The classic career advice many of us hear is: “The work does not speak for itself. You need to make sure others know about it, too.“
But recent research complicates the suggestion that everyone should advocate for themselves by promoting their own accomplishments.
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A 2022 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology surveyed a racially diverse and stratified sample of professionals, all from a large global financial institution and who all had white managers. Employees answered a survey about their self-promotional behavior with prompts such as “I talk proudly about my contributions or education with others at [company name],” and a group of management researchers used manager surveys and human resources information to see how supervisors rated the employees’ performance.
The researchers found that although white, Asian and Latinx employees received higher job ratings when they talked more about their contributions and accomplishments, Black employees were penalised by white managers for doing the same thing. Black employees who rated themselves highly on self-promotion received lower ratings of their job performance and assessments of their fit with the organisation.
In other words, self-promoting at work benefited white, Asian and Latinx employees while it had negative consequences for Black colleagues.
What explains this racial bias? The researchers think that white supervisors could be holding negative stereotypes of lower job competence against their Black employees while other racial groups were not dealing with the same thing.
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As a result, when Black employees excel and communicate their accomplishments, strengths and contributions, their white managers see this as something that goes against their stereotypes of Black employees’ competence and skills.
“When managers perceive the violation of their stereotypical ‘norm’ of Black employees, they feel uneasy and thus react negatively,” said Jiaqing Sun, an assistant professor in the London School of Economics’ department of management, and a co-author of the study.
“The unique bias revealed in our study is more likely to happen in [occupations] highly emphasising competence, education, and skills, and also with a low representation of Black employees, such as financial banking, high technology and higher education,” Sun told HuffPost via email.
“It’s really not you, it’s them.”
– Career coach Ebony Joyce
The study controlled for employees’ education levels, tenure at the company, length of time in their current position and how long they had worked with their direct manager to “really try to isolate the extent to which self-promotion is positively impacting performance ratings,” said Sandy Wayne, a management professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead author of the study.
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“What we did find was that African Americans, controlling all those other potential predictors of performance ratings, were getting lower ratings than other groups when they engaged in higher levels of self-promotion.”
Black employees can find sponsors to advocate on their behalf, but this is not their problem to fix.
Career coach and diversity consultant Ebony Joyce said the study’s findings resonated with her experience as a Black professional and with what she has seen with clients.
“We’re faced with this double-edged sword. You’re taught to do the work, put your head down and your work will speak for itself,” she said. “And you notice after a while that everyone is getting promoted around you. And you’re like, ‘I’m doing the work. What do I need to do?’ And then when it comes to advocating for yourself, that doesn’t work, either.”
Joyce said she has worked with many Black clients in this situation who wonder if there is another certification or degree that they need to get to be promoted. To them, Joyce advises, “You already have the education and the expertise and everything that you need already. You are just not supported within the organisation that you are in.”
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If you’re a Black employee looking to stay within your organisation, it can help to find a sponsor at your company, outside of your direct manager, who can speak up on your behalf. As Morgan Stanley senior client adviser Carla Harris put it in a TED talk, a sponsor is someone, usually within your same company, who is not just going to speak positively about you but will be willing to spend “their valuable political and social capital on you” and “has the power to get it — whatever it is for you — to get it done behind closed doors.”
Wayne said it is also critical for Black employees “to track and to maintain documentation on areas in which you have excelled and accomplished a great deal, so almost more objective indices of one’s competence and performance, rather than just communicating that yourself to your manager.”
But in many cases, the best option is to leave.
This is what Joyce said she did when she experienced this trap of self-promotion. At her then-job, she noticed people she started with the same day were getting promoted while she was not. Joyce would do the things being asked of her in performance reviews and would go to leadership and human resources with documentation, but she still saw no change and continued to watch less-experienced co-workers advance.
“[I was] getting overlooked to where it was really a slap in the face and almost, I felt like, an embarrassment to me, as to ‘What am I not doing?’” she said. “After, I think, year three of not being promoted, I had decided to leave the organisation, which was the best thing for me. And the next place that I chose to work was for a manager who looked like me.”
For Black employees who do exit unsupportive companies, Joyce advises them to look at the turnover of diverse staff and the representation in leadership of places they want to work at next to lower the chances of the situation happening again.
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Ultimately, however, the burden should not be on Black employees to deal with their white managers’ bad managing. Instead, it is the organisation’s responsibility to rectify the problem.
“The backlash toward Black employees’ self-promotion only exists when the manager holds a negative competence-related stereotype, so the most direct method to mitigate the bias is to mitigate the stereotypes,” Sun said. “This is, of course, not an easy job, but it is organisations’ responsibility and the only pathway to create an equitable workplace.”
Or, as Joyce put it, “This is one of those cases where it’s really not you, it’s them.”
