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Mixed Signals:
A Multiracial Window into Civility and Belonging at Work
Every workplace is sending signals about who belongs, who is trusted, and whose contributions count.
Some people have lived these signals firsthand. Their experience is already on your team, and Mixed Signals shows you what it reveals.
THE IDEA
Workplace culture is a system of signals. This book helps you decode them.
Every organization has a culture. Most leaders cannot see it clearly enough to know what it is taking from them. Some of the people who know it firsthand are already on the payroll, and they have been sending signals for a long time.
Mixed Signals draws on five years of original research. It shows how the signals people receive about where they fit end up shaping trust, collaboration, and whether an organization gets full use of the talent it already hired.
This is a book about organizations.
Identity is the lens. The subject is your workplace.
We do not clock in and out of our identities. We are whole as we arrive, even though we may only reveal part of who we are. The culture responds to whatever part it can see, and that response is where the real operating rules of an organization become visible.
FOUR PLACES IT SURFACES
Retention. People often leave because of who they had to become to keep the job, not the job itself.
Trust. Teams that misjudge each other slow down, and nobody can say why.
Contribution. Ideas that arrive from the wrong direction get managed as problems instead of heard as work.
Leadership. The signals you send land differently than you intend, and almost nobody will tell you.
RETHINKING CIVILITY
Civility is bigger than manners.
We tend to use the word when referring to politeness, professionalism, and decorum. Keeping things pleasant. All of that is real, and none of it is wrong. It is simply the smallest part of what the word carries.
The older meaning is still in there. Civility comes from civis, the Latin word for citizen. In that sense it points to membership rather than conduct, the everyday practice of treating one another as legitimate participants in a shared community.
Look at the word recognition and you can see what it is asking for. Re plus cognition. To know again. Not to notice someone once and file them, but to keep coming to know them, and to keep acknowledging their rightful place in the collective.
An organization answers the membership question every day, whether or not anyone means to. It decides whose voice carries weight in a meeting. It decides whose presence is treated as essential and whose is treated as optional. It decides which ideas are received as contributions and which are managed as complications. That is the layer beneath the manners, and it is the one your numbers eventually reflect.
Liminality is not only a mixed-race experience
THE SPACE BETWEEN
Liminality is the state of being inside something and outside it at the same time, not fully one thing and not fully the other, while everyone around you acts as though the question never comes up.
What separates liminality from ordinary difference is that people cannot agree on what you are. One person decides you are one thing, the next person decides you are something else, and you work alongside both of them. When you tell them who you actually are, they do not always take your word for it.
Dr. Gann's research starts with mixed race and multiracial professionals because that is where you can watch it happen most easily. People will ask what you are out loud, sometimes before they have learned anything else about you. But the guessing is less about race than about what an organization does with a person it cannot file, and organizations do that to a lot of people.