Minda Harts felt unseen. Her manager had informed her that her white male colleague had been reporting false information about her work. She sat in shock and disbelief as her manager made excuses for him, because he was going through a rough time in his personal life. Minda had believed that she and her colleague had a good working relationship and mutual respect, even though they were competing for the same promotion. Her manager reassured her that she had not believed his false reports and that Minda should stay focused on the assigned project.
While Minda excelled in the project and edged out her colleague for the promotion, she felt betrayed and lost trust with her manager, who seemingly ignored the emotional and mental impact of the accusations.
Minda’s story, which she shares in her recent book Right Within: How to Heal from Racial Trauma in the Workplace, is an example of the psychological and emotional duress that we, as Black women and gender-expansive Black individuals, face while trying to achieve our best work in the workplace. Feelings of inclusion, connection, and trust with colleagues and managers are harder to come by for Black women due to the historical and sociocultural context of the U.S. workplace, and more broadly, our country.
Research by Amy C. Edmondson and Henrik Bresman has shown that diverse teams need a foundation of psychological safety — the belief that everyone can pitch risky ideas and challenge the status quo without retaliation or judgment — to excel in the workplace. Additional research, as well as our professional experience as DEI strategy consultants and personal lived experience, shows that Black women require differentiated solutions to feel psychologically safe at both the interpersonal and organizational levels at work.
Leaders who are truly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace must ask themselves these two critical questions: What are the individual, interpersonal, and organizational costs of neglecting how psychological safety is different for Black women? And how might a tailored approach to psychological safety boost well-being and work outcomes of Black women in the workforce?
Identity Matters to Psychological Safety
In her book, Minda Harts expressly mentions her appreciation of Amy Edmondson’s work, because it provides a starting point for us to have a nuanced conversation about Black women’s psychological safety in the workplace. Research demonstrates that identity matters in the dialogue.
Differentiated solutions for Black women and other marginalized identities requires that leaders consider the relevant historical and social context. Discriminatory beliefs against Black people permeated the American labor system and laws for more than 400 years, notably through chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and unequal access to quality education and employment. Because of this historical context and because most corporate offices were primarily designed with white men in mind, there is an ever-present apprehension among Black individuals about potentially being alienated or devalued in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by non-Black employers and team members. These concerns can be validated, even on teams where leaders believe there is a great level of psychological safety and team members work together closely.
For instance, in its Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office highlights that women and people of color are more likely to experience threats to both their physical and psychological safety at work. Research from Gallup finds that Black individuals are most likely out of all racialized identity groups to experience microaggressions in the workplace.
A 2022 report from Black Women Thriving (BWT) highlights that a whopping 66% of Black women report not feeling emotionally safe at work. “While I wasn’t surprised by that statistic, it was profound to hear that while Black women may feel they have colleagues they can confide in, they don’t feel those colleagues will actually stand up for them when the moment calls for it,” said Ericka Hines, a DEI advisor and strategist who founded BWT.
Lean In’s report, The State of Black Women in Corporate America, released in 2020, sheds more light on the disconnect between self-proclaimed allyship and Black women’s true experience at work: “More than 80% of white women and men say they see themselves as allies to people of color at work. But less than half of Black women feel that they personally have strong allies at work — and barely a quarter think it’s mostly accurate that Black women have strong allies in their workplace.”
The Lean In report also reveals that Black women remain highly ambitious in spite of the obstacles they face. Its data states that Black women are substantially more likely than white women — and just as likely as white men — to say that they are interested in becoming top executives. What’s getting in the way? A lack of healthy, high-quality feedback, for one. Black women receive nearly nine times as much feedback that’s not actionable compared to white men under 40. How can we be expected to advance to our fullest potential without the reinforcement of what we’re doing right, as well as specific and unbiased feedback on how we can grow?
What Organizations Can Do to Increase Psychological Safety for Black Women
For non-Black leaders to better understand how to support Black women in the workplace, they need to understand which foundational components are needed for true psychological safety.
Alongside one-on-one allyship and support, your Black women employees want to be able to trust that overarching standards and policies will shield them from more egregious harm or trauma.
Clear systems and accountability create foundations for true psychological safety. When workplaces either don’t have or don’t adhere to these protective measures, Black women have no safety shield and are left to fend for themselves. In our interview with Ericka Hines, she emphasizes the adverse effect and long-term impact this can have: “When we try to advocate for ourselves — especially when we surface our race in a conversation — we’re informally labeled as troublemakers. And this doesn’t just impact our day-to-day experience, it actually impacts the trajectory of our career.”
So what are organizations getting wrong in their current approaches?
First, we can no longer leave to chance the experience Black women will have based on the manager they report to. Organizations must set a consistent standard when it comes to the emotional and psychological safety of all historically excluded groups, most especially Black women who are often at the edges of those margins. As Minda Harts told us:
Safety cannot happen without trust. Before we can assert that our environment is safe, we need to know with certainty that all of our leaders are equipped to build trust across identity differences, and also know how to go about repairing that trust when it’s been broken within the organization. We can’t just say, “We can trust supervisor A to be a good manager to all, but we’re not so sure about supervisor B.” That’s not enough.
Organizations can achieve psychological safety at scale for Black women by:
- Focusing on — and talking about — changing systems and not people.
- Understanding that Black women experience trauma at staggering rates both inside and outside of work, with impacts akin to serious PTSD symptoms, which can have profound health and career consequences. We recommend organizations learn what it means to become a trauma-informed workplace, especially as it relates to racial trauma, and integrate these strategies into management training programs.
- Creating a new set of supervisor standards that account for the necessary skills, such as cultural humility and a practice of shared and equitable decision-making, when it comes to leading diverse teams. You should also ensure that your hiring materials and interview processes screen for proficiency in these skills.
- Performing a pay audit and working toward pay equity to ensure you’re not exploiting talent from marginalized groups.
- Auditing and then truly adhering to trauma-informed HR policies that outline clear steps to be taken when a marginalized employee’s safety and right to thrive is breached.
- Revisiting DEI vision statements and commitments — many of which were created in 2020 — and using them to revamp existing manager training and development with an openness toward factors of identity, particularly race.
- Leveling up coaching, 360 feedback, and performance management practices to surface potential biases that are negatively impacting the quality and frequency of these conversations for Black women.
What Individuals Can Do to Increase Psychological Safety for Black Women
- Learn to spot and respond to microaggressions as they’re happening.
- Reflect on past situations when you didn’t intervene: What got in your way and how can you curb that in the future? For example, if fear of not knowing what to say in the moment caused your inaction, consider short, easy-to-remember phrases to interrupt the harm, such as, “Can we pause for a moment? I am processing what you just said to Janet.” Sometimes, this “speed bump” can give those involved a chance to reflect and resolve, during or at a later time.
- Leverage your privilege by actively amplifying the contributions of Black women you work with, particularly when something they’ve said in a group has gone unaddressed or without credit/reinforcement.
- Learn about how bias shows up in interview processes, be honest with yourself about where your tendencies lie, and ask those you trust to hold you accountable for mitigating them in real time
. . .
When the experiential differences between people of color and white people are ignored, we miss out on meeting the needs of everyone. Power and opportunity leans more in one direction, failing to widen the gates for those who’ve not had the same promise or guarantee of safety as we have. If organizations don’t commit now to building true psychological safety for all through the lens of identity, they’ll continue to fall short of creating the experience Black women (and all historically excluded groups) deserve.
And while a singular focus on the “business case” for diversity can be fraught, we also know that teams won’t reap the full vibrancy and benefits of diversity unless we have the base of psychological safety that then yields deeper creativity, commitment, and collaboration.
History teaches us that systems that support the safety and innovation of Black women and other racialized groups ultimately benefit the whole. We’re hopeful that conversations and research will take this into account in even more meaningful ways. We can’t afford to wait.
