The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity while Embracing Differences to Achieve Success at Work

Chapter 4

What’s Easy for You Is Hard for Me and How to Navigate the Differences

Consider how you might handle the following situation if you were a company manager overseeing a very skilled and productive employee: this employee’s manager is not noticing the extent of his hard work. The manager doesn’t think to mention the employee, and the executives above the manager know nothing about the employee’s especially strong performance. What do you make of this situation? Most of the managers I work with react similarly after hearing this scenario. They tend to say that the employee should “just speak up,” tell their manager about what they’ve been doing, and ask that he or she get them in front of the more senior team. This is an obvious solution for these managers, because they would do just that.

But in Noah’s ark, this employee may be diverse and come from a very different perspective, and each of those action steps could present a huge challenge. It might require the employee to overcome many obstacles, including ignoring some of their own cultural norms. The better solution would combine the manager stepping up his actions to get the employee noticed, with the employee adapting somewhat to the organizational norms. It is crucial that the manager have a greater degree of awareness and set of tools than merely suggesting that the employee speak up as an answer to his frustration.

People come into the workplace with varying comfort levels and with behaviors that are considered ...