As a society, we must be inclusive towards upward mobility.
How inclusive is your workplace to first-generation professionals?
Do you make space for someone to achieve upward mobility, or is there a set of unwritten rules and secret handshakes that create a barrier for those who weren’t raised in the same economic strata as your preferred team?
A story I rarely share from my days as an investment banker is about the time we didn’t hire a candidate because she grew up poor. Or at least, not rich enough for our tastes. It was despicable, and I didn’t know enough then to stop it.
I would do better now.
When investment banks interview from the top business schools, they host what is called Super Saturday, the day all the bankers come in (associates, VPs, directors, and managing directors) and meet with candidates from every school a recruiter has been to, with the candidates rotating from office to office 10–15 minutes at a time. This way, the bank can interview 20–200 people (depending on the size of the team) and only costs one day of work. And yes, Saturday is a workday.
Smaller groups would also take a few candidates out to dinner the night before or lunch that day. This was absolutely part of the interview, and you could assume everyone knew it. That said, in the deliberations after (which often went well into the night), the lunch or dinner hosts weren’t expected to give much input, unless it was to point out that someone’s behavior or conversation during the meal was particularly winning…or the opposite.
In my first year as an associate, on Super Saturday I was teamed with two men very senior to me to take a small group to lunch. One woman was friendly and easy to be around and didn’t seem awkward or uncomfortable, even though she knew a potential job was on the line. But at the end of the meal, when the waiter brought the dessert cart over, she looked at it and laughed and exclaimed, “Will you look at that? Now that’s good marketing! They bring it right out and show it to you!”
I immediately hopped in to say, “I know! It gets me every time. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly eat anything else.”
I honestly can’t remember whether we ordered dessert that day or not, but I do remember the looks on the older bankers’ faces right before I spoke up.
You see, by her comment and the way she made it, it was clear that she had never been in a restaurant where there was a dessert cart before.
That evening, after all of the interviews were done, we met in the large conference room to deliberate. The first round was to knock out the obvious rejections — including the man from my dinner the night before who was familiar with the sporting goods startup for which I sat on the Board of Directors and said to everyone at the table, “They make cheap knockoffs of real gear.” This was after I’d said I was on the Board. Luckily, his interviewers saw that part of his personality, too, so he went straight into the: “We met a lot of great candidates, and we’re sorry to share…” pile.
Then, we discussed the absolute superstars — the ones the interviewers and meal hosts knew we MUST GET, but who would probably have several competing offers. There were only three of them. Without going into detail, they all shared a lot of demographic similarities, if you get my meaning.
But the third, and by far largest group, were those on the bubble. Did we want to make an offer, take that risk, and see if they’d work out? They impressed enough people to still be in the conversation but didn’t blow anyone away.
This is where our lunch guest fell. Some of her interviewers loved her, some thought she was only okay. Then, one of our lunch companions, the most senior person who’d met her — not interviewed, just met — spoke up, and all he said was, “I don’t think she’s a good fit for us.”
No one asked him to elaborate. The conversation was over.
I knew exactly where his comment was coming from, and it broke my heart. But I was the most junior person in the room, one of only two women, the only one who had not gone to business school, and thus never been through this process (I got hired into investment banking having been a securities lawyer). I said nothing.
This woman was intelligent, at ease in stressful situations, and had a sense of humor — all traits we should have highly valued. And she wanted to work for us! Something we really should have cared about. And yet, because of having grown up with limited means, she was about to get a letter that started, “We met a lot of great candidates, and we’re sorry to share…”
How STUPID were we as an institution??? The fact that she didn’t grow up going to fancy restaurants and still made it to the top quarter of her class in one of the Top 25 B-schools in the country meant that she had the strength, character, grit, and initiative to do anything. Nothing was handed to her! And she got herself that far. How could we miss that?
Tears are flowing down my face as I type this, both in shame for having said nothing that day and in the thought of how hard she must have worked to get to that lunch, and how ludicrous it was that it cost her that opportunity. I always wish I’d followed up with her and found out where she landed. Now, I don’t even remember her name.
Yes, it’s true — she did not necessarily always know how to behave 100% in alignment with a wealthy environment.
Guess what?
We could have taught her that in a few weeks! Someone could have taken her to every nice restaurant in the city. We could have flown her first class to stay in a 5-star hotel, which is what we all did when working on deals, and all we had to tell her was what football coach Vince Lombardi told his kicker, Travis Williams, after Williams excessively celebrated scoring:
“The next time you make it to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”
She would have known exactly how to act like she’d been there before!
And I know that because I had to learn all of that when I started my career. I grew up on free school lunches and went to college on scholarships and need-based grants. In the book, Happiness as a Second Language, I talk about how much I feared and hated rich people, which makes it really hard to become one. Luckily, on the lawyer side of the transaction, how well you do the work is far more important than the schmoozing and the connections. Not so much for investment bankers, who are paid significantly more.
And yet, it still did seem that those junior lawyers who came from means were able to strike up quicker, easier relationships with partners and clients. They knew what kinds of suits to wear and how often to have them dry-cleaned (mostly never, but I didn’t know that, so my suits got shiny fast). They had an ease that those of us exceeding our station had to train for.
Which we were all capable of!
If you need an employee who, in professional situations, knows how to “act like they’ve been there before,” only hiring those who were raised with that knowledge is not only missing a huge, highly valuable potential workforce, but it’s perpetuating a gross inequity that harms families and communities for generations.
People with grit, intelligence, determination, and a desire to work for you belong in your workplace, regardless of where they started. It’s your job to bring them in, make them feel welcome, and raise them up to their full potential.
It may take a little more effort, but it’s so worth it.
Do your part to level the playing field.
The rewards will exceed all of your expectations!
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Valerie Alexander is committed to expanding happiness and inclusion in all communities. She is a globally-recognized speaker on the topics of happiness in the workplace, the advancement of women, identity, equity & inclusion, and unconscious bias. Her TED Talk, “How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias,” has been viewed over half a million times and is used as a teaching tool in classrooms and boardrooms around the world.
If you want to join Valerie Alexander’s Happiness & Inclusion mailing list, go to SpeakHappiness.com/Inclusion to sign up and download the free workbook, Five Policies That Outsmart Unconscious Bias in Your Company. This newsletter comes out on the first and third Tuesday of every month.
If you’re interested in having Valerie Alexander speak at your organization or conference on Workforce Happiness as a Strategic Business Advantage, Outsmarting Bias, Identity & Inclusion, or the Advancement of Women, reach out through SpeakHappiness.com.
