also had equals seven, that she had got 100% on the test, and got a gold star.
Those sorts of experiences stay with you. And then it was something that I say oftentimes that life rhymes, that things that you experience in life later on, you experience something very, very similar. My freshman year of college, I was in this writing course. I turned in my first assignment and didn’t do very well, I think I got a C- or something. And went up to the professor and shyly was like can you help me understand why I got this C-, and he said it’s fine, your native language isn’t English. And so, it’s understandable that you’re going to be getting a C-.
And I’m thinking, one of my native languages is English. But instead I was like, you know what, okay, that’s the perception that he sees of me. And so, the next writing assignment that we had, I sort of sarcastically tongue-in-cheek wrote this essay about my upbringing, and not having, even though I grew up in the United States how my native language wasn’t English, and how I was striving to become a better writer.
And I don’t think he quite got the sarcasm of it, but I got a B+. And sort of, you know, in a way guiding him, and saying, you know what, I am going to show you how I can enrich, and provide value, but at the same time taking those initial perceptions that you have on me, and benignly flipping them in my favor.
ALISON BEARD: When we talk about people who are having to overcome preconceived notions about them, we are usually thinking about women, and minorities, historically disadvantaged groups. Is this something that traditionally dominant groups, in the US it would be white men, do they face it too? Are they sometimes pigeon-holed in a certain way, and do they need to flip the script as well?
LAURA HUANG: Yeah, I mean, I always say everybody has something. And some of these differences are visible differences, things like gender and race, but there’s also invisible differences. And everybody has something whether it’s a different context that they go into that then switches the perceptions that people have of them, or whether it’s being judged on something that we’re not quite sure why we’re being judged on.
We all know the sort of hang-ups that we have, we all know the insecurities that we have, we all know the ways that we’re being perceived sometimes that are not always fair, that make us feel like we’re being underestimated.
And so, I think it’s something that’s really important for all of us to understand is that in some situations we will have an advantage, but in other situations we won’t, and we have to make one for ourselves, or at least think about what that would mean. And I think that applies to everyone.
ALISON BEARD: Laura, thank you so much for coming in today.
LAURA HUANG: Thank you, it was such a pleasure. Thanks so much.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Laura Huang, associate professor at Harvard Business School, and author of the book, Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, we get technical help from Rob Eckhardt, Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.
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