Dealing with unconscious bias and microagressions in the workplace with Nicole DaCosta

Dealing with unconscious bias and microagressions in the workplace

Towards a more equitable and inclusive work environment

I'm excited that you're joining me. I have a new interview for you with my friend, Nicole DaCosta. In this episode, we're talking not only about talent development but all about unconscious bias and microaggressions as well. Nicole is a learning and development leader at Brinker International, home of Chili's Grill & Bar. After spending over two decades in the hospitality industry specializing in both restaurant and retail organizations, Nicole understands the importance of the guest experience. She brings expertise in leadership, culture and inclusion and talent development. She is passionate about cultural intelligence and bridging the gap between our differences to connect more meaningfully at all levels. She's also big on volunteering in the Dallas area where she is.

We're going to dig into not only L&D, but how things have affected the hospitality and how L&D has worked in the hospitality industry, especially under COVID. We're going to dig into unconscious bias and microaggressions, as well as Nicole's experience of working as a black woman in Corporate America. We are also going to talk about some of the trends and book recommendations that she has and the volunteer work she's been doing as well. There are some great insights and information in this episode. I can't wait for you to dive in. Without further ado here is my interview with Nicole DaCosta from Brinker International.

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Nicole, welcome to the show.

Andy, how's it going?

I am good. I'm excited to have you on. We have a ton of great topics to talk about from learning and development in the hospitality industry to digging into diversity, equity and inclusion, and things like unconscious bias and microaggressions and how those fit into L&D, and what we can all be doing to improve there. Before we do, let’s start with a little bit of your background. Maybe you can share a little bit of your background in L&D and how you got to where you are.

Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. I'm going to take you way back. My mom used to ask me, “Little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I told her I wanted to be a waitress and a teacher. My background, going to school, I went to Huston-Tillotson College, now Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. It's a historically black college. I went there to learn how to be a high school teacher. While I was in college, like most college students, what are you going to do to earn a couple of bucks? We wait for tables and we bartend. I got my restaurant's introduction and initiation while in college.

It's been this cool journey of taking this education for being a high school teacher, which I tried. It wasn't quite for me, but it transitioned into training and development within Corporate America. I started off in medical manufacturing, but then it transitioned to retail, which I loved. It then brought me back home to my roots in the restaurant industry. I've been in a learning and development capacity for a restaurant organization here in Dallas, Texas. Honestly, it's allowed me to merge both of those loves of being engaged with the restaurant and learning and teaching and going back to my childhood roots.

My dad was a high school teacher for many years. My parents were all educators, but teaching high school sounds scary to me. I'd rather be doing training and development programs for adults.

It's funny when you walk down the hall and they think that you're one of them.

Avoidance is worse than saying the wrong thing, especially when it’s coming from the right place. Click To Tweet

Brinker L&D

Getting into L&D, what is your role in your responsibilities at Brinker?

My role is learning and development. We sit within the Chili's org. Primarily my responsibilities are re-imagining and redesigning our manager curriculum. Everything from our hourly shift supervisors all the way up to our general managers and also our multiunit leaders. That could be anything from operations, training, leadership development, diversity and inclusion, and the guest experience. Also, we support our corporate office as well. Everything from onboarding all the way through our talent review program, fun, and support tools. It's a little mixed bag of a lot of different things, but we work hard to make sure our people are getting what they need when they need it in the platforms that they needed as well.

I always see hospitality as being a different industry from many others and L&D has extra challenges with a lot of people being out in the field, serving customers and clients, and things like that. How do you see L&D and hospitality being different from other industries?

The biggest difference is dealing with the public. You never know what you're going to get. As a corporate employee, I know the people that I work with and I work with them on a day-to-day basis. You get to know them, you understand who they are, where they come from, and you work with them on a variety of projects. You get to experience them on a day-to-day basis. When you're working in whether it's the restaurant industry or retail industry, you have someone new coming in your doors every day. That provides a wealth of opportunities and sometimes different challenges. At the end of the day, you are trying to make a connection. You're trying to make people feel special. Jurors are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to deliver on those expectations and experiences. Sometimes, you have to lean on. You also have to be flexible because sometimes people are going to come in who may not act in the most appropriate of ways. How do you deal with it then?

When COVID hit back in March 2020, there wasn't a company or industry out there that wasn't impacted in some way, but I feel like hospitality was adversely impacted. You talk about restaurants, not to mention the travel industry and everything else, where people are not going anymore or shutting down. Things have come back a little bit, but I imagine that had a big impact. How did your team handle that time and making sure that you were still able to engage employees when things were getting shut down and there was so much uncertainty?

From a learning and development perspective, we had to turn on a dime. At that point, our business was changing every day, going from full service dining to go business model only. We had team members who were saying like, “We need only this many.” It was a big challenge, but what I was proud of is how we said, “We have COVID and disinfecting protocols.” We were all hands on deck for anything that was needed to keep the business afloat, to keep it moving forward. From that training perspective, even saying, “We're not hiring anyone. Let's put everything on pause. When we are ready to start bringing in new team members or new managers, how are we going to onboard them? How are we going to train them?”

We went to virtual orientations for all of our managers and certified shift leaders. We went to a condensed training schedule so that way, it was easier and faster for them to execute. It's like you're adjusting on the fly. We know what to expect a little bit more now, how do we revert back on? It’s a constant evolution. It's constant process improvement to make sure that it can work for the people that are still needing to have the training in hand.

There's still a lot of uncertainty, but it does seem like in October of 2020, things are stabilizing a little bit. How do you approach giving development to employees in the field who are running around not sitting in front of a desk all day?

Unconscious Bias: Why do you think it's called unconscious? Because we're not aware of the things that we're doing or that it's offensive or damaging to other people.

For a lot of our training, we have transitioned the whole learning and development team from paper-based training years ago. We have hourly training and we've got our manager curriculum. We went on this journey around how do we transition our content from paper-based to digital where it's accessible on mobile devices, whether it's an iPad in the restaurant? Most of our team members preferred to use their own mobile devices. How are we transitioning to eLearning? We use a lot of great videos and providing learning that way. We are making it short, fast, easy, engaging and slick, as some people would like to say. That's been probably one of the biggest heaviest pieces of looking that we've done.

When you have all of this content that's served up digitally, it makes it easy to change on the fly. Think about what's happening with COVID, where everything was changing on a daily basis, sometimes hour to hour. If there is a new protocol that needs to be deployed out to the field, if it's paper-based, that makes it hard and challenging to control all of those different versions. When it's digital, you can upload a new document, a new video, or a new piece of training content and everyone has the most current and updated version. That's been great to have.

Black Woman In Corporate America

I know you're passionate about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI. Some of that you've been working on and overseeing for a long time. The world became more focused on DEI after the death of George Floyd back in May 2020. We saw a lot of organizations responding to that. I'm curious what the response has looked like for your organization. What do you see as some of the biggest challenges holding companies back when it comes to DEI?

A Senior Director of Diversity Inclusion at our organization that has been doing amazing work in setting a strategy around, how do we want to address diversity and inclusion as an organization pre-COVID, presummer 2020? How do we then react to what was happening across the country? No one could prepare themselves for what happened. It has been a great journey in listening to the organization, hearing what are our leaders are experiencing in the field, hearing what our team members are feeling and how was that affecting their work, their sense of belonging and their lives. It was important for us to say, “Where do we need to lean heavier into the educational piece?”

To going unconscious bias training, revamping what we had and deploying new content that speaks to where we stand as an organization, which I'm also proud of. It's like we can do better and we will do better in face of racial injustice and incorporating that language and messaging from our leadership team, who's been excellent about standing behind us as an organization and standing with our communities. The work that we've done and worked collaboratively with our DNI senior director has been a beautiful thing. We have an Anti-Racism Alliance Task Force. We're not just looking at the training pieces, we're looking at our message externally to our guests and to the public.

We're looking at taking that data and what insights are we gathering from that? What messages or signage do we need to have in our restaurants to support our team members? We're looking at everything. We're looking at development for underrepresented groups. What about our black general managers in our restaurants? Is everyone having that fair opportunity and equal access to development? We've been unraveling and looking at all of those details, which has been amazing. It's been a proud moment in the midst of a lot of chaos, turmoil and sadness, but there has been a lot of great things that have come out of.

We've seen a lot of organizations step up, respond and change. I want to get into the topic of unconscious bias you mentioned. What the challenges are and the best practices? How we can help people and organizations? I want to ask you about your personal experience as well. You're a black woman working in the corporate world, which I know has had its challenges. Has anything changed for you or do you feel like things are different now that the rest of the world is waking up about this topic?

There are times when I'll have these moments of, “Welcome to the barbecue. Thanks for coming.” Me, my family and my friends have been talking about this for a long time. At the same time, I'm happy and I'm excited that the conversations are being had. Some of them are clunky and uncomfortable. People are saying like, “I don't want to say the wrong thing.” It's like, “I know, but don't avoid the conversation. You don't want to say the wrong thing. Avoidance is worse than saying the wrong thing, especially when it's coming from the right place. The execution was just a little wobbly.”

In terms of my experiences, when I think about unconscious bias and how it has impacted me, it forces me to do this historical walk into my past and saying like, “When I was a kitchen manager way back when and running my shift and kicking plates back to the cooks that were making everything behind the line, they're challenging me.” They're challenging whether I can run a kitchen effectively or not. It's like, “I can. Your plate sucks, fix it, and give it back to me because our guests don't deserve that.” Unconscious bias around being the only woman of color in our restaurants. I had a situation and this wasn't an unconscious bias. This was a conscious bias. This was someone who called me Aunt Jemima. They didn't think that I heard what they said in a group of male kitchen managers. I'm like, “Are you talking about me? I'm the only black kitchen manager here. What was that about?”

If it’s true that all lives matter, people wouldn’t be screaming #BlackLivesMatter. Click To Tweet

It was extremely painful. It was humiliating. When I think about those experiences. I carry those lessons with me. As much as I hate talking about being called Aunt Jemima, I have to tell you that story because people would be shocked and saying like, “Who would say that?” There are people out there who do. There are so much information and many conversations around unconscious bias and microaggressions, what are they? What's the difference? It is important for us to understand it. It's called unconscious because we're not aware of the things that we're doing are harmful, offensive, and damaging to other people. Once you start to question, where does that belief come from? That's when you start to say, “I can make some changes.” They may be small changes over time, but changes. I'm happy when people are making changes in the first place.

It's such an important topic. As you said, it’s hard to bring it up sometimes because you're afraid of saying the wrong thing. When I said you're a black woman in the corporate world, I'm like, “Did I say that wrong? Is that not right? She went to a black college.”

This is great because there are going to be those moments. Now, because there's such a microscope on racial injustice, racial equity, and there are many other underrepresented groups that we could and should be talking about, but the focus and spotlight is on race. What I don't want to happen is every time someone says something, there's this level of anxiousness about like, “Am I going to do it wrong?” Let's all start talking. It's being aware of when you have to be willing to embrace people who are going through their journey and all of us are at different stages.

I've had these conversations with a lot of different people, a lot of different reactions, different perspectives, which is great. We're all different people. You were talking about unconscious bias and microaggressions. There is a lot of conversation about that, but still, a lot of people may not be clear on what those things are, how they're affecting work and how we can improve. Let's start by explaining, what are your definitions of unconscious bias? How're that impacting people? What are microaggressions?

When I think about an unconscious bias, this is when you have a certain prejudice or belief about a person, a thing, or a group that's you're unaware of it, but it could be considered unfair. It's all of those thoughts and beliefs where it could be influenced by where we grew up, where we went to school or the communities we lived in. When someone is acting and they're unaware and don't realize that their behavior is biased. Microaggressions are things that people say and things they do. It's those little slights or actions that people take on that catches you off guard. They're like, “Did they say what I think they said. What was that about?” The unconscious bias, those are the thoughts and the beliefs that are living underneath the surface. We've heard many people say, “They're natural. Our brain naturally works that way.” Microaggressions are the things that people say and do that are also damaging. It could be hurtful. I don't look at them as being the same thing, but I do think they run a very fine line.

They're related. Unconscious bias can drive microaggressions. A lot of microaggressions are things that are done unconsciously. One of the most common things I hear from black women as a microaggression is a white person or any people in the office asking to touch their hair or touching their hair without asking. Have you experienced that?

Yes, in every organization I've worked at. Whereas my hair might be in this straight kind of bob, some days it might be curly. Sometimes I have my hair braided and the comments around, “Your hair's different.” I was like, “Your hair was different yesterday, but I didn't comment on it. What's the fascination?” The actual reaching out and touching without permission. If you do that to everybody, maybe that's a different story, but when it's typically singled out for specific people, that's when it becomes an issue. It makes it uncomfortable because the last thing I want to do is go to work and have to defend myself about being touched. My hair being petted or accosted without someone knowing that's not okay.

Let me add to that. There are certain things that if you're doing that, if you're treating everyone the same way, that's fine. If you're the guy at the office who's touching everybody's hair, you might want to stop. It doesn't matter what race they are.

Unconscious Bias: We need to learn how to understand where other people are coming from. Just because something is not our experience doesn't make it not real.

That's a whole other conversation.

What are a couple of other examples of microaggressions you've seen, heard and experienced that are common?

When I think about microaggressions, it's like mimicking people's accents. People might think it's funny. It might be acceptable when you're in that little circle of people and you do it all the time, but when you go out to a different circle or demographic, I was like, “That's not okay.” Another microaggression is when people say, “I don't see color. Nicole, when I see you, I don't see you as black.” That's the most defining characteristic. That's the first thing you see. You can't say that you don't see it because when you say that to me, it says that you're not seeing me as a black woman and I'm a proud black woman. Another thing I've been thinking about our LGBTQ+ community, asking transgender people about their genitalia. To me, that goes beyond microaggression. That was awful. Why? Don’t ask those questions. It is none of your business. It's inappropriate and offensive.

Even when people talk about Black Lives Matter, it's all lives matter. Stop being sensitive. If that were the case, we wouldn't be saying it. There are all these different examples. Even saying things like, “That's so gay.” When you start to think about the things that you inherently believe, you can't quite put your finger on it, but it's there. You realize that you say certain things because they're rooted in those beliefs, you have to stop. Pause for a second. We always tell people, “Read the room.”

It is like, “If I'm going to say this thing, is it going to offend this other person that's in the room?” Here's the thing, just because it's a comment or a statement about a specific demographic, it might offend somebody who's not of that demographic. At the end of the day, what we're getting a big lesson in is thoughtfulness. We're getting a big lesson in empathy, in terms of, how are we understanding where other people are coming from? Just because it's not our experience, it doesn't make it not real. Also, we're getting a lesson in, how are we getting to know people who are different than us? Are we spending time doing those things?

A Call To Action

How do you approach combating unconscious bias? You mentioned you have unconscious bias training set up. How do we help organizations and people personally to stop these microaggressions so we have a more equitable inclusive workplace?

If you're talking about a call to action, what are some things that you can do? First and foremost, you got to do the work. You have to go on that personal journey into understanding your own biases. One thing I've learned, especially in the summer of 2020, is that people are learning and they are unlearning a lifetime of beliefs, behaviors and values. I grew up in this community and this is something that we always did or said. My parents do these things. My grandparents do these things. You can peanut butter this across multiple ethnicities and races. You name it. People are learning and unlearning a lot now. Go on the journey, examine your own biases and start to question, where does this come from? Is this still the belief that I want to hold? Be willing to talk about it. Be willing to have those hard, ugly conversations that we tend to avoid because who wants to talk about racism all the time?

It's heavy and it's hard, but it's necessary. The only way that we're going to get better is if we talk about it and ask for feedback. I'm grateful that there are people in my organization and also my friends' circle who come to me when they say, “I need to talk to you about something and let me be careful.” It's important not to shift the burden to a group of people who are typically the ones that are feeling these biases and circumstances all the time.

At the same time, if you have those colleagues or friends that you can safely go and talk to about it, ask them for feedback and keep learning. There are many resources out there, whether it's on LinkedIn Learning and YouTube videos. There is a plethora of information. Netflix has a wonderful collection of movies and documentaries that you can search by for African-Americans. You can search and find so much out there. Keep learning and expanding your circle, do the work and be willing to talk about it.

Examine your biases and question where they come from. It’s going to be a process of unlearning a lifetime of beliefs, behaviors and values. Click To Tweet

Another thing is we learned from studying this as well and talking to a lot of great people like you, we need allies and leaders to step up, stand, speak up and push back on those microaggressions. We don't want to put the burden always on people from underrepresented groups, but you put it plainly. We need white guys like me to step up and say, “That was not appropriate. You shouldn't touch her hair. We need to make sure that everybody’s opinion is heard in this meeting or whatever it may be. We're all on the same team and we're all fighting for the same thing.”

You've called out something important. This is another thing that I've been proud of in our organization, our executive team is willing to do the work. Whether it's hosting leadership listening sessions for our team members and people in the field and at our corporate office to get on an intimate virtual call for up to twenty people and they're listening to their stories and hearing it firsthand. Whether it's them being vulnerable enough to say, “I realized that I was not understanding the experiences of black people that are working in my organization, black women that are working for me. I had to take a step back and say, ‘I want to hear what you have to say.’”

When you say allyship and we need more people to support and speak up, it also goes beyond speaking up. It’s you also has to start looking at your own internal systems, especially in our organizations. It's no secret that we have opportunities for representation across the land when it comes to leadership. It’s to start questioning, why is that and how are we reaching down for people to step into those leadership roles that are diverse? It can't continue to go as it is.

We need everybody working together to come to a solution or improve things. I want to make sure I ask you, how has your work in L&D and DNI influenced the volunteer work that you do for Harmony Empowered Living there in Dallas?

Harmony Empowered Living is a program that is part of our Harmony Career Development Center. The work that we do is in support of the communities in South Dallas. They're predominantly black. When you talk about underserved, under-resourced communities, it's an opportunity to go in and say, “How are we creating opportunities within the community for people who are unemployed or underemployed to find jobs that pay sustainable and livable wages? What are the skillsets that they need to get them ready for those jobs?” All of my passion for people in elevating and amplifying black voices and black people comes together beautifully with this volunteer work. It's been amazing to work with a powerhouse team of volunteers and women who are typically coming out of HR and business and social work. We're all banding together to bring this program to life.

Clearly, you are making a difference and helping a lot of people who could use the help, which is great. What's a trend that you're following in general and learning and talent development?

A trend that I've been sticking in and following is how companies are looking at blending, learning talent, diversity, inclusion, and belonging altogether. When you have those DNI strategies, they're massively important and you're looking at the structure of an organization. You're looking at how people are coming in, how you're attracting diverse talent, how do we create the experience once they're there, and how do we ensure that they're getting the promotability that they deserve. Typically, what happens is you need training in development and coaching along the way because you're also asking for leaders within the organization and employees that there are some behaviors that we have to change. That is a trend that's been fascinating and interesting to me is how are they merging all of those worlds together and how they can play in the same sandbox.

It's definitely what I'm seeing. For those reading for a while, you may have seen it or maybe you missed it, I released my report of the top five trends in talent development, and weaving DEI into everything that we do was number two on the list out of the top five trends. If you haven't gotten that go on over to TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com, that's our website. There should be a link there to download that free report. Thanks for mentioning that. Also, I wanted to ask you, is there a book that has made a big impact on you or that you highly recommend?

Unconscious Bias: Talking about racism is hard and heavy, but it’s necessary. It’s the only way for us to get better.

I'm been more of a podcast and TED Talk kind of girl. I was listening to Ibram Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist on my road trip to and from California. It’s a great playbook for people who are looking to dive into what does being or coming anti-racist mean? What does it not? Some of the podcasts and people that I'm following now, I'm loving Austin Channing Brown. I found her work on The Next Question to be powerful and engaging. I can't wait to dig into her book I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness.

Luvvie Ajayi got a great following on Instagram. I love reading her posts, her Rants & Randomness podcast has been great. Also, Mellody Hobson, Ash Beckham, Vernā Myers, those are some of my favorite TED Talks when it comes to overcoming our bias, color-blind versus color brave, and then when to take a stand and when to let it go. Those are some of the snippets and quick ones that I have been enjoying lately.

There are many great recommendations. If you are into books and podcasts, you can also join groups to connect with people and find out what's going on. You joined the Talent Development Think Tank Community that I run. You've only been in for a little while now, but what do you like about it so far?

I love that you always have an expert in our field. It can be a chief people officer from an organization. It could be a DNI expert. It could be a learning design strategist. You have all of these amazing people. For those of us that are in the learning and talent space, we nerd out on this stuff. It's great to go in and see previous interviews and read what they have to say. It's sharing all of these wonderful resources. I think it's been great. I love that I can post a question and ask for information and people will start to chime in with their recommendation. It's a nice little think tank you got there.

Thank you, Nicole. We're glad to have you. For anybody out there who is interested in coming to join us, our website is TDTT.us. You can get all the information there. You can reach out to me with questions. The last question for you, Nicole. For anybody else out there in talent development looking for a way to accelerate their career success, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

If you're looking to get into the talent space, get comfortable with diversifying your skillsets. We're always going to have our subject matter experts, which they're necessary. There's a lot of value when you're nimble and you can flex across multiple disciplines. This has also been a trend with organizations where they're merging and blending roles. If you are an OT practitioner, being able to flex into learning and development would probably be a benefit. If you're new to the talent space, being able to diversify your skillsets because situations like COVID-19 may have you flexing into worlds and work that you were never a part of it before. Being able to have that agility would be my recommendation.

The world is always changing and we need to be ready. All the more reason to be learning, connecting, diversifying and building your network. We're doing all those things inside the think tanks. I'm glad you're there. Nicole, this has been fantastic. It is great to hear about your experience, everything you're doing and how we can all get better when it comes to unconscious bias, microaggressions and become better allies as well. Thank you again for joining me on the show.

Thank you for having me, Andy. It was great.

Take care.

• Brinker International
• Nicole DaCosta
• How To Be An Anti-Racist
• I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
• Luvvie Ajayi - Instagram
• Rants & Randomness
• Mellody Hobson - TED Talk
• Ash Beckham - TED Talk
• Vernā Myers - TED Talk
• TDTT.us