Leadership is a Responsibility: How to Become an Inclusive Leader in the Modern Workplace by Understanding the Lived Experiences of Black Women and Afro-Latinas at Work

By Marisol Capellan

Are professional organizations that publicly support equity and inclusive workplaces driving real, systemic change, or just using minorities to virtue signal while upholding the status quo?

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• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889266716

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LEADERSHIP IS

A RESPONSIBILITY

LEADERSHIP IS

A RESPONSIBILITY

Dr. Marisol Capellan

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2023 Dr. Marisol Capellan

All rights reserved.

Leadership is a Responsibility

ISBN

979-8-88926-670-9 Paperback

979-8-88926-671-6 Ebook

To my husband and our three kids, I love you.

Contents

Introduction

PART 1:

Parts of My Story

Chapter 1:

Preamble and Overview

Chapter 2:

Fresolina: My Education Story

Chapter 3:

Teaching: From Rookie to Veteran

Chapter 4:

Discrimination: From Mentor to Nemesis

Chapter 5:

The Meeting

Chapter 6:

The Aftermath

PART 2:

Women in the Workplace

Chapter 7:

The Rules Are Different for Everyone

Chapter 8:

The Invisible Barriers

Chapter 9:

Women in Leadership

Chapter 10:

Black Women in the Workplace

Chapter 11:

Afro-Latinas in the Workplace

Chapter 12:

The Working Mom Punishment

PART 3:

Leadership Is a Responsibility 

Chapter 13:

The Case for Responsible Leadership

Chapter 14:

How to Become a Responsible Leader

Chapter 15:

Managing Your Career and Well-Being: Advice for Women in the Workplace

Conclusion:

A Letter to My Readers

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

There was an Offred before me. She helped me find my way out. She’s dead. She’s alive. She is me.

—June/Offred, The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, Episode 4)

It’s their own fault. They should’ve never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.

—June/Offred, The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, Episode 10)

As a leader, you have the capacity to influence other people’s lives well beyond the workplace. Like it or not, your leadership impacts your team members’ quality of life, their sense of self-worth, and their overall well-being. When leadership is taken lightly, everyone gets hurt. Now imagine a bad leader who also propagates an environment where racism, harassment, discrimination, and other toxic abuses are allowed to exist and even flourish unabated. 

Most people can easily recall at least one bad boss, and many of us have had several. Bad leadership affects everyone. Often, our most overlooked and underrepresented minorities are abused, discarded, and dehumanized. You can be a force of gossip, negativity, infighting, demoralization, jealousy, blame, and even uglier outcomes, or you can be a positive, motivational force that serves to inspire, uplift, and transform a team and those humans within it who follow your lead! 

A leader should always be the source of strategic guidance, improved performance through the gift of constructive, positive feedback, and a mindset of positive change that leads their people and the world around them forward.

I want to help foster a future where leaders will be not just operationally sound, but where they must also be aware of how intersectionality of identities impacts their employees’ experiences at work. Privilege equals access, which includes access to social capital, education, resources, and acceptance. Privilege is comprised of many things, and it is a huge head start in the race of life. An employee’s exposure to privilege or subjection to oppression will shape the way they value work, motivation, belongingness, and inclusion. Leadership can never be a one-size-fits-all approach. I truly believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes. Studies have shown that well-managed teams with inclusive leaders valuing all members equally perform better.

A leader’s job is to support the development of many different people with vastly diverse backgrounds in many cases. Leadership is a responsibility to those under your care. If you do not care about your people, you should not be in a position to lead anyone. Your responsible leadership, or lack thereof, will impact other people’s well-being in their work and personal lives. Your first job as a responsible leader is to genuinely care about your team members enough to know and value their background and their identities by taking an active role in understanding the challenges each member faces on an individual, team, and societal level. When you are leading a department, a team, or a movement that involves other people, you are responsible for their experience.

Research has shown that 87 percent of human resource (HR) leaders consider employee retention to be a primary concern due in part to the costs of employee onboarding. Some of the most frequently cited reasons for high employee retention are good leaders, company culture, and job recognition (Dickson 2022). The leader who takes the time to ensure the job is done very well works earnestly to ensure the well-being of their team members. They understand the challenges their team members face, the goals they have, and what motivates them to come to work every day. This individual will be a much more effective and successful leader. It is not easy, but it is necessary.

I was compelled to write this book and tell my story. As a Black Hispanic woman, I believe I played by the rules and by the societal rule book. I worked hard and pursued advanced education to the point of achieving a doctoral degree at one of the leading higher education institutions in the United States, and by default, in the world. I was successful in my lesser roles, and I continued to be successful in my teaching. I worked at my craft, and every semester my ratings consistently climbed to 4.5 and above—out of 5. I did many things very well. I was dedicated and loyal. I helped other team members, and I pursued wholesome extracurricular activities, giving back to my community. Remarkably, none of those things prevented me from being harassed, targeted, and discriminated against at work. In my estimation, my supervisor witnessed it, orchestrated it, and contributed to it, ultimately pushing me out the door. 

Working among my predominantly White colleagues, I experienced unique struggles during my career regardless of my excellent performance and worthy credentials. I never believed for one minute that I should be given anything strictly because of my skin color or ethnicity, but rather because I had worked for it and earned the opportunity. However, in environments where people who look and sound like me are far outnumbered by the dominant, entrenched demographic, that opportunity must be protected for the underrepresented. This protection should be compulsory, especially within institutions like the one where I worked, precisely because these institutions frequently vocalize support for diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice, but fall far short in practice and action.

I will share much more of my confrontation with workplace discrimination. I will also share my experience of submitting a formal discrimination complaint in a professional setting and going through an internal investigation. I entered this investigation with trepidation but with the greatest hope for justice and a belief in the institution’s leadership and their performative public statements and programs. Ultimately, I realized this was all a sham to protect the institution, and my supervisor and tormentor—Dr. Ofkaren. I will call her Dr. Ofkaren, with a nod to current pop culture. The investigation was certainly not conducted to protect their loyal, double-degree earning, minority alumna, and high-performing employee—yours truly.

Writing this book has exposed me to the unique experiences of the many, very talented Black women professionals who were kind and brave enough to speak with me. I will also be sharing their invaluable insights and unique experiences throughout the book. I will be sharing winning leadership principles that will be helpful to a new generation of leaders and, hopefully, encourage them to be more boldly inclusive. A new generation of responsible leaders who work tirelessly to better our society through positive, inclusive leadership is something we should all strive to assist.

Sections of this book will highlight my doctoral research on the advancement of women to leadership roles, interviews with Black women, Afro-Latinas and industry experts on leadership, burnout, and modern workplace leadership. I will revisit my experiences with Dr. Ofkaren, a woman manager and supposed feminist who ostensibly, publicly, and performatively cared about increasing representation of minorities up until the point where I formally asked to sit at the table. I will address how we can navigate a workplace avoiding the dangers of performative allyship. Finally, we will explore a new definition of leadership and lessons from minority women to create a more inclusive workforce and career development tips for minorities.

In large part, this book was written for women, especially minority women, who have seen or will experience firsthand stories of discrimination like mine in the workplace. I hope this book helps minorities going through challenges at work. I hope it helps managers create inclusive company cultures and aids in increasing the representation of Black women and all underrepresented minorities in positions of power throughout society. To do that, we need leaders who are willing to learn about how leadership impacts minorities. Specifically, we need leaders who understand that representation matters, and we need educators who want to teach future leaders how to practice social responsibility in their places of work.

Leaders need a multifaceted approach to promote inclusivity in the workplace. Women, especially Black women, face many individual, institutional, and societal challenges during their career trajectory and throughout their lives. The cumulative effect of all these challenges can be a dehumanizing experience that can, and very often does, negatively impact their overall well-being. We need leaders who are willing to change the system from the top down. It all starts with the people leading our society and our organizations because Leadership Is a Responsibility.

PART 1:

Parts of My Story

Chapter 1:

Preamble and Overview

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

—Maya Angelou

In 2021, I graduated with a doctoral degree in higher education leadership. I officially became a part of the world’s population of doctoral degree holders, which according to my doctoral classes, only an estimated 2 percent of all living humans in the United States holds a doctoral or terminal degree. As the first person in my family to ever earn graduate degrees, I was looking forward to all the opportunities that would now be available to me and how perhaps, I could change the trajectory of life and opportunity for myself and for future generations of my family.

My journey to becoming an expert in leadership began long ago in the profound struggles of my childhood. I was born in the Dominican Republic to a young, single mother. By all reliable accounts and my personal experience, my time in the womb and at birth was harrowing, marked by severe neglect and abandonment until my father’s family saved me. 

My grandmother lovingly and strictly raised me in abject poverty in a cinder block home with no windows, dirt floors, and occasional electricity or water. It was not uncommon for our small home to be flooded with rainwater runoff from the street or for rats to explore my small bedroom and crawl over me at night while I slept with the covers over my head. We had to go outside to use the bathroom until I was almost seven, which meant at night, I had to use a small bucket I kept in my room to avoid encountering the creepy crawly critters of the night. 

The home I live in today and the life I worked so hard to earn did not come easily. My grandmother raised five children and later raised me, while always emphasizing the value of education. Every day was a struggle of worry, arduous work, menial labor, and often very little food. Many nights, we went to bed with a full glass of water. We would run to the corner colmado to buy a single eight-ounce bottle of Malta for fifteen pesos—about ten cents at the time—which we would drink to keep the hunger pangs away and sleep through the night. 

Social services in a third-world country are a fantasy, and money for a daycare or a babysitter was not an option, so my grandmother enrolled me in school at an early age. I was in the first grade when I was four years old, and I graduated from high school at sixteen. 

I always loved school. My grandmother would say that staying out of trouble, being disciplined in school, and getting good grades was the path to getting out of poverty. I remained an excellent student at every level in school. But as poverty tends to yield dysfunction, I survived a tumultuous first sixteen years of life and got the chance to move to Miami to live with my birth mother and pursue a college education shortly after my high school graduation. 

I was chasing the most basic by-product of privilege by seeking access to higher education and economic opportunities for a better life.

Four months after I arrived, with no provocation whatsoever, my mother told me I was on my own and sent me out into the street with a bag of my clothes and no shelter of any kind. I had just turned seventeen years old; I was not yet enrolled in college classes, and I was working at McDonald’s five to six days a week. My mother took almost every penny she could. 

My struggles in America began the night she sent me away, but I never stopped working hard. I persevered through countless challenges and pursued my college degree until I graduated with honors. I had to overcome so many obstacles during my journey, including temporary homelessness, the total absence of parental support, no network or social capital, constant housing instability, food insecurity, health problems, and loneliness.

Even with these challenges, I was always very driven to succeed and make it happen. The lack of food in my body, the hours I rode buses from school to minimum wage jobs, and my harrowing sleeping arrangements never defeated the hunger I felt inside to learn, compete, and work hard to achieve. Someday, I wanted to move forward toward abundance and stability in my life. 

Despite going through so many challenges, graduating at the top of my class with my undergraduate and graduate degrees seemed to be leading me to the reward I had always longed for. I loved school so much that all I wanted to do was become an educator. Specifically, my dream was becoming an educator at a leading, four-year, private, higher-education institution in the United States. Finally, my dreams were coming true!

I overcame many challenges in my plight-riddled childhood. Some of the ways I overcame these challenges included working hard in every aspect of my life, earning degrees with honors, compiling an extensive list of glowing recommendation letters, and generally exceeding expectations in every way during my academic and career trajectories. But little did I know, nothing would protect me from being subjected to crushing discrimination in the workplace once I began to move forward into areas where people who looked and sounded like me had rarely been given the chance to enter.

As a minority immigrant in the United States, a descendant of indigenous Taino Indians and Black Africans who were brought to the new world of Hispaniola as human property in the chains of chattel slavery, I believed so much in the promise of America and my naive belief in the innate decency and righteousness of its major institutions, laws, and leaders. I never imagined the evil and imperfection I would encounter! 

Growing up in the Dominican Republic (DR), it was very rare to see anyone who looked like me depicted on Dominican television, despite the preponderance of Black Hispanic Dominicans. The effects of colonialism and rampant colorism are still very influential forces in the class and social structure of the DR. The preferred skin color is very light, or simply White when available, and the preferred hair type is very straight. In other words, Afrocentric physical characteristics are not in demand. Occasionally, I had seen preteen American TV shows at a friend’s house. Characters like Raven and Urkel were immediately and intimately relatable. I hoped someday, I might live in the country where people who looked like me were shown on television, starring in a show! I never expected to encounter racial barriers and discrimination, which are much worse in a way, because in the United States we are supposedly enlightened, aware, and soldiering against the backward attitudes found in other countries.

After arriving in the United States, I worked in low-level roles at the beginning of my career trajectory. My coworkers and supervisors consistently applauded my work ethic, education, and job performance. They considered these elements in decisions regarding the next step in my career progression. However, the more I sought to move up in my career, I began to see how those qualities were overlooked and replaced with more subjective, undefined, and amorphous preconditions. This proved to be far more dependent on my race, gender, national origin, and caregiving responsibilities—and how those factors made others feel. 

Suddenly, making sure people felt comfortable around me mattered more than my work ethic and measured performance. The responsibility of my predominantly White and White Latino colleagues’ feelings fell on my shoulders. I could be lauded mildly for my great work and results, but simultaneously get criticized in the strangest way for the feelings of others with whom I barely—if ever—interacted, and to whom I usually made a point of smiling and saying hello, nonetheless. In fact, my previous efforts to form a relationship with them had been mostly ignored or fully rebuffed, and so I focused instead on the actual work and delivering excellence. How do you make people like you, even when you are being nice to everyone, and yet somehow, that is not enough, and mystery Karens are always in the background complaining and creating false narratives? 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my dystopian nightmare of a hostile workplace rife with racial discrimination, harassment, tokenism, workplace violence, and much more had already begun in earnest when my White supervisor—Dr. Ofkaren—called me into a meeting at the conclusion of my very first year of teaching at the university. She called me into her office, and to my surprise, she began with an indignant tone, indeed, yelling:

Why are you telling people you want to become a senior lecturer?

I responded, Are you serious? I never said I wanted to become a senior lecturer to anyone. I can assure you. I am dumbfounded.

I was totally confused and caught off guard by her demeanor. This was my mentor and supervisor whom I looked up to and regularly praised to others. Why is she so angry? I had told no one that I wanted to become a senior lecturer. It was not a goal of mine or a desired pit stop along the way to my goal.

Ofkaren continued in her markedly stern and accusatory tone, Well, Whitney said you were asking how to become one, and I’ve never had any issues with Whitney. So, I have no reason to doubt anything she’s told me.

I was shocked. I did not know what to say, but I was thinking, Well, you certainly have no reason to doubt me either, as Ofkaren continued badgering me with questions and accusations based on total fabrications. 

My mind raced. What is Whitney? Some kind of immaculate, irreproachable, lily-White, saint-like being who walks on water? Because that woman has been lying to you, and I don’t know what her problem is!

Ofkaren ranted on, Why do you think you can be promoted? Look at your ratings. You cannot walk in here and think you are going to move to a senior lecturer role. Look at your ratings. Who do you think you are?

My eyes filled with tears, my throat closed, my chest felt tight, and before I knew it, tears were streaming down my cheeks. In fact, I was quite concerned with my ratings at that point because Ofkaren had mentioned that our teaching ratings were the most important metric she looked at when evaluating her department faculty members’ performances. Much to my shock and surprise, she went on to identify a minority colleague by name and said she was considering terminating that colleague for her low ratings at that time. Can you imagine a department head at a major university sharing such gossip? I later realized this was a normal operating procedure for her.

During my first year of teaching with no formal training of any kind, I had been feverishly working to improve my ratings, while working