Do you consider yourself an ally to people who have been historically excluded?
Are you sure you’re really helping?
Say you hire a young woman of color. She is talented. You’re excited. You’re invested in her doing well.
Then she completes her first assignment for you…and it’s not quite as good as it needed to be.
You don’t want to discourage her, so you praise what’s good about it, and fix the rest yourself.
Then you keep giving her easy assignments. She does well, and you praise her some more.
Maybe it feels like you’re helping this new employee to succeed.
But…she isn’t growing. In fact, she’s falling behind her peers.
A year passes, maybe two. Everyone likes her, but she doesn’t get the opportunity to shine through her work. She doesn’t advance. And she leaves, disengaged.
What went wrong?

Dr. Valerie Batts describes this pattern as “dysfunctional rescuing.” It tends to be a problem for people who see themselves as allies—who consciously want to see marginalized people succeed at work, but their implicit bias gets in the way.
So they “help” them—by lowering their standards.
If you recognize any of this, instead of beating yourself up about the past, focus on doing better going forward. The place to start is tackling your implicit biases.
Bias reveals itself through behavior, not conscious thought. You tell yourself you believe everybody can do well, but unconsciously, you don’t. Withholding challenging assignments and constructive feedback from some people and not others are signs that you are implicitly nervous they won’t do well.
Ask yourself: would you worry as much about giving feedback to someone who shares your identity? Who do you tend to think of when you need someone to work on a complex assignment?
All employees benefit from assignments that will help them stretch and grow.
It is difficult for anyone to improve unless they receive constructive feedback on their work.
Not providing it is not doing them a favor; it actually causes harm.
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