Comment: Being Nobody

I was sitting in the bank the other day, waiting for a colleague to finish a transaction at the desk. In front of me was a longish queue of people all seeking their few minutes with a bank teller. I vaguely noticed the people in the line and saw that all but one was very white, very middle class. The exception was a smartly dressed young man whose origins were clearly somewhere in Central Asia and whose body language shouted anxiety. He was not with anyone else in the line and everyone had their eyes politely averted and faces disengaged. When it got to his turn he said something to the man behind him that I could not clearly understand at the time. The other man extended his arm with hand at an angle and the nervous man went up to the desk. All seemed well and he was soon heading for the door with a sense of relief on his face. Then I figured out what he had said to the man behind him: “Do you mind?” It was his turn, but he was still asking permission to take it.

I don’t think any of us lucky enough to be born in the right place in the World can ever quite realise what it must be like to be brought up to internalise a deep sense of inferiority. That incident reminded me so much of another in Hong Kong several years back. I was staying in a smart hotel and got into conversation with an American at the bar. It was mid-evening and some live music struck up in a neighbouring cocktail lounge.

They were playing all the usual classics and had a singer crooning in English. The music switched to the ever familiar ‘Summertime’ and I must have indicated my partiality to it because my new friend said, “Yes, Filipinos are good at this stuff.” I replied, “How do you know it is a Filipino group, have you seen them perform here before?” He said he had not, then asked me to “listen” and tell him what I observed. I heard them play a few more bars and reflected that all I could say was that it was well performed. “Exactly,” he replied, “that is just it. They have listened to others play the music many times and then mimicked what they heard. It is flawless, but without spirit, without connection. Perfect in a way, but essentially alien to the player. It is the voice of a servant serving their cultural master. We have the same in the US with those from Puerto Rico.”

As HR professionals we live in a sea teeming with prejudices of all kinds. The world of business is no different from the world at large in this respect, but the difference is that in HR we need to keep the sharks from surfacing or biting the legs of the bathers. Back in the days of simmering labour conflict, HR used to be largely populated by hardened (but essentially kind) IR fixers who could keep the unions onside. The way the most successful IR fixer did this was by trying to get under the skin of the typical worker and union Convener. They mixed informally on a daily basis, heard all their family troubles, and offered a helping hand out of sheer humanity. They were, sure enough, one of the “bosses” but a “good guy (or gal)” and someone people could trust. As HR has professionalised and become “business partners”, a lot of that old connection, those well-honed skills, have been lost. A further consequence of this is that we fail to see the deep divisions that still exist before us. We mistake peace for contentment, order for consent. But in every office, warehouse, and shop floor people are asking colleagues, “Do you mind?”, and every workplace contains those having flawless levels of performance who are totally alienated from the jobs they perform.