How I will rephrase questions to avoid making assumptions

by Vicky Lim | May 21, 2022 | Lessons Learned | 0 comments

This week, we kicked off a team retreat with about twenty people by going around the room, playing a game called Barbecue. You introduce yourself by sharing your first name and an item you’ll bring to the barbecue that begins with the same letter as your first name. The tricky part is that you also have to repeat the name and item shared by each person who came before you, which means it would suck if you were near the end. Shout out to my manager, Marshmallows, who suggested this icebreaker!

I was luckily near the beginning, but I had a hard time recalling food that started with the letter V, mainly because I don’t eat enough Vegetables. Nancy said she was bringing Noodles, and since I was unable to come up with anything else, I said I would bring Vermicelli Noodles. The second-to-last teammate who is bringing the Raccoon accidentally called me Nancy when reaching me, which was notable because Nancy and I were the only two Asian women, lol. It wasn’t a big deal to me because I relate to how our minds + mouths can trip up like that, but Raccoon later came by my desk to apologize and express how embarrassed she felt. I appreciated the follow-up as an example of what it looks like to take responsibility and realized I should have done the same thing when I made a similar mistake last fall.

I was still new to my role and the organization, and it was my second or third day coming into the office. My assigned desk is in a section that I was told was where everyone else on my larger team was seated, but everyone was still working full-time from home. When I noticed that there was only one other person in the corner of this area, I wanted to say hi. I checked the seating chart I printed out and confirmed this should be Pretzels, whose name I recognized but whose face I hadn’t met on Zoom yet. But when I went over and asked if they were Pretzels, they said no, their name was Udon Noodles, and then I spent the rest of the day reflecting on the mix-up I made between two Black colleagues 😓.

Next time

• Instead of asking, “Are you. . .Pretzels?”, rephrase the question and ask, “I don’t believe we have met yet. What’s your name?”
• Instead of asking, “Are you like a Project Manager?” during a tech-y happy hour to someone who looked like a young woman [who replied that they worked with data and studied computer engineering], rephrase the question and ask, “What’s your role on this project?”