As calendars flip to January, many feel motivated to set ambitious goals for self-improvement in the coming year. While this optimism infuses our personal lives, at work many still grapple with a languishing malaise – a sense of stagnancy, fading engagement, and exclusion from career advancement and workplace belonging.

Though larger discriminatory practices definitely contribute to these feelings, small interpersonal micro-rejections frequently accumulate as well, nurturing office cultures where employees languish rather than thrive.

Defining Workplace Micro-Rejections

Micro-rejections refer to subtle conversational and behavioral cues that consciously or unconsciously communicate dismissal, degradation or exclusion of certain individuals or groups. These minor slights and dismissals erode belonging and morale incrementally over time.

Just as micro-rejections can slowly diminish personal relationships, a steady accumulation of them in professional settings damages workplace environments too. They transpire daily, often unintentionally during regular interactions. However, over weeks and months they feed into marginalized team members feeling less psychologically safe, respected, heard or appreciated – obstructing their ability to progress at equal rates as their counterparts.

Left unchecked, this manifests into organizational cultures where certain demographic groups never quite feel comfortable enough to freely contribute, take risks or unlock their full potential.

What might these look like in action?:

1. Being Distracted: A manager constantly checking emails and taking calls during a one-on-one meeting with an employee, making them feel unheard and insignificant.
2. Selective Attention: A team leader focusing most of their developmental feedback, mentorship and visibility boosting opportunities exclusively on a few extroverted or demographic similar employees – while quieter and minority team members see their contributions happen in a vacuum without recognition or career progress.
3. Interrupting or Talking Over: A colleague interrupting and talking over someone’s presentation, not giving them a chance to fully communicate concepts.
4. One-Sided Conversations: A CEO dominating Q&A sessions with their own views versus asking employees what support they actually need.
5. Micromanaging: A supervisor who assigns a task yet controls the end result not trusting in their colleague’s voice or judgement.

These subtle slights accumulate over weeks, signaling to employees that their unique perspectives, emotional needs and work contributions don’t fully matter. This breeds resentment, erodes intrinsic motivation, and stagnates problem-solving, innovation and honesty in raising issues.

Micro-Rejections vs. Microaggressions

While often conflated casually, micro-rejections and microaggressions have distinct meanings:

Micro-rejections refer broadly to subtle interpersonal behaviors that consciously or unconsciously exclude, dismiss, or make someone feel they do not belong – such as interrupting them, overlooking their work, expressing disinterest in their input, etc. These can occur between any colleagues due to lapses in courtesy or intentional biases. For example:

• Repeatedly interrupting or overlooking colleagues with accents when they present ideas can degrade confidence in communicating openly.
• Assuming immigrant team members only obtained opportunities to fulfill diversity quotas discredits their capabilities unfairly.
• Neglecting religious minorities’ holidays when planning events signals their traditions warrant lower priority.

Meanwhile, microaggressions call out brief exchanges – verbal or nonverbal – that intentionally or unintentionally degrade someone based specifically on their membership in a marginalized group, such as race, gender, disability status, sexuality or religion. These relay implicit biases the recipient does not belong due to minority identity.

So while micro-rejections can happen interpersonally for myriad reasons, microaggressions stem implicitly or explicitly from biases against traditionally marginalized demographics in society. Keeping them conceptually distinct sheds better light on diversity issues facing underrepresented groups.

Bridge to Languishing

As micro-rejections relentlessly chip away at employees’ sense of belonging, safety and self-efficacy day-to-day, it leads more vulnerable team members down an incremental path towards weary indifference, emotional numbness and loss of motivation – known as the state of languishing.

Unlike depression, languishing manifests as a persistent sense of blah – an emptiness and lack of passion for one’s work rather than sad mood per se. Employees might describe it as lingering in a grey area every day – putting adequate effort needed to tread water and get by, but without feeling purpose, engagement or forward career momentum from that work.

Over months and years, as minor slights accumulate without intervention, a profound feeling of insignificance and detachment takes its toll. While still physically showing up, employees’ psyches drift into autopilot, going through rote motions without tapping into creativity or feeling their contributions make a substantive difference.

Of course languishing also stems strongly from burnout and lack of access to clear advancement opportunities. However, frequently experiencing micro-rejections exacerbates and accelerates these feelings of stagnancy by blocking employees from projects granting visibility, useful developmental feedback, sponsorship and promotions to progress in the organization.

New Year, Fresh Start

It’s easy in busy work environments for small marginalizing behaviors to incrementally become the norm, spreading subtly across teams. But with renewed intention as we embark on 2024, each of us – from interns to CEOs – maintains responsibility in our daily interactions to notice and shift habits that dismiss or obstruct marginalized groups from inclusion and achievement.

Here are five tangible, realistic commitment areas to reduce micro-rejections this year:

1. Practice active listening – Set a goal to have at least one 30-minute meeting each week where you intentionally refrain from checking any devices, allow no external interruptions, and devote complete focus to validating the colleague’s perspectives through thoughtful questions.
2. Solicit diverse opinions – Devise a brief weekly email cadence to get ideas or feedback from at least one team member outside your usual circle, who has a substantially different identity, background or role than you.
3. Give credit and appreciation – Once a week, identify at least one employee you worked with that week and explicitly acknowledge their contributions and unique value to a manager or in a larger team communication.
4. Respect autonomy – Have open and direct conversations eliciting employee preferences when assigning new projects rather than just mandating top-down decisions on goals or end results.
5. Ask clarifying questions – If you feel the temptation to interrupt a colleague presenting, make a point to jot down your questions and follow up afterwards in a space for bilateral sharing to fully grasp their perspective.

The turn of each year brings a surge of fresh optimism and blank canvas for possibility. While larger structural changes occur more gradually over years, committing even to small personal resolutions can compound powerfully to help overcome interpersonal workplace barriers like chronic micro-rejections.

So let’s collectively resolve to start 2024 actively building each other up with greater understanding and care, rather than allowing another year of accumulated small slights to quietly stagnate diverse talents.

References

1. Martela , F. (2023, August 16). How to get your mojo back. Psyche. https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-get-your-mojo-back?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter ↩︎