Introduction to Employing Differences

[00:00:03] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

[00:00:09] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:10] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:12] Paul: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, what did differences cost? 

The Value of Diversity

[00:00:20] Karen: So I think we live in a time where we really value diversity. We get enthused about having people that don't all look the same, don't all talk the same, don't all think the same. I think there's a general awareness that there's a lot of really good things to be gained by working with and collaborating with people who are not just like us.

[00:00:41] Karen: And thus the name of the show that we're working on here, which is Employing Differences that we think differences are really good things and they can be employed. 

Challenges of Embracing Differences

[00:01:00] Karen: And today we wanted to pause and say, well, we think it's really good. Like a lot of really good things. It's not necessarily easy. That often the thing that's good is good because it makes us do some hard and challenging things. And so we wanna talk about that. And Paul, you were saying you had an experience with this recently. That might be a good illustration.

Paul's Improv Workshop Experience

[00:01:13] Paul: I did. And part of the reason I'm talking about this on the show is because I had a very intense emotional reaction to this. Like my nervous system was definitely up and activated while this was all happening. And so we kind of wanted to mind this a little bit for what was going on.

[00:01:25] Paul: So to set the stage as it were, recently I was in an improv workshop. And it's a form of improv that I'd never really done before, but I studied a good bit and I was really excited to be there. I didn't know any of the other participants. I had no idea what was gonna be going on. And normally I'm a pretty, pretty good person in social situations.

[00:01:44] Paul: And can, you know, I never met a stranger, you know, kind of thing, right? And as people started to fill in for this thing, and the point of this workshop was we had three hours to work together to put together a show that we were then gonna put on that night, sort of thing.

Feeling Like an Outsider

[00:01:59] Paul: And as people start filling in, I realize that I am the oldest person, in the group of performers by a substantial amount. That many of the troop could be my kids, if I had any. They're that much younger than me and many of them are very experienced and know each other.

[00:02:19] Paul: And so it becomes very obvious to me very quickly that I am an outsider and this is not a group that I feel super comfortable with. And that's an unusual situation for me. Probably a useful one for me to experience from time to time, but that was the sort of initial reaction that I had was like, do I really wanna stay?

[00:02:40] Paul: Do I really wanna be part of this? Like, what's going on? 

[00:02:44] Karen: Yeah, and I think that your reaction is pretty common. We are, as humans, far more likely to be comfortable in a pretty homogenous group if we're very much like everybody. Else we have a sense of, I belong here and I fit in and I know what the rules are, and you were really dipping into a different culture.

[00:03:02] Karen: We don't necessarily think of age as a culture, but it sure sounds like it was playing that way for you. And even, you know, what is the communication that works here? What is the approach to the task that's going to work here? What are the rules of the game and you were, as you describe it, a little bit new to the thing you were doing, but you were a lot new to the group and it wasn't the sort of group.

[00:03:28] Karen: There were some demographics, which demographics are not only demographics, right? It's not just that they were younger, but with being younger, they approached problems differently. They approach communications differently, their energy plays out differently. There's all kinds of things that are gonna be different about that and.

[00:03:45] Karen: That costs you something cognitively. 

Cognitive and Emotional Costs

[00:03:48] Karen: So to get back to what we're talking about, what do differences cost? One of the things it is, is cognition. Like you spend your time figuring out how to navigate the differences and you don't have as much brain power left to do the thing that you're doing. And I imagine there were other things that you could unpack of what happened for you that made this hard.

[00:04:09] Paul: Yeah, certainly that piece of the unfamiliar, right, of like, they have shorthand for things that I don't understand. They're making references to things that I don't really get. Like there was certainly a cognitive element there of being the fish out of water, of trying to make sense of things where it's like I was operating at a deficit there.

[00:04:26] Paul: The other thing that I really noticed was that, I don't like to admit this, but it's true, right? 

Judgment and Defense Mechanisms

[00:04:34] Paul: I found myself getting super judgmental, right? You know, kids these days, right? Not quite, but it's like, you know, how can I really relate to them? Like, do they really know this stuff?

[00:04:41] Paul: You know, even as we're going around the room, right? And they're saying like, yeah, I've been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing this for, you know, blah, blah, blah, and I'm going, yeah, but have you really, are you really any good at it? Like, am I really gonna fit in with this group? am I gonna learn anything from this?

[00:04:56] Paul: Am I gonna be challenged in any particular, am I gonna get the experience that I was coming for out of this group? Like that was in some ways, like the really big thing that was going on for me, which was also a big cognitive drain.

[00:05:10] Karen: And I think that judgment piece, as you say. I think that's a pretty classic defense strategy. So you land in a place that's more challenging than you expected, you don't have the sense of belonging that you normally would think you'd have in that kind of environment. And what we do is when we feel threatened and, and I just wanna say, if we don't have a strong sense of connection in a group, we do feel threatened.

[00:05:33] Karen: That sense of belonging, that we've said this on the show in other episodes. That is existential for humans. If we don't belong, we will die. Historically, it's not as true today, but it certainly was true historically. We get kicked out of our tribe, but we don't survive. It's deep in our DNA. That belonging is really important and when we don't feel like we have it, defenses come up.

[00:05:54] Karen: And a favorite defense is, my way is the right way. The way I was raised, the thing that's comfortable, the thing that's familiar, the thing that feels good to me. Is the right thing and everybody else is inferior in some way. That is such a classic kind of defense strategy. And you know, from what you're saying, you recognized it, you had enough sense to know it probably wasn't really serving you and you stuck it out because you wanted the experience.

[00:06:22] Karen: But I think if we aren't aware of it, it can really damage relationships and make it hard to even work with a group that we wanna work with.

[00:06:32] Paul: Yeah. I basically stubborn my way through it. Like there really was a point where I was going, I'd sort of talked myself out of staying for the workshop. 'Cause it's like, well I, I could have taken off and gone something else, but I said, no, I'm here to do the thing like. I just kind of had to, you know, I took a deep breath and tried to ground myself and it just kind of went, okay, like how do I do this?

[00:06:52] Paul: And when they divided us up into groups, like to actually start working, 'cause there were 14 of us, which is too big for this thing. They divided us up into groups of seven and then sent us out with our instructions to build your thing. Like, here's how we're gonna do the thing together. 

Finding Common Ground

[00:07:04] Paul: It was really fascinating to me because once we actually started doing the work together.

[00:07:12] Paul: Two things happened. One was I got to see how skillful these people actually were. Right? That was where I started to witness like, oh yeah, okay, they do know what they're like. Like I really got to see them in action. And so that sort of eroded some of my preconceived notions about this.

[00:07:28] Paul: There were some things where I was just like, yep, okay. You are 15 and super distractible got it. Like, I wasn't wrong about that part, but also. I started to find ways to work with it, right? It's like, how can I actually relate to this person, to this group, in my way, right?

[00:07:44] Paul: What's the thing that I'm bringing to the group? And what's the thing that they're bringing to the group because it's different, right? And this is the Employing Differences part. And what I found myself doing was relying on my improv training and experience and going, okay, I see a problem with the thing that you're suggesting.

[00:08:00] Paul: But also doing the, like, how can I incorporate on it and how can I, yes. And it, how can I build it? I really like that idea. I think it's a great punchline to this thing. I think we need to figure out how we set it up, right? We need to build towards that. How might we do that? Or we could do it this way.

[00:08:14] Paul: Or, hmm, that really feels like we're putting too much into this one thing. I wonder if we simplify it this way, would that maintain kind of what we were doing? I found my way to contribute. And once I started doing that, that also calmed me down because now it wasn't just me seeing what they were doing, it's like, oh, now I know how to work with them, how to be part of this group.

[00:08:39] Paul: By the end of the rehearsal I was going, huh, this might not be half bad. Right? And then the show happened and it was actually really great and I really enjoyed myself. But it took actually engaging in the work of the group together for me to start to calm down around some of those things.

[00:08:57] Karen: Yeah. 

The Importance of Belonging

[00:08:58] Karen: And the piece I really wanna highlight here is that it took you some effort and really some consciousness to honor who they were and where they were. You weren't asking them to turn into clones of you or to stop being who they were. But also you figured out what you had that you could add.

[00:09:17] Karen: Like, what's the part of me that is useful here that is valuable here, that connects. And it's that blending of honoring and being with what works for other people and bringing in what works and the strengths that I have when I come in. And that isn't easy. We don't have a ton of experience with it often, especially a lot of us grew up in schools that were really homogenous in various ways.

[00:09:41] Karen: And if we got tracked by intelligence or by giftedness or something like that, then that was another homogenization kind of thing where we have less difference that we're dealing with. But I think there is a piece that's just really important about how do we bring both and we need to not be surprised that that's work.

[00:10:00] Karen: The being in a different culture, the being aware of other things, being aware of what I'm bringing, being aware of the biases I'm bringing, being aware of the value that I'm bringing. All of that has a cost, like it takes up part of our capacity. And so not to be surprised, both if, you know, if I'm in the one walking in, not to be surprised if I feel like I am working harder and getting tired out more and just don't feel like I have as much to offer as usual.

[00:10:25] Karen: That's a normal thing. And to be okay with. But also to be aware that generally if we're in a group, there's gonna be some kind of difference in play. And it might be a culture background difference. It might be a language difference, it might be an intellectual intelligence kind of difference.

[00:10:43] Karen: It might be an experience difference, might be an age difference. I mean, more than I could name. But whatever those differences are, those differences are absorbing some of the capacity that would otherwise exist in the group. And that burden is going to be born most for whoever is the most in minority.

[00:11:03] Karen: So in your case, you were the only one in your age group that gave you a really high end of the burden. It might have gone even better if the group you were with had had capacity and they, and maybe they did to some extent, but to say, Hey, we're gonna do the work of meeting them halfway too.

[00:11:22] Karen: The thing about being in the majority is that we can ignore that cost and not put our own energy toward it. But what that's doing is making the person who's in the minority carry all of it. I think you had the capacity for that. 'Cause you're a guy who has the capacity for these kinds of things, but it doesn't always work that way.

[00:11:40] Karen: And a good percentage of the time those people will just leave and then you lose whatever it was they would've brought. So, I love this example and really what it shows us, but I wanna point to the cost of those differences and being conscious of trying to share those costs.

[00:11:58] Paul: Yeah, because it wasn't necessarily obvious to me that my presence, as an outsider, was necessarily having all that much impact on the rest of the group, in terms of that cost and that disruption to them. Either they were just kind of rolling with it, you know, sort of thing.

[00:12:12] Paul: And also because they have a lot of support from each other. Again, they know each other, right? Many of them actually had personal relationships. To abstract this slightly, right? This is where I've seen exactly this same sort of thing when I've worked in software and IT teams where you have teams that are made up majority of a particular role, right?

[00:12:31] Paul: Mostly engineers and one product manager, right? And so it's like, as someone who generally occupies a majority and privileged position, I rarely have the experience of being in that role, of being the only, of doing that. And this was a very visceral reminder of sort of the cognitive and emotional costs that can happen.

[00:12:51] Paul: And it's, you know, it was more surprising to me because I don't have to deal with it all the time. Because it isn't part of my daily experience that I am, in a minority group, in an underrepresented group, in a minoritized group, as an outsider kind of thing. But it also meant that I also had more reserves to draw on because I don't have to deal with all the time.

[00:13:08] Paul: So I wasn't as used to it, but I also was fatigued by it. And I think it's a useful thing for us to think about, that when we have these groups that we're trying to work with, you're trying to help and trying to support, again, recognizing what those differences do actually cost. You know, in the end, what we got was exactly the sort of thing that collaboration is supposed to get us.

[00:13:29] Paul: Which is a much richer, broader, better result. I mean, one of the things that we ended up doing with it is there's an archetype in this particular form of improv of the old man and guess who I ended up playing, but we leaned into it. I had a cane, I was totally hunched over right? There ended up being a bunch of jokes about my age and about how I was old and ugly because then it turns out one of the other characters was my long lost child, you know?

[00:13:55] Paul: And so there were a lot of these, these sorts of things, and it's like, so we worked with it and those are jokes and bits that we wouldn't have had if I hadn't been part of this particular group. Those are not the sorts of things that I would've, or if there hadn't been those differences that we needed to bridge, if it had just been, again, a bunch of clones of me, like we got a much richer result, there was cost to doing it and we shouldn't overlook that. But in many situations, if we're willing to work through those sorts of things, we can get better results, which is why we talk on this show about employing differences.

Closing

[00:14:31] Karen: And I think that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:14:35] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.