Wake up Minnesota with Dr. Gloria ​Gonzalez-Morales on oppressive civility

Ally, accomplice, co-conspirator

• Ally, accomplice, co-conspirator, video excerpt of the program Visionary Voices: A Candid Conversation with Brittany Packnett.

Appreciative inquiry

• AI Commons 

Benevolent sexism

• Hideg, I., & Ferris, D. L. (2016). The compassionate sexist? How benevolent sexism promotes and undermines gender equality in the workplace. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), 706.

High-quality connections

• Dutton, J.E. and Heaphy, E. The power of high-quality connections. In Cameron, K., J.E. Dutton and R.E. Quinn, Positive Organizational Scholarship (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler), 263-278, 2003.
• Dutton, Jane E. Let's bet on high-quality connecting as a path for fostering well-being at work. In Mathew A. White et al. (Eds): Future Directions in Well-Being: Education, Organizations and Policy, Springer Publishers, 2017.
•  High-quality connections by John Paul Stephens, Emily Heaphy, and Jane E. Dutton.
• Fostering high-quality connections - How to deal with corrosive relationships at work by Jane Dutton. 
• Build high-quality connections by Jane Dutton.
• High-quality connections and relationships at work, Jane Dutton's website.

Implicit/aversive racism

• Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2000). Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999. Psychological science, 11(4), 315-319.

Intergroup dialogue

• Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR)
• Ford, Kristie. 2018. Facilitating Change through Intergroup Dialogue: Social Justice Advocacy in Practice. New York, NY: Routledge. 

Masculinity contest cultures

• Berdahl, J. L., Cooper, M., Glick, P., Livingston, R. W., & Williams, J. C. (2018). Work as a masculinity contest. Journal of Social Issues, 74(3), 422-448.

Microaggressions

• When and how to respond to microaggressions by Ella F Washington, Alison Hall Birch, Laura Morgan Roberts.
• How to intervene when you witness a microaggression by Jennifer Kim and Alyson Meister. 
• Recognizing and Responding to Microaggressions at Work by Ella F. Washington.
• How to respond to racial microaggressions when they occur by Frank Harris III and J. Luke Wood
• Sue, D. W., Alsaidi, S., Awad, M. N., Glaeser, E., Calle, C. Z., & Mendez, N. (2019). Disarming racial microaggressions: Microintervention strategies for targets, White allies, and bystanders. American Psychologist, 74(1), 128.

Relational practice

• Fletcher, J. K. (1998). Relational practice: A feminist reconstruction of work. Journal of management inquiry, 7(2), 163-186.
• Fletcher, J. K. (2012). The relational practice of leadership. In M. Uhl-Bien & S. M. Ospina (Eds.), Advancing relational leadership research: A dialogue among perspectives (pp. 83–106). IAP Information Age Publishing.

Relational and feminist practices

• How to run a feminist company by Lila MacLellan.
• González-Morales, M. G. (2019). A more feminine scholarship: Relational practice for setting a good example. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 18, 302–305.

Selective incivility

• Cortina, L. M., Kabat-Farr, D., Leskinen, E. A., Huerta, M., & Magley, V. J. (2013). Selective incivility as modern discrimination in organizations: Evidence and impact. Journal of Management, 39(6), 1579-1605.

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: Hi, everyone and welcome. Today, we're really excited to have a conversation with Dr. Gloria Gonzalez-Morales, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Worker Wellbeing lab at Claremont Graduate University. We've been engaging in conversation with Dr. Gloria for probably a little over a year, really excited about her research on oppressive civility, and for us as leadership educators, talking about her journey. So welcome, Gloria. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Thank you so much for inviting me. This is such a great opportunity, there's very few opportunities to be able to have a conversation with friends. It is really early in the morning, but maybe a glass of wine and discussing these issues. I arrived to the States back in 2007 as a Fulbright visiting scholar. I'm originally from the Canary Islands. Those are some islands on the west coast of Africa that actually are part of Spain.

Our culture and our experiences are sometimes more closer to Latinx experiences, than people from Spain in the mainland. So that's one of the reasons why I really have an identity as a Latinx person here in the States. My accent in Spanish is like Venezuela or Cuban, and I love salsa, I dance salsa. There's all these shared cultural elements that make me feel at home here in Southern California, and also in Tuscon, that is my other home.

So I came here, I was doing research on work-life conflict, I was doing a lot of research on stress from a feminist perspective, and then I moved to Canada after two or three years, and I was there for 10 years as a professor, and then I decided to come down to Claremont in the very, very limit of Los Angeles County, so I don't see the ocean from my window, but I see beautiful mountains and here, I came here because it's a graduate university where I can work one-on-one with a lot of graduate students and also they have a program on positive psychology, and that's what I'm really passionate about is about how we can think about ways that people can flourish and ways that people can figure out ways of having full feeling lies within the workplace, because I'm more focused on organizational psychology, but also in relationship to their personal lives.

So I have always been interested in well-being from a critical and feminist perspective, and that's why I have all these critical system-level ways of thinking about, for example, incivility and how we came with this idea of well, maybe it sometimes its incivility and sometimes is oppressive civility. So that's a little bit of a snippet of where I'm from, what I'm doing and where I'm going.

Jenn Aranda: So when we're looking through that lens of incivility moving towards oppressive incivility, can you talk a little bit about your personal leadership style and your own philosophy?

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Yeah, so right now, I feel like I'm a leader in two different aspects of my work. I want to give you a little bit of context of what I do here. First is, I'm the principal investigator or the director of my research lab: it’s a worker well-being lab. We decided “worker well-being” because it really is “WW” and we really wanted to call it The Wonder Women Lab, but it wasn't very academic, so we're like, “Okay, let's call it worker well-being because it's really about the well-being of everybody, and then let's have the W’s as an internal joke.

So we have a very well-established feminist identity, but an intersectional feminist identity within the lab, and so right now I lead around 15 PhD students, and then another five grad students that are thinking about doing the PhD, and it has been an interesting journey, because I established the lab at the beginning with five students, they were feeling like very cozy, they felt that this was a very safe environment, and this is where I want to talk about my leadership style, and I do that also.

I try to be a leader in my learning communities when I teach as well. I use language as a tool to create an understanding of what we're talking about. So in my classes, I call them learning communities. There's no students and professors, there's instructional teams and community learners or community members, and we try to build together the knowledge. I always talk about how the instructional team that is the TA and me as a professor are really facilitators of knowledge and how everybody brings their identities, their thoughts into the table and that we want to have conversations, to have some kind of grasping in our own experiences to understand their academic gradients that we go through.

So that's one example of how I use language to try to transform a little bit the way that we think about a classroom that could be very hierarchical, to a more flatter structure within the classroom. In terms of the lab, it was interesting because when we started, everybody felt it was mostly … it was all women, and they were like, “Yeah, we want to keep it tight, we want to keep it small because this feels so safe and it feels such a great place to be able to collaborate and to develop trust with each other, and I was like, “Yeah, that's great, but we cannot be exclusive.

In our own inclusion, we cannot be exclusive and say, “No, you cannot be part of this club, because this is where ... it's a tension that we are dealing with all time: that inclusion, exclusion, right. Little by little, I was kind of creating this place where people feel safe and brave, I love that. That kind of language comes from intergroup dialogue. Yeah, Michigan is a pedological orientation I'm trying to get. I'm getting trained on that, and this idea of safe and brave, that really in terms of psychology is just psychological safety, and we know from evidence in research that psychological safety, especially in teams, is what really allows teams to succeed, flourish and deal with mistakes, learn from mistakes and further develop.

So I really put a lot of work on maintaining that psychological safety or that safe and brave space as we were adding people to our work team into our lab. Now we have a more diverse lab because I didn't have anything ... I love that my lab was all women, but I really wanted other people to come in and to experience that safe and brave space, and to be able to have all those complex conversations, so we can grow from that, and we are not in an echo chamber.

So little by little we have been adding people, we have an older white “dude.” Sorry, sorry, Saran, that I'm calling you that. But he's great, he’s Dutch and his wife is from India, I believe, and he has a lot of experience in companies and organizations and in startups, so the perspective that he brings to the table is still respecting and contributing to the safe and brave space are invaluable. It's kind of like, I don't know what the lab would be without him now.

I have done a lot of work trying to recruit a lot of different people, BIPOC folks, into the team, so now every time we have a lab meeting, it's just … it's beautiful. You know all the diversity that you see in there is beautiful. Now we have privileged identities and identities that don't have that much privilege, and I think that that's what really allows us to have a good community where we can learn from each other. And at some point, I will talk about oppressive civility …

And then the other leadership role that I have at the university right now, and I only started it. I started some of it last year, but now I'm the Director of the Center for Academic and Faculty Excellence. The actual name is CAFÉ. An idea is that it really is a place for people to come together, to create community just after the pandemic, to be able to be able to have those discussions about what it means to be an excellent professor or a mentor, or for our grad students, how can they develop into the scholars and faculty.

So one of the things that I'm doing is, again, using language. I try to talk about established faculty and emergent faculty, so I don't use the box. I don’t do opposition between faculty and students in that space. We're trying to also talk about instead of the students, because they're graduate students, we talk about “scholars” as much as we can to kind of give them more agency and feeling like more autonomous and actually deal with that imposter syndrome that all of them know, but most of them have.

So that's another example of how we're trying to create community with our language and then events where there's possible creating opportunities for a change, but the challenge is how you do that in a way that it still is a safe and brave space, because I think that that's a key for being able to lead to real civil and meaningful interactions instead of what I call oppressive civility.

That is a way of incivility that looks very civil. It looks a very … would you say, kind? Disguised as kindness and professionalism, but behind it, there's really an intention to put you in your place, and that's what I call oppressive civility. It’s like an email that is back-handed, it’s a comment at the end of a very positive email that it really tells you that they're trying to enact their power over you or their hierarchy over you. It's a type of phenomenon that also is very hard to then report, because on the surface it’s a very civil encounter, but the surface is not everything. You have to think about the context. And when you think about the content, you can tell that.

And if you want to talk about this a little bit more, I can talk about this meaning of civility, especially for indigenous cultures, like how the word of civility or civilized actually has a lot of baggage. It’s a negative word and how maybe we need to change a little bit the discourse when we're talking about incivility in workplaces or about harassment or about these things. Like sometimes I think about, maybe we need to talk about disrespectful behavior, rudeness. I like the idea of talking more about microaggressions, because it really is talking about the experience of the person that is victimized and not so much what the person that is victimizing or the actor can claim that they're doing.

Jenn Aranda: Right. And I love just coming to a point where you're honest, right. It's not coded language. You're being micro-aggressive. You're being disrespectful. I think that's where some of the language as we talk about the importance of language and Wonder Woman and trying to replicate the safe space and brave environment, language holds so much and for some BIPOC leaders, trying to learn the language of the oppressor is part of being able to get into, unfortunately, that oppressive environment. But how do you change if you're not there at the table?

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Exactly, and that's the problem with the table. We need to rebuild that, we have to take out that table and put another table that is not based on a hetero-patriarchal system. The hierarchy is what we talk about, it’s not only the patriarchal forces, it’s all the oppressive and privileged forces that actually shape our systems.

So how can we create a new table? And this is one of the things that in the last 10 years, because I started doing stress and gender, and gender roles and how women tend to cope with the stress and how men tend to cope with the stress, and I remember when I was a tiny baby doctoral student, the students think that when men used social support, when I was finding in my researches that when men used social support, they actually report also higher levels of distress than when women use social support/coping. And I was like, what is going on?

And I had two hypothesis that I wrote in the discussion of my dissertation that were like, “Well, maybe one hypothesis to further develop and to further understand what was going on is that they're using social support when it’s too late, when they have tried everything and then now they're using social support, but at this point there is not much to be done, and that's when also there's a tendency ... we also know that men or male-presenting identities tend to use more escape and avoidance and even addiction as a way to cope with problems, and I think it's because there's a point where social support is not working well.

I think that's what I was hypothesizing, but also the other reason why maybe there's more, there's a high relationship to social support and feeling distrust is because when men and I'm talking, men, I'm talking in binary ways, but of course, I'm just — my research back then was very binary. When men enact social support, people are not expecting that social support seeking and they're not ready to provide that support, because they're showing weakness. They're showing that they cannot do it, and then the context, maybe in organizations, doesn't allow that to happen. And then what they get is backlash from doing that.

We know, for example, when men ask for paternity leaves or for time off to be able to take care of their children, not “babysit” the children but take care of their children. This is another one that the language is important, they are told, they receive backlash, supervisors are not that supportive. And they maybe also pass some promotions or bonuses. So there's all these issues around men being the receivers of this toxic masculinity as well.

I remember that, but back then when I was a baby “dissertationer” having these thoughts about what is the organization, how are our culture responses to this, but then I continue working on work and life ... or work/family conflict. And I was just really focused on that gender issue, and then I started to think about gender is not who we are, only. It’s who we are within our context, and that's when I started to kind of piece things together. So we were working on incivility, harassment in the workplace, then we were … so that was kind of like less related to gender, but related to minorities, right, because we know that there’s selective incivility.

Selective incivility is a term coined by Dr. Lilia Cortina, at the University of Michigan. Yeah, Michigan is coming up a lot. She'd talk about how the reason why minorities experienced more incivilities because that's a way that now they are targeted. It was conceptualized as subversive racism or implicit racism, right, like that. People are not openly racist anymore, people are not openly sexist anymore, but there's benevolent racism, there's benevolent sexism and these type of things are showing up, for example, in that type of selective incivility.

So for example, being passed for a promotion just because you have two little kids at home and they assume that you will not be able to deal with the responsibilities of the job, and you're not even asked if you're interested in it. And they're like, “Well, but we're taking care of you.”

Yeah, so the benevolent sexism, the subversive racism really get in that form of selective incivility or even that oppressive civility that we were talking about that on the surface is very respectful, or on the surface it's nothing, it's just a civil encounter, but it really has a bad intention and if you don't look at the identity of the people that are interacting in that instance it’s very hard to understand what's going on.

But another thing that I was interested about doing research and gender and trying to figure out how we can get women and women of color into leadership positions was when I listened to a talk from Jennifer Berdal, who is a sociologist with University of British Columbia, but I can double check that, talking about how the problem, we have tried to fix women, or the leadership women issue, with so many things.

We have tried to tell women to be more like men, have tried to tell women to network only with women, we have tried to tell women to lean in. There’s even another book that is to lean out. There’s all these things that women have to do. Jennifer Berdal was saying, “Well, it doesn't matter what you do. It's clearly not working because the gender gap and the gender wage gab and the gender leadership gap is not closing any time soon. I think that we need like 70 or 100 years at the pace that we're going.

It's about the context, and we are in organizations, the organizations and institutions and societies, that are founded in this hetero-patriarchal, racist, oppressive cultures, and when our deepest assumptions about culture are engrained and rooted in that system, then you can do little changes and some organizations, you can change some norms, but until we do really change that culture, nothing can happen. And I remember being at that talk thinking, “Oh no, changing culture is the most difficult thing that someone can do in an organization.” So I was really, like, dismayed about it.

And then I came across this other author who's fantastic, Joyce Fletcher, and [there] is a study that she did in the 90s where she went to an IT company in the 90s. You wouldn't believe it, but I learned this last week, also. In the 80s and the 90s, there were more women in IT than now. So she actually was able to see it has been going down in the industry. She was able to shadow and do an ethnography with women who were leaders in this IT organization.

So she will shadow them, be with them, figure out what was going on and then having conversations with them afterwards like, Oh, I notice that in this case that you were running the meeting, you actually took responsibility for the mistakes of others, or you took this and you created this opportunities for learning but saving face for all your team members that were men. So they had conversations about what was going on there.

Her paper is beautiful because she talks about all the different ways that these women leaders do what she calls relational practice and relational leadership, that is about putting the team and the collective and the community that they're leaders for first, and focusing on creating team, focusing on developing each other, and how all this work then disappears when it's time to for promotion, it's time for performance appraisal, because we think that culture is not part of the job.

It's not part of the things that we value. We value the bottom down, we value the money that we make, we value how many sales you have, and the fact that you developed your team and your team now is stronger and more successful. It's only measuring certain ways, but all those behaviors that take time to create trust, to create again that safe and brave space are not part of what we value as a culture, and that's what Berdal calls a toxic ...  not a toxic ... that's what Berdal calls a masculinity context culture.

So I put those together and I started to think, okay, so then maybe this is the way forward. Maybe we need to start talking about how we can embrace relational practices, how can we embrace relational leadership? Fletcher has talked a lot about it, and then add into that this positive organizational scholarship or positive psychology to it, because there's a group again at the University of Michigan, the Positive Organization, a scholarship network where especially Jane Dutton — notice that I'm citing a lot of women ...

Jenn Aranda: Yes, I love it!

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Dutton talks about high quality connections and how high quality connections within the workplace really can create a flourishing and a more successful and less transactional and more relational workspace where we can have a flourishing, positive social capital that everybody can benefit from. So they don't talk too much about inclusion and DEI, but really I think that all these three things together really can help us understand how to move forward now and stop trying to get women to behave this way or behave that way.

Of course, we need a space like this one for us to talk freely, but also we need to figure out how we can invite all those allies, and more importantly the accomplices, because the accomplices actually take risks. The allies can be performative, right? The accomplices are partners in crime, they're going to take a risk and how we make them understand that that's what we need to do together. Yes, so that wasn’t very long ...

Jenn Aranda: Yes, that was awesome.

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: I love it, I love it. I think for me and other Black Indigenous People of Color who might be tuning into this, it's cathartic to hear the work that you've been doing, because I think that sometimes in conversations, especially when they're formed around diversity, equity and inclusion, we lose a lot of complexity, right? I think the work that you're doing is all about going deep into the complexities of our identities, how our identities interact, how they intersect, and then also how they do so in different contexts, depending on the space you’re in.

And if you're in academia, I think you know that as a person of color, as someone who isn't white, as someone who isn’t a man, you know these things physically, you know. And I think part of what is so important for me and what I love about talking to people like yourself and the work that you're doing, is that you put language to what we feel and what our bodies remember about these experiences. Where we get that email and we get and we feel like, oh, there's just something wrong here, or you have that conversation and you feel like, did anyone notice that that was just a little off, that there was something there? So for me, that's just the best part of listening to you talk about your work is it's just a resounding “yes!” Mentally, spiritually, physically.

Jenn Aranda: A validation.

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: Yeah. Yes. Perfect.

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Yeah, yeah, and I wanted to add that the thing about language and naming things, there's this very interesting approach to organizational change that is called, I don't know if you're familiar, appreciative inquiry, is that David Cooperrider was a founder of it, from Case Western University. And one thing that I always remember from going to trainings and reading about this is “words create worlds,” [which] is very rooted in how we communicate and what are the things that we say.

The appreciative inquiry process really helps you to the way to he thinks about it is really creating that safe and brave space where everybody's sitting around tables with different levels and different hierarchies, and you have to create a place where people feel safe to dream, discover, design and deliver new ways of doing things moving forward, and I think that that's another tool for people.

If there's coaches or consultants or people that are listening to the podcast right now, those are tools I think that can help to create those brave and safe spaces, apart from the intergroup dialogue and appreciative inquiry, those two things because they’re out of the box, they're not … It’s academic research, but most of it is based on community-engaged applied research, as of course, there's not a double blind randomized controlled trial to figure out how this works. So that's one of the critiques some people use, and actually that's another ... that really is another limitation for how this would work, especially in academia.

Apart from being the director of the Center for Academic and Faculty Excellence, I’m also the chair of a committee on faculty inclusive excellence, that is also the acronym COFIE. Because I have the two hats, so I was like, let’s do it easy. And if they say COFIE and mean CAFE, I don't care. Talk to me. So I really am talking a lot here at this university, it only has 133 faculty, talking about DEI all the time. If it is for DEI and trauma-informed pedagogy and equity-minded design of teaching, or if it is like, “Okay, we're hiring folks to come here, how do we do a hiring process that is equity-minded?”

And it's interesting how “science” and “empiricism” and “positivism” really gets into the conversation and hijacks the conversation, because you may be talking about experiences, the lived experiences of people from a more constructivist, more symbolic epistemology and then they come from that more positivist epistemology and go like, “Yeah, but where is it data? Where is the case study that shows how before and after, and then it’s interesting in how they ask for ... the data is now feelings of belonging of the community, the data is not feeling engaged while doing your work as a professor in the community or having students who are engaged and they want to stay here. The data is increased in productivity in terms of citation counts, and I'm like, “Okay, so where do you start, really?”

And this is again, another reflection of that oppressive civility, sometimes it's not even oppressive intentionally by the person who's enacting it, because they're just using their frame of reference and just imposing it on a very different scenario in a very different problem. They're just trying to put a square on our circle and it doesn't fit, and it's very hard to have a conversation.

Right, because they're a square and you're a circle, and it takes a lot of time to get that square, to get a little bit of round edges, so you just start like going like you're carving slowly into that square to get their round edges, you have coffee then within that coffee you get microaggressions, you dismiss them because you are just trying to carve that, or you get an email explaining or mansplaining what you should have done instead. And you just ignore the email. And you're like, “You know what, I have no response for this right now, and I'm going to move forward.”

The language, again, like the same way that we think of a language to build, we were talking about how, you know, “Okay, we are trying to wake up, right, we're trying to get people to be woke,” but that we cannot get people to be woke if they feel threatened. And that's another thing that I have learned to my leadership journey, especially in terms of DEI, the moment that people feel threatened, the moment that people feel a little tiny bit of a negative emotion when you say something, they tend to disconnect.

And that's another thing that as social justice warriors or BIPOC folks, we should be doing, really like I know that we have a lot of work to do, and this is even more work, but this is the reality is that we need to also use different language. So I was called out by a colleague of mine, that I think that I’m carving the edges and he was becoming an ally, hopefully that at some point he will be kind of an accomplice, and he was like, “Hey, in that email that you were explaining this, you said “old white professor.” Old white male professor. He's like, “Can you think about a different way of saying that, because I can see in the team where we're working on these specific issues, how they can feel that they are out of the conversation, that they're blamed for this, I don't think that is the right language?”

And I wrote back, this was a whole morning of email back and forth, and I was like, okay, I feel ... Again, I also had a negative reaction to it. I was like, “Oh my God, really? Do I have to watch my language? Seriously?” Okay, so I answer back saying, “Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I usually use the term heterosexual, cisgender men. So do you want me to change that in the email, and I'm pretty controlling myself here, and then this other person comes back, who was also a white man, and he was like, “Well, I think that that still will create a problem because just that you're saying that they're problematic.” I was referring to the fact that not everybody has a reference letter or has been recommended or is well-connected with networks of old white men.

So then I was like, Okay, let me think about this. So what does old white men mean to me? So it means a person who's really connected in academia, who is in this old boys club that knows also how things work, that is part of the system, of the power system, and it also has taught all these other people, even people of color, how to play in the system, right? Like if they have had the access to them, I'm like, “Okay, so I'm going to try to define this instead of saying the identity or how we call that identity.”

Okay, so people who are less connected or people who didn’t come recommended from a person who's central and highly connected in the academic network, and that has privilege and it has identities associated with privilege, and that was the whole speech, the whole sentence to substitute the “old white dude” kind of thing.

And I think I'd really learn a lesson here because I can say “old white dude” in this context, or maybe not, maybe we will edit it out, because that is not threatening, that doesn't create a negative effect in our conversation, but when I'm talking to people who have identities associated with privilege, especially in the academe, I need to change my language again, and I am learning in these last months of my leadership journey, I'm learning so much about this importance of language and how you call things.

So now, whenever I talk to faculty, I talk about privileged identities, or identities associated with privilege, so they really like they know what I'm saying, but also they can reflect on their own privilege and think about it. I know that it's kind of code, I know that from our perspective as BIPOC or underrepresented minorities, it feels disingenuous to us, but it's helpful to continue the conversation of the squares to carve.

So that's another insight that I have had in the last months too. You really have to figure out who's your audience, who's your team, who's there, what is the language that you want to use, and what are the identities that are represented there. And the most complex place to be doing this is when there's an inter-group ... like a group with a lot of identities. And that's why intergroup dialogue is such a great tool to create that safe and brave space where when I say “white dude,” the white dude in the room makes a joke and says, “Oh, come on, you're talking again about the white dude … remember that? I actually grew up really poor” and I will be like, “Oh yeah, that's true, and you shared that experience, so yeah, sorry about that.”

Yeah, and then how do we create the psychological safety so people don't feel backlash, but we are not there yet, or whenever you're in a situation or a space where that psychological safety, that safe and brave space has not been created yet, then you have to be very careful about what are the words that you use, the words or the world, either way that the worlds you're creating psychologically in their mind with the words that you're using.

Jenn Aranda: That is so right on, especially for where Jocelyn and I are and who we work with privilege is ... that's a word that's not going to fly here. No, because again, that's a trigger. If we think about taking DEI out and never using it, I think we would go much farther.

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: Yeah. I love what you said, because I do agree with Jenn. It’s right, spot on. Especially from us who are working in rural areas where language is so powerful and has been used politically to convey these huge ideas or histories to people, right? When you say privilege, what all does that convey to people? This entire narrative is conveyed by one word, but as we talk about leadership, I think that is what sets it apart. If you are any person of color, if you're just someone in the general public ... yeah, it's painful.

And maybe you'll say, “I don't want to do that, I don't want to water it down, I don't want to feel disingenuous by having to use different language or having to say in a different way, but I think for leaders that's part of the skill set, right? And that's part of the commitment that you make as someone who steps into a leadership role, is to take on some of the things that might be a little bit more painful.

Sometimes it might feel a little bit more of a struggle, but that is what makes us leaders is the ability to have that emotional resilience or maybe just a different way of seeing things where you can say, Okay, I'm going to use this differently because I have this overall goal in my community, the people that I work with, the students that I work with, are so important to me that I'm going to take on what could be painful and could feel disingenuous, but I know it's going to help get us farther, but I think that's the thing.

If you're a leader, you made the commitment to represent others, represent those who are following you, you made a decision to use your skill set, to use your ingenuity, your imagination, to think of things differently. And that's what you have to do. That's the skill set that you have to develop. I think that's just so powerful to me, especially for us who are working in rural areas, especially, it's just like, yeah, that's true. It's hard, but it's true.

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: And it's a journey for every single person, and understanding that everybody is in a different space in the journey. I think that one thing that has helped me is to have ... I have a couple of colleagues here, the people that talk about DEI, the people with whom you can have really honest conversations like, “Can you believe I had to do this, or can you believe I had to receive this email? Went through it, and you have different communities of different groups with whom you can be honest and you can be very, very transparent, and you can be very vulnerable, but there are other places where others feel vulnerable when you are in that space. And others, if they're in the space, it means that maybe they're trying.

So I think that there's another concept from positive psychology that is compassion and self-compassion. So first of all, have self-compassion for yourself, and you don't have to go in for all the battles and you don't have to explain everything every single time. There's very good guides on how to deal with my microaggressions that I can share with you, but there's one that the first rule is to check out if you have the energy to manage it or not, and it is totally okay to back off, because I love the sentence I think it says “the most important act of rebellion or of social justice is to take care of yourself.”

So go ahead and check if it is worth it, if you have the spoons ... if you have the energy to do it, and if not, you don't have to do it. So you have to have self-compassion to yourself, for yourself. But then once you have checked, do you feel that you have the energy, that this person is worth it, that this person is in the journey? And they just need a little bit of a nudge. Then have compassion for them and understand that their experiences are very different from your experiences, that they are not in yours and your shoes, and that they just need to understand what is it to feel like they're in your shoes or the shoes of other people, and that perspective taking and that compassion … I know that that involves a lot of emotional labor for us, and that's why you have to think about ... Do I have energy to do this, right, first? So if you're going to do it, do it well, do it with compassion. Use a language that will not trigger backlash.

Dolly Chugh wrote this book, The Person You Mean to Be, it’s a great book for people who want to start being more inclusive, for people who want to really be allies, for people who want to be accomplices, and instead of talking about privilege, she talks about headwinds and tailwinds. Just again, a different language, a different way of talking about what has helped you in life and what has prevented you from advancing in life, because that at the end is what privilege is. Privilege is a big word when you think about it in a system, but it can be breaking down into small things when you're thinking about it at the individual level.

And I think that that's one of the issues with the “privilege” word, is that it's very hard for people to think in this higher level system level, because people are not sociologists. So easy to talk about this with a sociologist, but with a psychologist, and believe me I know a lot, that really are interested on personality and very specific things about the individual, they really just anchor themselves into that individual experience.

It's hard for them to go on one level higher and understand privilege as a system and not as “what are your experiences?” So that idea of tailwinds and headwinds can help people to see how there may be a system that helps way or the other, but that also some people are going in different directions or have stronger planes or different ways where they were putting in their journey.

So yeah, I think that compassion is a key word here, and then what I mentioned before, this idea of high quality connections, of building our relationships with others based on reciprocity, but reciprocity, as Jane Dutton explains, that it's not reciprocity based on a transactional social exchange approach, it’s not I did this for you, you did this for me, and this actually is very clear … And our society here in North America, that social exchange approach, that transaction of exchange is very rooted in our culture here, the idea that if someone does a favor for you, you feel indebted, you feel in debt, and that you actually feel a tension and you have to do something really fast, not to feel that you're in debt. Like here in North America, and there's this tendency to be like that.

I remember once I was helping in Canada, that's why I'm saying North America, because I didn't see a lot of difference between the States and Canada in that regard. I had a colleague who just had a baby and their wife needed to sleep a little bit during day, so while he was teaching, he needed somebody to be with the baby. So I volunteered, yes, of course, I was new. They had a baby, they had been trying for a long time, and I really liked them, so I was like, of course, I can just take a couple of hours while you're teaching, and what is better than just hanging out with a baby that is cozy and you're just like this, it was a newborn, it was so cute.

But I know from my Spanish culture, I was trying to build community, you know, I was trying to create a meaningful relationship with them through providing instrumental support, but also an instrument of support that is not just, I'm going to go make a lasagna and leave it up to your door, I'm going to spend quality time with your son.

So then after that semester happened and things went better for them, they just gave me a very nice gift, a massage, that I went and got, and it was super nice. And then a couple of months later, the first year birthday of the kid came up, but I didn't get invited. Right, because for them ... and this is not that they’re bad people. I'm just giving this as an example of how in our culture and how it's kind of like, again, like culture and that foundation and those very, very rooted assumptions work and don’t allow us to move forward. That in their culture, it was like, Okay, they did a favor for us, we're in debt, we really want to solve the question, we will get them something very nice. And that’s it. It's like, I don't know, with weddings, all these thank you notes and everything, and it's like, I don’t want to have a thank you note, I want to have a coffee with you after going to the wedding. I want to see your family, I want to connect with you.

So that is what reciprocity is. Reciprocity is connection, creating a link. It's like creating a hyperlink that goes two ways, that you're always connected to that other person and that you are really interested in the growth of the other person and the development, and vice-versa, and it has to be the vice-versa. This reciprocity has to go both ways, because if not, you just have this type of motherly love that … yeah, it's very feminine, but it's also very emotionally exhausting, so the idea is that you give and you get, but not in a transactional way.

There's no tension when somebody does something for you, because you know that it will come back maybe from those people, but also you may come back from two degrees of connection later with something else. So when we think about that when we're doing the DEI work and we're enacting our leadership practice for more equity or equity-minded perspective, then we start to see like, okay, well, it's going to be hard to have a coffee with this person that has identities associated with privilege, right?

I may get some microaggressions during the coffee or I may feel that I'm disrespected on my professional level, that they're going to question my expertise or that they're going to make a comment about how young I look, or things like that. But this person wants to have a coffee with me. They want to have a conversation and I can learn from that. I actually can learn what are the paths of thinking, how do they think about these things in order to for the next coffee with that person or another person, I'm ready for going into that path of conversation and argument.

You have to do the work. Especially if you want to be a leader on this. And not everybody has to be a leader. Again, compassion and self-care is the main act of protest. I have to remember what the sentence that is … I will give you the link to that paper. It’s an HBR paper by two women of color talking about how to deal with microaggressions, it’s wonderful. So yeah, I think that is very important, and I'm enjoying having this conversation because I am reflecting on my own leadership practice, and it's really interesting to think about this this way.

Jenn Aranda: And I am so thankful that you have brought up that self-care … We see that. I'm sure you're familiar with the book, Presumed Incompetent, written …?

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: No … My God, I have to look at it.

Jenn Aranda: Oh, I should’ve brought it! Presumed Incompetent, it is called … oh, are you looking at it right now? Yes, it's amazing because it is, again, going back to that validation that sometimes, I think really comes from that collective. We have that foundation that is so similar among us, and so hearing the stories and like you were saying Jocelyn, just getting that even visceral reaction of, “Oh my God, I've been through that, I hear you, I understand it.”

And at the same time, knowing that inner journeys, whether you're going to be a leader who is forefront or you're going to be a leader within your sphere of influence, taking care of that self, and knowing that without you, there isn't going to be that perspective … I’ve found for myself that's the hardest balance, even you know, in my research with civility in academia. You can become so ingrained in that system and become so used to the microaggressions. It's the norm. So how do we find a balance, especially when we're seeing folks get lost?

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Yeah, I think that there's different ways. I think that one way is building communities where or finding the communities where there is less of that, and finding the people that are ready to listen in their journey, they're ready. Instead of trying to talk to people that are not ready to listen and spending time and energy on that, so sometimes you need people that are ready to listen, then those people will be telling other … So that there's this proximal, maybe they will not listen to you, but maybe they will listen to another person, right?

Jenn Aranda: Yes, that power mapping. Yeah, I like that idea.

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Exactly. So thinking about impact in a more cumulative way, and again academia, our frames of reference to come back here again. In academia, when you think about impact in terms of how many citations you have, citations you have, which journals did you publish and have this impact index. How many papers you have is about quantity, and the reason why it’s quantity, is because from my perspective as an organizational theorist, is because we as humans have what we call, Kahnemann called “bounded rationality,” and that means that we cannot make decisions that are totally rational because we actually as humans don't have the ability to process all the information that is out there.

So because we are rationally bounded, we will never be able to make complex decisions or be able to, for example, when you look at a CV of a fellow colleague, you're not going … you don't have the time or the energy or maybe the knowledge to read all their papers to really understand what their scholarly contribution is. So what do we do? We take a shortcut and we just count. Right, and we just look at how many impact, like what is the impact index of the journals where they go.

And that's why, for example, in my cover letters or whenever I do a statement of research, I explain why I’m publishing the papers and the journals were published that I actually am more interested about readership that is interested on what I'm doing than a journal that has a higher impact index with the experts that nobody is going to read my stuff or even consider it.

So then what happens is that the frame of reference in academia about quantity, about more, more is better, and higher is better, then it comes back to understanding our relationships in academia and how we relate to each other, so when you have someone that ... you say square with those carved rounded edges, that person can help understand the other person that is a square better, what is going on, than you being a circle and not having the spoons or the energy to get the square to understand or to get the square — not even to understand — to get the square to do a little bit of perspective taking, that's it.

You don't have to convince anybody to do perspective taking. So I think that the idea of mapping, mapping who is in the journey and how they can do a line and put them there and going like, okay, so if I convince this person and this person will talk to this person, and then they move them into that journey a little bit in the other direction, could be helpful.

I know people that, for example, and I love politics in the organization, and in academia. I have been a student representative all my life, when I was in undergrad, when I was a grad. I always have been really involved in politics, and I find them really fun to be honest, like I love, especially having suffered the politics in the Spain … When I come here, I'm like, oh my God, you're amateurs. You don't know what is to be nasty in academia, there's stronger systems of oppression than academia, and I think that maybe it's because they are a little bit like less subtle.

That's probably why. I am having fun having these leadership positions at the university because I feel that I have the spoons, I have the tools, I have the competence, I have the expertise and as an organizational psychology to kind of navigate that. But that doesn't mean that everybody can do that, or wants to do that, probably they can just do they want to do it, do they want to actually enjoy it while they're doing it and while they’re getting all the microaggressions.

So find the pockets or the places where you actually want to do the work, and a little bit of work is going to help because again, also this idea of the things have to be very impactful, we have to forget about that. Science really is about that cumulation, and academia and the scholarship, a cumulation of little tiny things over time. When I was talking about how I'm thinking about things, I'm talking about three, four different women that have inspired me into the type of theories that are brewing in my mind right now is not one single person that has ... and they have come from, all their research also cites other people, so it's all cumulative …

It's the same thing, leadership, social justice work can be cumulative, and it can be a small and can be, a little, tiny contribution but it will accumulate. It will get there. It will take a long time, but …

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: Yeah. Thank you. I think that's a good place. I think that's a perfect wrap-up of the conversation. Is there anything else that you would like to mention, any other statement that you would like to make that you want to include?

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Yes, self-care is the most important act of resistance. I finally remembered what it was, but I will send you the paper because I want you to cite who really said that. Everything that I say here is not that, I don't think that I have come up with any of that. I have come up of a way of reflecting on it in my leadership practice really.

So I think that the last thing to say is that in order to do self-care, there has to be reflection. So I think that taking the time to reflect on what are you doing? Why are you doing it? With whom are you doing it? I think it's important to do that every now and then to check with yourself, see how many spoons you have, and seeing which direction you want to continue being a leader in the community, or in the communities where you are. Where do you want to be a follower? Where do you want to support others, where do you want to be an ally? Where are you willing to take risks and really become an accomplice? Reflect — reflecting is a good way of ending.

Jocelyn Hernandez Guitron: Thank you so much, Gloria, today for being here. We had an amazing conversation and I think that the insights that you've shared have just been so, so valuable and so … it's like pressure relief to have these conversations, so thank you once again for being here and joining us.

Dr. Gonzalez-Morales: Thank you so much for having me this was this was really fun and I'm going to be taking notes once the podcast is out and maybe write something to spread it a little bit more.