If you have ever been left out, at school, by your friends or at work, you know you are coping with a harsh feeling. Our society measures our achievements and success by comparing them with each other. We rank our accomplishments; our jobs have a career ladder that judges and rewards based on performance ranks. Being left out hits directly at the core of our social models and therefore hurt us deeply. We can quickly realise when we are the target ones. The ones left out. But how about when we are the ones leaving someone else behind? How easy is for us to figure out who we are leaving behind and what we are doing to cause such distress?

In this article, I want to share my experience. Here you can find my attempts to create an inclusive and respectful environment for my teams. These are the times when I left someone behind.

Those who speak differently

I was the new manager of the team, and picking up a team that has been long alone without a manager has its good and bads. From one side, there were plenty of easy small things I could do to improve (like taking individualised care for the career plans of each team member). From the other, the months without a team leader accumulated tiredness in the team. Meetings were taking too long; they struggle to agree on a single decision, due to lots of debate; the team wasn’t sure where they should go.

It was during a meeting that I discovered that above all, one person in my team never spoke a word. He was quiet, worked at his desk the full day and didn’t indulge much in conversations. What was bothering me that time, was the fact we were deciding an essential turn in direction for the software we were building and half of the room did not have an opinion about it. A pretty significant shift that could have thrown away the last three months of work and very few people seemed to care. I started to seek direct inputs from the quietest in the room. I called him first, and it was then when one of his peers in the team thankfully said it out loud:” I have never heard you speak in meetings, you know?”. It was the warning bell I needed to realise what we were missing. When he was answering my questions, his English was not very clear, tattered, almost ashamed for not being better. Although the communication was difficult, the ideas he shared with the teams were healthy and very well supported. A couple of months after, from that session, the crew restarted a new work chapter to follow his initial intuitions.

He was so quiet not because he didn’t care, but because he was speaking a different language. After that meeting, we worked together and delved into the details of the problem to find more specific solutions for him, but the primary learning I took as a leader was always to seek input from everyone on the room.

To be inclusive in meetings means listening to everyone, even the ones that do not talk. Often behind a silence hides more problems, more solutions, more things that a distracted ear will miss.

Those who you don’t know well

Working in a team means accepting the fact that you’ll be working with peers that have more experience than you. Working with the ones that are considered “the knowledge experts” and help others in the process of delivering the team’s value. But what defines the experience? Who decides when you become “the expert yourself”?

How to recognise expertise was a problem one of the engineers in my previous company had to face. She was fresh out of university and on her first job in engineering, on her first team of software engineers. A lot of inexperience you may say. Despite what the paper said, she was taking every challenge head first, and delivering her projects on time, always. She quickly found herself designing complex parts of our systems together with the most expert engineers, but it wasn’t enough to be considered as such. Her peers were still somehow sceptical because of her lack of seniority, and it was a problem.

Only senior members of the teams drove significant projects, and she was always working under someone else guidance, and suddenly she was slowing doing her fantastic growth. I was the manager of her team at the time, and when I realised what was going on, I decided to act, but not alone. I spoke first with the most expert engineers in the team to understand if they were aware of this “selective” approach and make them know the difference between seniority and ownership: great owners will find ways to solve problems even if they have not encountered them.

Ownership is not something “to give”, but rather something people pull out from themselves. As leaders, we can empower our teams to choose ownership over seniority, to promote leaders over autocrats.

Those who think differently

To date, I consider the relation I had with one of my former managers among the strongest, the most emotional and eye-opening I have ever had. In a sense, it was the moment when I decided that leading people should have been a big part of my life. We started working together in one of my first teams, at a moment where we just finished a big project, and the team was cleaning up the software we delivered, just before the next big thing. We were meeting quite often with my manager as we wanted to help the teams shape this “next big thing”, but the meetings were far from good. There was some tension; I could not understand why at that time, but none of my ideas was supported. I was always wrong. Almost made fun of my opinions. I started to believe my manager was a horrible person and became more and more vocal in my interactions with him. Up to a day when things escalated.

We were about to meet for a one on one when he closed the door, and by looking to my eyes, he started to shout at me about how disrespectful I was because of my attitude, my arriving two minutes late for our meetings, me not taking notes of his feedback. I felt verbally attacked.

I came out that day thinking of what to do next: should I report him to Human Resources? Should I resign and leave my team? Or was there another option? What if, all the list of things he said (and I believed completely unreasonable) were the obstacle to our relationship? What if I could come back to work and do what he asked, forgetting the aggressiveness of his tones?

I did precisely that, and a week later, the unexpected happened. We met again, and my manager apologised for his manners. He thanked me because the efforts I made to accommodate him, allowed him also to see which were my contributions to the team leader. Everything changed after that, we became very close at work, and I learned most of the rigorousness and attention to detail I have, thanks to him. I was leaving him behind with his manners and different way of approaching problems. I was wrong.

We may be relating to others that do not share our beliefs, our way of working and living. We may not understand why others behave the way they do, why they get angry at us for nothing. We see the world behind filters, and every one of us carries our versions of these filters. It’s when we realise that we have such filters that we understand we cannot abandon them. It’s when we make an effort to travel and attempt to see behind the others’ filters that we start to understand a bit more who is in front of us.

Thank You

Thank you for reading this story. I hope you enjoyed the article and leave your comments and suggestions to make it better. Do you have any tip to create an inclusive environment?

Simone