Your next chance at a promotion may come down to how you talk.
A working paper from Harvard Business School argues that workers’ careers are often influenced by their speech patterns—not because those patterns are associated with merit, but because managers are inclined to think workers who communicate similarly have better social skills.
Drawing on decades of labor-market data and audio recordings, researchers found that workers whose communication style matched a workplace’s norm were more likely to be tapped for the “people-oriented, socially intensive roles” that often result in career advancement.
The researchers analyzed the career impact of having a Southern U.S. accent in the South and Midwest compared to the Northeast and West, finding that Southern speakers were more likely to have socially intensive roles in regions where their accent is more common.
They also found that for women and minority groups like Black Americans, and Latin American immigrants, the increase in “social task-intensive” employment since 1980 has been concentrated in areas where their group is well represented in the labor market—i.e., Latin Americans are more likely to be tapped for people-oriented roles in areas with high Latin American populations.
These findings did not come as a shock to author Kadeem Noray, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who co-authored the paper with his wife, Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program fellow Savannah Noray. Professor Noray is the son of Caribbean immigrants to Canada.
“It’s not surprising to me the extent that being culturally rooted and matched well to the kinds of people in your workplace actually matters,” Noray told Harvard Business Review.
“The action item is really doing the hard work of creating an environment that is open to many cultures.”
Managers should stay aware of their bias toward people who sound like them when making hiring decisions, Noray said. This might mean being a little more open to candidates who don’t immediately feel like the right “fit.”
“Relax the constraint on the kind of talent that can do well in your firm,” he said. “That should give your company a competitive advantage.”
“If workplaces hired and developed people who enjoyed and learned from the complexities of interacting with people who are different from them, this might allow organizations to better harness the power of cultural diversity,” he added.