Navigating Differences

For eLearning professionals,navigating personal variables and differences lies at the very heart oflearning-experience design. Whether we call it needs analysis, learneranalysis, requirements analysis, or whatever, eLearning designers understandthat the best way to create experiences that engage and inspire is to make surethe attributes and artifacts of those experiences are relevant, engaging, andmeaningful for their audience. One might even suggest that managing personaldifferences is one of the fundamental tenets of our practice. Without it, wefocus on personal expression. And that’s fine. But that’s more like art, notwork product. 

With all of our professionalknowledge, skills, and abilities about navigating differences, why do genderdifferences continue to hamper career path development?

If I think about it for more than abit I can generally come up with personal examples where “the gender thing” hasreared its head. In some cases the disparities were material—being paid lessthan co-workers, perhaps not being considered for a lead role even though myskills were demonstrably stronger.

But I have also had to come face toface with my own predilection for finding bias where perhaps there was none,remembering a period of time where if I didn’t get what I wanted, and knew Ideserved it, that it was “obviously because I am a woman.” Workplace genderbias continues to exist in varying degrees of intensity across the differentindustries that engage in eLearning so it is important to call it out for whatit is when encountered. But one must also guard against creating one’s ownpersonal biases on the road toward professional maturity.

When I first started working ineLearning I was a young academic actively looking for ways to change the world.One such moment of success got me involved as a junior (female) member of aresearch team of senior academics (all men). Everyone was nice enough. But Icould tell I made them edgy. And yes, I admit to having more than a few momentsof private intellectual righteousness, wondering why I needed to constantlyprove that I was the skilled, competent one that should be given the shot atleading the team, writing the manifesto, or be credited as the one who came upwith all the big, shiny ideas.

At the time I was fairly certainthat my more conservative institutional colleagues were shining me on, notgiving me the shot at leadership that I longed for because I was young andfeisty and female. The project ended, we all went our separate ways, no harm nofoul, or so I thought. I ran into one of those men not too long ago. Turns outthat the reason I didn’t get asked to lead was mostly because they couldn’tfigure out why I was angry all the time. And after a while the overhead wasjust too much.

IS that sexist? Well, maybe. OR isit really more about my awareness of how my behavior affected my colleagues.WAS I angry all the time? Is THAT sexist?? Well, no… but I did have a way withwords to let people know exactly how I felt. And in that moment I had astartled appreciation for the power of my words when I creatively expressedmyself, which in this particular instance may have actually interfered with myability to produce work product expected of me. Because really, nobody wants towork with a smart-ass, no matter how righteous he or she may be.

In looking back on early careerexperiences, when everyone is anxiousabout being seen as “good enough,” it was also easy to see that my concernsabout not being taken seriously as the “only girl in the room,” were oftenconfounded by other variables. I was also, occasionally, the youngest in theroom. Sometimes I was the least experienced person in the room. Sometimes I wasthe pushiest person in the room and had made everyone cranky by not payingattention to all the cues and clues. Sometimes, just sometimes, I didn’t seeeye-to-eye with the person leading an initiative. Sometimes my skill-set wasn’taligned with whatever work-product was needed. Not surprisingly, if any ofthose factors were out of alignment, the probabilities of my personal successon those teams were dramatically diminished.

But there were also several pointsalong the way where I realized that I WAS gaining the skills that would make mea successful leader, and that maybe I just needed to focus on developingessential ways of being that would serve me well, find the community ofpractitioners who could help me grow, and quit worrying about what other peoplethought as I tried to keep my eyes on the prize.

Navigating differences in theworkplace—gender differences, skill differences, cultural differences, valuedifferences—are, in and of themselves, things to manage on the way to achievinga goal. From a designer’s perspective, they are conditions to be managed whileon the road to achieving the goals and outcomes of the work at hand.

About a month ago I shared a piece in Learning Solutions Magazine in which Ireflected on the 10 things I wish someone had told me before I started out ineLearning. Among the reflections, I realized that the things I wish I’d knownwere more about ways of being thanabout things to do, or things to know. So my words of advice for finding aprofessional state of gender parity: strive first to be the person—not the man,not the woman, but the person—thatpeople want on their team. Always remember the people who chose to be on yours.