Why your employees may be suppressing their inner selves to adhere to your company’s “Culture Fit”.
This article was originally published by Herry Pierre-Louis, a Product Manager at Oscar, on Medium’s The Startup (opens in new tab). The content in this article reflects the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Oscar.
As a 13-year-old, it was hard for me to understand why my mother insisted that I cut off my baby dreads or that I get rid of any oversized jeans that imperceptibly sagged. Dating back to my adolescence, my parents instilled in me this notion that, as a black man, I had to carry myself a certain way if I wanted to be successful. Even more imperative than what I wore or how I looked, I distinctly remember a conversation with my father where he explained that I would have to work “ten times harder” than the other kids at my predominantly white high school to get by, simply because of the color of my skin.
My parents didn’t say these things because they felt I was a bad kid or that I would get in trouble. They thought that I was a great kid, but through their lived experiences, they felt that certain societal biases could negatively affect my future based on my “perception”. Whether true or not, conversations like these, as well as similar ones throughout my career, have driven me to develop a subtle vail used to hide parts of my personality in professional settings.
What is Code-Switching?
A recent conversation with a colleague made me reflect on how I’ve chosen to express myself in professional environments over the last few years. Today, as I reminisce about the last few years working in tech, I realize that I’ve subconsciously suppressed my true expression to fit into the work environment that I was entrenched in at the time. Most of my career, I’ve been the only black person on my product team, and even at times, the only black person in the entire technology department. If I think back on it, there were many instances throughout high school and college where I changed my tone or demeanor depending on the group that I was around at the time. This change in behavior is a phenomenon we generally refer to as code-switching.
