Ducks in a Row: Owning Up to Your Advantages
by Miki Saxon
It’s always gratifying when something I wrote in years past, based on my own experience, is validated by current research. Yesterday’s Oldie about privilege is no exception.
I wrote it in 2015 and last week I read the validating research in the Harvard Business Review (love these little ego trips).
There are lots of people held back by bias. And that means that some of the people at the top have advanced partly through privilege.
Our research finds the idea of being advantaged to be uncomfortable for many senior leaders. We interviewed David, a senior executive who recognizes both having benefited from unfair advantages and the injustice of bias. He’s tall, middle-aged, well-educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, white, and male — and these provide David with unearned advantages that he intellectually knows he has, but that in practice he barely notices. He tells us he feels an underlying sense of guilt. He wants to feel that his successes in life are down to his abilities and hard work, not unfair advantage. “I feel like a child who discovers that people have been letting him win a game all along,” he says. “How can I feel good about myself succeeding if the game was never fair?”
Over the years, I’ve found the idea of ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ deeply embedded in people’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where it has a major impact on all three MAP components.
In speaking with leaders about their built-in advantages, we have seen that David’s experience is widely shared. Acknowledging these advantages can challenge their very identities and sense of worth.
As is often the case, normalcy erases awareness.
Our research on speaking truth to power shows there is often a blind spot among the powerful, preventing them from seeing their impact on the less powerful. We call this advantage blindness. When you have advantage blindness, you don’t feel privileged. You don’t notice a life of special treatment; it’s just normal. You don’t think about your physical safety most of the time; you don’t worry about holding hands with your partner in public; when you get angry, no one asks you if it’s because of your hormones; and people in power generally look like you.
The results of the researchers interviews list three negative reactions
- Denying the playing field is unlevel.
- Focusing on one’s own disadvantages.
- Denying the playing field is unlevel.
And three positive ones
- Owning personal prejudice and bias.
- Empathy from connecting with people who are “other.”
- Putting personal advantage to collective good use
The one problem with the research is it’s focus on executives, which is to be expected from Harvard, but the same advantages, bias, guilt, and negative reactions can be found at all levels.
The good part is that the positive approaches discussed also work at all levels.
What should you do next?
- Read the article.
- Consciously and honestly identify your own advantages.
- Write (not keyboard) them down.
- Reread the list often.
- Heighten your awareness.
- Lower your defensiveness.
- Implement the actions described and add your own.
While you can’t eliminate societal advantages, you can put them to work for the greater good. Doing so will go a long way to validating your advantaged success.
Image credit: Duck Lover
