Episode 27 | Former New York Times Editor on His Bad Workplace Experience May 29, 2022

• Tweet
• Share
• Share

GUEST: Alan Henry, Editor, Journalist, and Author, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized

As the former editor-in-chief of the lifestyle blog Lifehacker, Alan Henry was well aware of the power of actionable advice in helping others maximize their potential. Little did he know he’d need some of that same advice to knock down professional obstacles that he faced after becoming the editor of the Smarter Living section of The New York Times. In this episode, Alan talks about his new book, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, in which he explores the struggles he faced at The Times as a person of color. Often overlooked and kept from interesting work and career-advancing opportunities, he developed a new set of work rules to allow people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ employees to have the same access to success, interesting work, and career opportunities as those with more privilege. Now the senior editor at WIRED, Alan shares some of the new hacks he’s learned for career advancement and offers advice to managers on how to get the most out of all of your team  members.

BIO:

In his own words, Alan Henry is a writer, editor, blogger, gamer, streamer, classy geek, recovering physicist, unapologetically Black, and severely opinionated. He’s also a journalist, editor, and author of the book Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. He’s spent his career sharing the journalism that helps readers make readers embrace technology and use it to work and live better. He’s the former editor of the productivity and lifestyle blog Lifehacker and previously worked as the Smarter Living editor at The New York Times. He is the author of the newsletter “Productivity Without Privilege,” which was launched by his  2019 New York Times piece. He’s currently the senior editor at WIRED and based in New York City.

LINKS:

Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized

Productivity, Without Privilege newsletter 

Full Transcript

BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:

When I sat down to write this opening monologue, I wrestled with whether I should use the specific term a former boss of mine used to describe a job applicant. In this case, I decided to use the word – a non-English term – which, in context, was infused with its intended ugliness.

This incident occurred more than two decades ago, when I was an associate producer at CNN. I worked for the weekend unit, contributing to Reliable Sources, The Capital Gang, and Late Edition, and our unit’s executive producer wasn’t exactly well liked by staff. The point of this story isn’t to use this platform to call her out – she’s long retired, so doing so would be largely pointless – so I’ll leave her name out of it, although a small cadre of former colleagues will know exactly of whom I speak.

A colleague who worked in another department – someone with whom we interacted frequently – was interested in a position with the weekend unit. As far as I could tell, he was generally well liked and had demonstrated competence in his current role. When a position opened up, he applied. And that’s when I found myself speaking with the executive producer.

I asked, casually, whether he was being considered for the role and mentioned that I thought he might be a good fit. She responded with a shrug and a three-word phrase I’ve never forgotten: “He’s a faygala.”

In Yiddish, that term literally means “little bird.” But it has another connotation, which I suspect is clear to you. A Reddit thread from a few years back asked, “Would you consider the Yiddish term ‘faygala’ derogatory?” And while there was some disagreement in the thread, the most common response was that it depended on its context. And in this case, the context was clear. When asked whether he was being considered for the position in our department, he was dismissed in three words because of his sexuality – and, indeed, he did not get the job.

In that case, the employee who was discriminated against never knew why he didn’t get the job. But he was unquestionably marginalized by a hiring boss with conscious and stated prejudices. In many other cases, likely the majority, that prejudice never gets voiced out loud. The hiring manager comes up with other, more anodyne reasons for the job rejection – he’s not the right fit; I’m not sure she has the right experience – but what remains consistent is the marginalization.

Of course, sometimes that person gets the job, only to find that the marginalization occurs in different ways during the course of a working day. My guest today, Alan Henry, is a Senior Editor for Wired Magazine and a former editor for The New York Times. In his new book, Seen Heard & Paid: The New Work Rules For The Marginalized, he shares his experience while at the Times – spoiler alert: it wasn’t good – and offers advice for others who are navigating challenging work environments. He writes:

“When I sat smiling at passers-by at my desk at the Times but screaming internally, wondering why I’d been left out of yet another meeting, or having to learn secondhand that someone had worked around me instead of with me, it shouldn’t have been my problem to resolve. But the unfortunate reality is that, well, the working world isn’t fair, and it probably won’t be in the near future. So we have to come up with ways to cope and survive on our own while still maintaining our own personal dignity.”

In our conversation, we’ll discuss why marginalization is broader that one might think, how he separates everyday obnoxious, annoying, or bad workplace behavior from something more sinister, and why the paper’s first Black executive editor, under whom he served, was unable to step in and help him more directly.

If you have any comments or questions about this episode, drop us an email at comments@speakgoodpod.com. Here’s my conversation with Alan.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Alan Henry, thank you very much for joining us.

ALAN HENRY:

Thanks for having me.

PHILLIPS:

So, I want to begin by giving listeners a sense of what you do for a living. The term that describes your profession, service journalist, is one that I suspect is an unfamiliar term to a lot of people. So, let’s just begin there. What is a service journalist?

HENRY:

Yeah, I think a service journalist or a good service journalist, at least, is somebody who strives to make sure that all of the work that they produce is accountable and actionable to their readers. So, I find that the best service stories, aren’t just ones that cover a specific event or a specific issue, but also arms their readers to take action in some way. So, there’s a low hanging fruit kind of stuff that we do in tech service, which is like how to make your phone faster or how to make your battery last longer, and things like that. Those are very stereotypical service stories, but then there’s the kind of high-minded service stuff: How do I make sense of the role of this new technology in my life and in society? How do I understand what I should do as an educated person to make decisions in terms of policy or to be active in civics or in my community, or alternatively, just in my lifestyle, like, in my marriage or my relationship. How do I, you know, communicate better with my partner? That’s not necessarily tech journalism, but it is still service journalism.

PHILLIPS:

It sounds a lot like news you can use, for lack of a better term.

HENRY:

Yeah. Absolutely.

PHILLIPS:

So, I know that you worked for websites. One of them was one of the Gawker brands. Am I correct? It was Lifehacker.

HENRY:

Lifehacker was one of the Gawker media sites. Yup.

PHILLIPS:

And then you get, what on the page seems like it would be a dream job. You become the smarter living editor at The New York Times. And as you describe it in your book, I sense that you thought it was going to be a dream job when you got there. So, let’s just start at that moment. It was a dream job?

HENRY:

It was.

PHILLIPS:

Or so you thought it would be.

HENRY:

I thought it would be. And not to say it was a bad job. It was a great job. And I have so many good friends who are still at The New York Times, including some masthead editors who really did advocate to bring me in and advocated for my work while I was there. But The New York Times, for as much as we look at it as an entity, it’s a global company with over a thousand employees. It has multiple departments and multiple silos. Some of those editors on certain desks or more territorial than others and are more resistant to change or more resistant to new ideas and, frankly, fresh faces. So, it was a challenge to get this job that any journalist would say, this is the highlight of my career, and find out that it really wasn’t as kind of glimmering gold as I thought it was going to be once I was on the inside.

PHILLIPS:

Did you kind of know very quickly that something was off, or did it take a while for these moments of marginalization that you describe in the book to start to emerge?

HENRY:

It took some time. It took some time, because when you’re new somewhere, everyone rolls out the red carpet for you. Everybody’s eager to meet you and hear about what your background is and what you’ve done and what ideas you can bring to the table, especially for them. But over time I found that if I didn’t aggressively pursue those relationships, in addition to doing the best work that I could do, then they started to fall by the wayside. And, sometimes those people would be more than happy to chat with me if I reached out to them. But The Times is the kind of place where everyone’s so busy that we all had our own things to do. And it was very difficult to make space for those relationships. And it was very easy to let things that shouldn’t happen slide. And that was kind of what had started to happen to me. I started to feel like in some certain meetings, in some spaces, I was kind of viewed as I hadn’t earned my place there yet, as if I had, I mean, you know, my age and experience aside, like somehow, because I didn’t come from a traditional newspaper, or I didn’t go to an Ivy League school or I didn’t come from an outlet that The New York Times traditionally considers a competitor that somehow I hadn’t earned my dues. And that, along with all the other social baggage that’s involved, led me to kind of start to rack up these incidents of when I felt like I was  being pushed to the side or I wasn’t given the assignments that were even my own ideas in some cases. It wasn’t great.

PHILLIPS:

I’m glad you brought up that broader definition of marginalization because race is obviously one big one, but then you also just brought up education. Where did you go to school? What job did you just come from? Do you have a disability? There are all sorts of things. Are you a woman in a male-dominated environment? Are you a man who’s not a jock in a jock environment?

HENRY:

Exactly.

PHILLIPS:

That’s something I remember feeling a lot of it in a previous job. So, marginalization has this kind of broad definition, but as you then started to experience it at The Times, what were the types of things that started happening to give you that sense that people were looking at you, questioning that maybe you hadn’t fully earned your place at the table?

HENRY:

Yeah, I remember some of these examples will sound pretty familiar to a lot of office workers where you may present an idea in a meeting and everybody just kind of waves you off. And then a week later, somebody else, who is more favored, presents the same idea and suddenly it’s worth considering. It’s interesting. It’s buzzy. It’s new. That happened to me several times at The New York Times. And you know, I don’t want to point fingers at any particular person, but oftentimes it’s very similar people with very similar backgrounds acting on their own kind of implicit or explicit biases about my background. In other cases, I remember pitching a series of stories that turned into a very prestigious project that the opinion desk wound up doing. And this wasn’t that they took the idea. I think we both came up with these ideas at the same time, but I just couldn’t get the groundswell support in the newsroom to actually make this project something real. I had to go around to other editors and try and convince them that this was impactful. It had to do with internet privacy. And, I had to go around and convince them that not only was this impactful, but I was the person to do it or handle it. I actually run video games coverage at WIRED. It’s one of my many hats at WIRED, but I tried to convince The New York Times that, hey, The Washington Post has launched a video game vertical. Video games are a multibillion-dollar business, and we should probably address it in a way that’s not 10 feet away. “Whoa, what are those kids doing?” And everybody was kind of like, “Yeah, that’s a really great idea, but maybe not right now.” And they, to my understanding, they still don’t have an actual strategy to discuss video games. But that’s, I mean, it was, I feel like if I were a different person, they may have given that more credence.

PHILLIPS:

You know, in that story, you just told you reminded me the number of women in my career that have told me that they pitched an idea to a boss and the boss or the room said no, and then a guy a week or two later pitches it and suddenly, oh, that’s the smartest idea. We should pursue that, as if they didn’t just say the same thing. So, yeah, that’s a familiar story that I’ve certainly heard. Would you mind telling the story about the laptop?

HENRY:

(LAUGHS)

Yes, it’s a great story. Yeah, I had a MacBook Pro issued to me by The New York Times. It was brand new when I got it. Now, it wasn’t the best machine. I don’t know how you feel about the touch bar MacBook Pros, but like in a lot of the enthusiast circles, it wasn’t a great model. And my model started to break down pretty quickly, but it was fine. But I left it at work. I have a lovely computer at home. I have a laptop of my own, so I just left it at work, plugged in, locked to my desk. And I left the charger plugged in because obviously I don’t want it to go dead. So, what wound up happening was that one day I came to work, and my laptop was still there, but the charger was unplugged and not removed, not gone, just unplugged.

And I tried to turn on my laptop and at this point my laptop had been completely discharged. So, I had to plug it in, wait for my laptop to charge a little bit so I could turn it on and then take it and go to a meeting. Once or twice that happened. And I didn’t think too much of it. Then it happened maybe five times, six times, seven times. And then it became more times than I could count. And now I’m confronted with a question, is someone doing something to me out of malice? Or, maybe a coworker sees that I’m not at my desk and would love to charge their own laptop or because it’s USB-C, they’re charging their iPhone or something. So, I have to decide, is someone doing something to me or are they just doing something to help themselves that’s around me?

And that led me into researching microaggressions, because I realized that I would turn around and ask some of my other coworkers, who also had seats in the vicinity, if they had seen anything. No one saw anything. I had my suspicions that it was one coworker that I didn’t get along with terribly well, who was unplugging my laptop just out of sheer spite. But I never confronted him about it because I had the choice. Now I can either talk to him about it, and say, ”Hey, are you unplugging my laptop? That’s not cool.” And be seen as all of the social baggage that I carry into the office. I could be the angry Black man. I could be threatening, heaven forbid. It just undermines all of the work that I’m trying to do. And, in reality, it just distracts me from the work that I’m trying to do. I’m not there to police a laptop. I’m there to do journalism.

PHILLIPS:

Mmhmm …

HENRY:

And this is impacting my ability to do that. I come into work in time for a meeting, try to grab my laptop and go to the meeting, and my laptop’s dead. And I can’t use it in that meeting. I can’t take notes. I can’t join a Zoom call. It just sucked all the way around. I never really figured out who did it. I never figured out who did it or why, but I didn’t have to. And that was kind of one of the points that I came to in the book is when you’re suffering microaggressions, part of the design of a microaggression is to make you spend more time thinking about the motivations of the person who did something to you than the thing that’s happening to you. And it’s also usually so deniable that even if you do pinpoint who did it to you, they can fall back on, oh, I didn’t mean to do anything. I didn’t mean any harm. My intentions weren’t malicious, even if the action had consequences. And that is a disconnect as well. This disconnect between intentions and actions. I mean, when we talk about microaggressions, we want people to focus on the action. You did a thing. That thing is bad. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you even meant to hurt anyone, but it caused harm. So, you should stop , you know, and from an empathetic perspective, most people would understand that, naturally. From a malicious perspective, now you have a whole different set of problems.

PHILLIPS:

And the thing about that laptop story is I think many of us have endured some form of workplace hazing or teasing or unpleasantness along the way. And when it happens to me, if that exact story happened to me, I would say, who the hell is doing this to my laptop? What is their deal? But what I would not think is there any chance they’re doing this to me because I’m white?

HENRY:

Right.

PHILLIPS:

And that’s an additional burden. That’s where that additional piece comes in. And you describe that in the book. I’ve heard people say, I feel like I have to have two jobs managing my race, my gender, my fill in the blank, and my day job. You actually talk about three jobs. Can you talk about what those three jobs are?

HENRY:

Yeah. So, there is the having to manage the social baggage that you come to work with. Doing your actual job. But, then there’s actually also trying to do the work required to get ahead in your career and like keeping track of the work that you do, keeping track of all of your successes, your failures, and advocating for yourself in a way that doesn’t hinder you, but also makes it clear that you are here, you’re qualified, and you do great work. I mean, I generally hate to ask people who are marginalized to take action to address their own marginalization, because ideally in a perfect world, systemic issues would be addressed by systemic solutions. Everyone would play a role in making sure that these things get resolved. But, unfortunately, because we don’t live in that perfect world, until then it is up to those of us who do experience marginalization. And this is also in the book, marginalization is for everyone. Like you said, race is a factor. Gender is a factor. Ethnicity is a factor. Religion is a factor. You know, sexual orientation is a factor. All of these things are factors and being able to sit back and piece out what it is that I’m doing, what is my unique contribution? and what makes me a superstar is additional work, but it is necessary work to offset some of the social baggage that you may be bringing into the office.

PHILLIPS:

How do you parse out where marginalization comes into play? As we were just talking about, there is workplace hazing and bad behavior that’s kind of universal, unfortunately, across many workplaces. What happens? How do you recognize when it tips over from being that to being more targeted, to being specific to some form of marginalization instead of maybe the broader form of workplace harassment or teasing or hazing or any other word you might apply to it?

HENRY:

A lot of times I think duration is the key there, right? Because I mean, I’ve been in situations where I’ve … when I worked at Lifehacker, Gawker Media was a very kind of inclusive, or, inclusive isn’t maybe the right word, but we all kind of had our eyes on each other. There’s a real camaraderie there, and we teased the heck out of each other. You know, we beat each other up on a regular basis. We still do it on Twitter, but there’s a certain, there’s certain place where that falls by the wayside when it’s time to get down to business and when the teasing stops and the work starts and everyone is involved, then you know that, okay, this isn’t about me. This is about culture. And then beyond that, even if it doesn’t stop, like I was saying, we still do that to each other on Twitter. I mean, when it is part of the culture and it kind of just becomes normalized, it can do two things. It can either be part of a toxic workplace environment or it can just be part of that kind of camaraderie that I was talking about before, where you do something and you kind of rattle somebody’s cage a little bit, but you still respect them. You still look to them for their expertise, their guidance, their skills. So that’s kind of how you can tell the difference between it being really bad-natured and being kind of good-natured in the long run.

PHILLIPS:

Yes. And I thought your description of gaslighting in the book was really helpful. It seems like it gets to that question of impact versus intent that you talked about before. How do you approach conversations with somebody? Because you went into some detail that you have to be really careful about how you approach that question of almost accusing somebody of marginalizing you. What are the right ways to approach those types of situations, so you don’t get that defensive response of either somebody saying, no, you misunderstood intention it’s on you. Or, as you said, they have some form of plausible deniability and just evade the accusation and don’t deal with it all.

HENRY:

Yeah. I mean, some people are going to do that no matter what you do. I mean, I think that it’s natural for most of us to react to being confronted with something potentially negative, or our own behavior that is potentially negative, with defensiveness, because nobody wants to be labeled, first of all, no one wants to be labeled racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever. That’s fine. It’s natural to not want those labels that society has, on a broad level, said that is bad and makes you a bad person. But if you disassociate the bad person from it, like I was saying a second ago, like what happened was bad. I’m not saying you were bad for doing it. I’m not saying you are a bad person, but I just want to talk specifically about this action. This action caused harm to me in this way. Could you change the action? Could you stop the action? And by keeping things laser-focused on the person’s behavior, then you get a way to talk about exactly what’s going on without bringing value judgments into it or without bringing personality judgements into it. And I think that that’s really important and it’s an important skill for people to learn, in general, regardless, because it is possible for people who are different to engage with each other on that personal level, without necessarily bringing all the social baggage in. And sometimes you can’t avoid it. And sometimes you have to present the fact that like, “Hey, there is social baggage here that plays a role in this that we need to talk about.” But at the end of the day, it’s not, “You are a bad person for doing a thing it’s that this thing hurt me. And I know you don’t want to hurt me. Right?” And that generally brings people around a little bit more. Appealing to their empathy helps a lot.

PHILLIPS:

You also talked about when you have a complaint in the workplace. And, when you go to your manager, you don’t just say, “Hey, I’m being marginalized and it’s not right. And I want you to fix it.” You have a more strategic approach to dealing with those situations.

HENRY:

Yeah. I mean, I like to say managers like problem solvers, not problem complainers, you know? So, I had several situations at The New York Times where, I went to my manager and I said, “Hey, these things are happening. I don’t really know what to do about it.” She was lovely my manager at The New York Times, wonderful editor. She’s on the masthead now. She turned around and she’s like, that sucks. That’s terrible. I don’t really know what to do about it either. And I was like, well, hmm, if she doesn’t know, and I don’t know, she’s not going to take the time to figure it out because she doesn’t have time. And even if arguably you could make the case that it is a manager’s responsibility to figure that out, she didn’t have time to figure it out. So, it was on me. So, I like to come to managers when I have issues with potential solutions and whatever that solution looks like, that’s up for debate, but it’s important for you to come with something, even if it is, “Hey, I’m having a hard time with my manager that is your direct report,” if you want to skip a chain in the chain of command, just say like, “I’m having a hard time with my manager. Is there another team that I could work with?” Or, “I’m having a hard time with a person I’m sitting next to, can I sit across from them instead?” Or, “Maybe I can work in the office on days when they’re not here, as opposed to working here on days when they are here?” Something like that. Coming armed with those things is really, really important, but also, so is having the psychological safety to bring this up with your manager at all. Because if you don’t have that psychological safety, you have no trust that your manager is even going to be receptive to your issues in the first place.

PHILLIPS:

That’s what I was talking about in the open, that story about the executive producer at CNN, who used this really ugly pejorative term. And what I was thinking about is, certainly, I didn’t feel any sort of psychological safety in that situation to speak up. I thought my job could be at risk or at the very least risk being marginalized within the department if I spoke up as the pain in the butt. And, to that end, I know a lot of times that people suggest as a potential remedy, well, go talk to your HR department. It’s a lot more …

HENRY:

(LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

Yeah. I mean, your laughter kind of gives away why that advice is .. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad advice at all, ever, but it certainly depends on the HR department at the place where you work and the company culture. So that’s my question for you. If you’re experiencing this form of marginalization, how do you know that that HR department is safe, but that other one isn’t?

HENRY:

Yeah, it’s really hard to tell. And I think a lot of it has to do with what has your HR department done for marginalized employees at your place of work up to this point? Right? Because the proof is going to be in the pudding. I wrote an article for Lifehacker many, many years ago called “The Company You Work For Is Not Your Friend.” And in it, I had some pretty harsh words for HR departments, in general. I said the HR departments are generally there to protect the company, not there to protect you. And I do think that that is true. Otherwise, you know, it’s like IT. You sink a cost into them and they don’t really produce anything to your bottom line. They just exist to serve a purpose for you. But some HR departments are very receptive. They’re like, “Hey, okay, this is not great. We want to avoid potential EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] issues. So, let’s sit down, let’s talk about this, and let’s investigate this issue. And every HR training you’ll take will say that, yes, we take it seriously and everything. But, at the end of the day, your HR manager, your HR representative, your contact in your people department, it’s the fancy way to  describe them these days. They don’t work with you on a day-to-day basis. So, unless they can actively provide you with some level of security that you won’t be further marginalized, like you were saying, like, if you speak up and, even if it’s like, “Hey, what did you mean by that?” Because that’s one of my favorite tactics against microaggressions.

PHILLIPS:

Right. Yes.

HENRY:

When someone’s …

PHILLIPS:

What did you mean?

HENRY:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

So, she uses that term and I say, Hey, what do you mean by that?

HENRY:

No, no, no, I just meant …

PHILLIPS:

Yeah.

HENRY:

No, really, what did you mean by that? Why did you say that? Why did you choose those words?

PHILLIPS:

Right.

HENRY:

Little things like that clue them into, oh, I really shouldn’t. I should watch my mouth, you know. But, I mean, and some HR departments are very aggressive about advocating for employees like that, but most in my experience will investigate a complaint. They’ll have some stern words for a manager or another employee. And then they’ll kind of sweep it under the rug because they want it to go away. And, of course, they want it to go away. Their job is to make sure that your team is functioning as efficiently as possible. So sometimes you just can’t go to HR or sometimes you can go to HR, see what they do. If your HR has a track record of like fostering employee resource groups and doing seminars and trainings and things like that, then maybe you have a good one. But if you have most corporate HR departments that essentially just issue paychecks and do recruiting, you might not. And if that’s the case, it might be time to go.

PHILLIPS:

Now, the name of your book is Seen, Heard, and Paid. So, I want to make sure that we spend time on that third piece as well. There was one there’s one thing you wrote. I don’t know if you know the answer to this because you were citing one specific piece of data from a study.

HENRY:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

And this may have even been outside of that study, but the 2018 study you referred to was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and they found that Black workers get paid less when they negotiate salary.

HENRY:

Yep.

PHILLIPS:

Now that’s paradoxical. That’s troubling. Do you have any insight into why negotiating for salary as a Black worker would lead to worse results?

HENRY:

Yeah. Well, I like to talk about it in terms of social baggage, but, in reality, what we’re talking about is when we say social baggage is people’s preconceived notions about who you are, what you’re worth, what you come from in terms of your salary history. And so, like systemically Black people are generally underpaid compared to their white counterparts with the same qualifications and the same job roles. That’s kind of historical. It’s just out there in the workplace, industrywide. So, of course, even if we do negotiate, even if we use the same tools, even if we use the same techniques, we may not even, if assuming an impartial recruiter, we may not get the same bump in or may not get pay equity compared to someone else because we’re starting from a lower floor. Beyond that though, we have to deal with people who are like, you’re awful aggressive. Like for me, I’m awful aggressive.

PHILLIPS:

Right? So when we say to people, speak up for yourself, be your best advocate. That’s something that for some people is seen as confidence and for others will be seen as validation of a negative stereotype.

HENRY:

You hit it. That’s it. So it could be, oh, you’re being too aggressive. Or, if you’re a woman of color, you’re specifically a Black woman, you’re sassy, you’re angry. Why are you so angry? And those are things that eventually, when it comes time to put a number on the line, you’re not going to give them the same number that you would give to another person that you also, for social reasons that may be invisible to you even perceive as courageous, entrepreneurial, a go-getter and a hot shot, you know, and those are the things that I struggle with in my career. And I know that a lot of people do in theirs as well.

PHILLIPS:

So, if advocating for yourself isn’t the answer, if negotiation isn’t the answer, how do you get compensated?

HENRY:

Well, a lot of it has to do with keeping track of your wins. One piece of advice I’d like to give everybody is I think everyone should keep a work diary. Mine is just a Google Doc. If you are also one of those people who buys lots of empty notebooks like I do, then you can use one of those or you can leave it blank like I do (LAUGHS). But, I tell people to keep track of your wins, keep track of the things that happen at work, keep track who made you upset, who you worked with and loved working with and would love to work with again, something you won, your big wins, your small wins. Keep track of your challenges and the things that you failed at, too. Because on top of just having all of this information prepared for your next performance review so you can walk in with a sheet of paper that says, look at all my wins, and these are areas that I want to grow in, and you don’t have to go in and kind of pull out your hair and be like, what do I tell my boss that my review is next week? I don’t know what to say. If your boss is not receptive, that data is still power. And as my friend, Emma Carew Grovum, who I interviewed for the book, says, data is power and power is money. So now you have your work diary. You can go to a job interview. And when that interviewer says, tell me about a time that you were challenged at work and you overcame it.

PHILLIPS:

Right. (LAUGHS). There’s that famous behavioral interview question.

HENRY:

Exactly. You’ve got answers. You don’t have to rely on, oh, my greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist. No, you have …

PHILLIPS:

Right. I care too much.

HENRY:

I’m a workaholic. You just can’t get me to stop working. No, you have real answers to those questions.

PHILLIPS:

Right. Now, I want to go back to the question of gaslighting. When something happens in the workplace, you’re excluded from a meeting where, objectively speaking, you probably should have been a part of it because your role really, it would be appropriate for you to be the person sitting in the room. I would imagine that there has to be a fine line between self-reflection and gaslighting. And what I mean by that is I could see how a self-aware person would say, okay, was it me? Maybe it had nothing to do with my race or gender or disability or religion, maybe there’s something about my personality that’s grating those people. Maybe my social shyness of not being as aggressive in forging these relationships, maybe that has marginalized me. So, I think if there’s a spectrum of sorts, one is the reflection side and then putting the onus on yourself. And on the other side of that is the gaslighting part of it, where you really do have a valid complaint. It’s clear for everybody to see, but they’re all going to deny it. When  these things happen to you, how did you think about where the line, and I know this is a very nebulous gray area, but how did you think about the line between kind of reflecting on what you did that led to a situation versus this was out of my power. This wasn’t about anything that I did. It’s just about who I am.

HENRY:

That’s a great question because I am also an introvert. I tend to be very shy in situations where I don’t necessarily know everyone. So, there were many meetings and I’ll go back to The New York Times where we were working on a big project on behalf of Smarter Living, the whole team. And for one reason or another, I just found myself removed from these meetings. And at first I was like, oh, well maybe it’s because I work from home too much. Or maybe it’s because I’m not in the office. That would make sense if they want to have meetings in person and I’m not always there. But then it kept happening. And then when I said, “Hey, I’d really love to be a part of this.” Because there’s a point where you do have to step up and say, “I’ve noticed this behavior. I’d like to change it.” I stepped up and said, “Hey, I’d really like to be part of this.” And they’re like, oh no, no, no, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. It’s fine. No, we don’t want to bother you. We can handle it. And that was when it was starting to become clear that I was being purposefully excluded. I think all of us go through those stages. It’s always like the stages of grief, you know, where we look at ourselves and we’re like, maybe I’m not, maybe it’s, maybe I’m not included here because I’m not a fit. I have to do that self-reflection. I also think that people who tend to be marginalized for whatever reason, do more of that self-reflection than a lot of people who really should do that self-reflection.

PHILLIPS:

Right.

HENRY:

There were a lot of times when I stopped and said, maybe it’s me. Maybe, if I assert myself, maybe if I put myself in a situation or in the position where I am welcoming to these opportunities, then I’ll get more of them. But if those same people turn around and push you back out, then you have to realize that, okay, something else is going on here.

PHILLPS:

Yeah.

HENRY:

And maybe it’s not about my behavior. Maybe it’s about their beliefs.

PHILLIPS:

And it gets back to what you said earlier about duration is one of the real keys. And the other one, it sounds like, is consistency. If it happens once, it’s an anomaly. If it happens many times it’s a trend. Is that fair?

HENRY:

Exactly.

PHILLIPS:

So, I’m struck that during your tenure at The New York Times, Dean Baquet, the first Black executive editor of The New York Times was in charge of the news organization. And I want to be very clear because obviously just because Barack Obama is the first Black president thatdoesn’t make racism and marginalization magically disappear. So, you can have somebody at the top and all of these issues remain, that is obvious. But how did you think about that? Here you are in this news organization, which got a lot of positive attention, rightfully so I think, for elevating the first Black leader in its history to the executive editor position, as here you are struggling to even work your way into a …

HENRY:

Yeah, it’s extremely dissonant. Because, when I interviewed at The New York Times, my last interview was with Dean and Dean’s great. Dean’s a great guy. And, in fact, I would argue that on the leadership level of The New York Times, there is a lot of passion and interest around making sure that the newsroom is diverse, that the newsroom has lots of diverse voices and perspectives. But, systemically, The New York Times is such a, and I do pick a little bit on The New York Times in my book, but I think that this is true, number one, across journalism, but across any industry, a lot of big ships are hard to steer. They’re just hard to change course because there’s so many people working individual levers and buttons that have done it the same way forever. And you can go straight to the top and say, “Hey, the person here who is managing the social feeds really doesn’t seem to see the value in my work. And I don’t understand why they won’t help me get more readers.” This is a cyclical thing, especially in journalism spaces. Like, I may do good work. But, if my social editor doesn’t think I do good work and never promotes them, I don’t get readers, which means I look bad because no one is reading my stories. And if I go to my next review and say, oh, well, the reason my numbers are so low, the reason my growth is so small is because no one’s promoting my stories. Well, that looks like I’m making excuses. That doesn’t mean that. It’s like I’m pointing the finger at someone who has nothing to do with me actually doing my job. So, like if I go up to Dean and Dean had an open-door policy and I would talk to him often, not often, but regularly, and say, “Hey, you know, I’m experiencing these issues.” He would sit and brainstorm with me on potential solutions that I could take back into the trenches, but he’s in no position to really dive right in because the stakes are high for him, too.

PHILLIPS:

Right.

HENRY:

Like if he suddenly has a role to play in a middle manager’s debate or two senior editors that are three or four levels removed from his position, people are going to be like, why are you taking such an interest in this and those other people who may think that that’s inappropriate will now have ammunition against him. So, it requires finding people who are willing to help you without directly helping you. And I found that really, really important, not just at The Times, but in every position I’ve had.

PHILLIPS:

A while back on the podcast, I spoke to a journalist named Tiffany Cross. Tiffany has a show on Saturday mornings on MSNBC. She’s a former CNN colleague of mine in that weekend unit who worked for the same insufferable executive producer as I did. And I think I can speak safely to say we shared similar views of. One of the things that, one of the stories she shared was as a young journalist, I believe this was her days in Atlanta, she had so little money to even take a taxi to work before the public transit system started working – and she had to work early hours-  that she would sleep overnight in the edit bay. And what I’m wondering is for you, because you’ve spent much of your career writing about productivity, and I wonder how much that balancing those three jobs you’ve described has cut into the productivity you otherwise would’ve had. If you could just focus on your daily job.

HENRY:

I think about that all the time. And it’s unfortunate. It really is. Because honestly, all I want to do, and I used to say this when I was at Lifehacker, I said it at The New York Times, I’ll say it now. I get up in the morning because I like to do journalism that helps people. And it sounds kind of corny, but like, I mean, it. I want to publish things that help people live better lives. And doing work that doesn’t involve that just to do that work is so time-consuming and draining, something that I say about productivity, in general, that productivity is not a means to just do more stuff. It is a means to get the stuff you have to do off your plate. So. you can focus on the things that are really important to you.

PHILLPS:

Mm-hmm …

HENRY:

Regardless of what those important things are. And this is all the time that people of color and other marginalized people spend doing additional work just to bring their whole selves to do the job and do their best work every day. Work that their peers don’t necessarily have to do. And that’s so unfortunate because I think a lot about, especially when people push back on diversity efforts and bringing in multiple voices, they’re like, oh, well, you know, I don’t want to choose not the best talent for a job. Right?

PHILLIPS:

Right.

HENRY:

I don’t want to have to choose someone just because they are of some marginalized group. And I think ….

PHILLIPS:

Alan, if I could just interject and say, you know, it’s just so interesting to me that that question wasn’t asked for the first 130 or so Supreme Court justices.

HENRY:

Right.

PHILLIPS:

Oh, I don’t want to only pick the white guys because there’s other people we might be leaving out. No, it’s only heard when the equation flips.

HENRY:

Yes. Exactly.  And it’s wild that that’s the case. if you all you want to do is do your best work and go home. Ideally, we would all want to work towards an environment, any environment where that can be our lives. I mean you’re not searching for someone just because they are blank. Think about how much great work this qualified person could do if they didn’t also have a second job at the same time, or the third job that we’re talking about. They could be doing so much more. So if you create those spaces for people where they don’t have to do those other two jobs, imagine what they could accomplish.

PHILLIPS:

I’d like to end our conversation because a lot of what we’ve been talking about, most of what we’ve been talking about, is really the onus that’s placed onto the individual worker to have these hard conversations, and when do you report. And, I think it’s important to acknowledge the role that managers and people who have as subordinates people who either are being marginalized or at risk of it, know what to do and, and are better in their roles. What advice do you have for managers to recognize marginalization, deal with it when they’re seeing it, and maybe this is Pollyannish, but maybe prevent it from occurring in the first place.

HENRY:

I think that one of the biggest things, I mean, we talked a little bit about it a second ago, but this is way more important advice for managers – foster psychological safety on your teams. Make sure that your teams know that you are receptive. You are empathetic. You are focused on the team’s goals and you are focused on your collective strength and your collective success, but also make sure that you understand, make sure that you make clear what your priorities and what those team priorities are to the people that work for you. Let them know what that you appreciate their individual strengths that they bring to your team. Similarly, there are simple little things you could do, like giving everybody an opportunity to speak in a meeting, right? Like actually going around the room. I mean, and some of it is kind of, you know, pseudo icky kind of team building stuff. But some of it is important when you notice somebody isn’t contributing in a meeting that you don’t let them get away with that. And I don’t mean call them out in the meeting and say, “You haven’t said anything.” I mean, go to them afterward and say, “Hey, I noticed you’re not really contributing in the meetings. Maybe you’re not a big group talker, but you can come to me later, if you have thoughts or ideas on any of the things that we discussed.” Or, maybe if someone, we talked about this in the book, when it comes to office housework and glamor work, if you notice that someone has the job of always scheduling the meetings or booking the rooms or getting lunch, stop that cycle and do a round-robin or something, get everybody in on that. So, no one feels like they can’t present their idea because they’re so busy ordering lunch for the team. You know what I mean? Like that’s never a good thing either, but making sure that you break down those tasks that are rote and routine and spread them out as much as possible, and then bring in people as much as you can, based on their individual strengths and the value that they contribute to your team. That’s so powerful. And I wish more managers did it, but no one teaches them how. That’s the thing. We promote people because they’re good at the last thing they did. So no one teaches people how to look around a room and identify which of their employees are disengaged, not because they are bored, but because they don’t feel comfortable in the room or they don’t feel confident speaking up, or they have social baggage, their lifestyle says that that Latinx person over there has been deemed fiery every time they speak up, you know?

PHILLIPS:

Right.

HENRY:

So, they’re not going to.

PHILLIPS:

Right. And because maybe that manager feels like their intentions are good. They’re not thinking about, are there places where I’m having a negative impact unintentionally.

HENRY:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Alan, I really enjoyed this conversation. This is Alan Henry. The book is called, Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules For the Marginalized. Thank you very much for conversation.

HENRY:

Oh, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

• Alan Henry
• Seen Heard and Paid
• workplace marginalization