The Latino Flexibility Advantage in the Workplace

Excerpted from The Latino Advantage in the Workplace by Mariela Dabbah and Arturo Poiré ©2006

Flexibility is a broad term that could mean different things depending on the context. Here it is used to depict the ability to adapt to multiple and different situations—to be able to play different roles depending on the circumstances. In other words, flexibility is the ability to be able to adapt to a changing environment.

The United States is at the center of this process of high-speed change and Latinos can benefit greatly from it, because Latinos have skills and abilities that are essential to understanding, surviving, and even excelling in this changing environment. Growing up, most Latinos have had to learn multiple survival skills like translating for their parents or negotiating between their parents’ cultural habits and the new ones they found in their adopted country. Knowing how to use them in your professional life can give you a great advantage.

Many Latinos were raised in complex environments in which they had to understand and deal on the one hand with the world of their parents or grandparents who grew up in Latin America, and on the other, with the world of their peers here in the U.S. Those who grew up in Latin America had to withstand constant instability in terms of governments, learn to survive through recurrent economic crises and inflation, and overcome the challenges of inadequate infrastructure. The economic aspect has certainly had a critical impact on every Latino’s life, as this has historically been one of the main reasons people immigrate to America. Inflation, a key aspect of the economic dimension, has given Latinos a crash course in adapting to a changing environment. Seeing your income—the product of your hard work—depreciate every day forces you to constantly change all the decisions in your daily life.

In such contexts, being able to adapt is an imperative. Therefore, Latinos have developed specialized skills that are extremely valuable in the modern world. The challenge is to learn how to put them into action so that you have an edge in your professional life.

In the following example, you will see how interpreting for the adults in your family, a common skill for people who arrived in the U.S. at a young age, entails enormous flexibility, as you are dealing with two different cultures and are adapting to each one according to the situation.

Example
Juana was 5 years old when her parents moved to the U.S. from Puerto Rico. When she started elementary school her mother did not speak a word of English, so Juana translated during the parent-teacher conferences. She also attended an after-school program to get help with homework. Juana had to explain to her parents how important her scheduled tests were and the fact that they could not take her out of school before the school year was over to join the family on their annual trip to the Island. She found herself always explaining how things worked in America. It was not easy to be her parents’ teacher, and many times their confusion frustrated her, but she knew they relied on her to receive that information. When she grew up, Juana decided that she wanted to work in human resources, specializing in international transfers to the U.S. Without even thinking about it, Juana gravitated towards something with which she had a lot of experience—interpreting the American culture for recent immigrants.

Adaptability
Adaptability is clearly the easiest component of flexibility to grasp in terms of conceptual description. It is also the easiest to understand in connection to work. Big companies spend a lot of money each year teaching their employees how to cope with change. They hire training experts, change management consultants, and buy books and videos focusing on managing change and preparing employees for a changing world. Unfortunately, Latinos who have all these teachings embedded in their cultural DNA are seldom aware of them, so they too have to learn them on the job, just like everyone else.

Most likely, you or your parents experienced constant change in Latin America. Whether the value of the currency changed or any number of rules and regulations were modified overnight, the truth is that unpredictability was part of your upbringing or that of your parents. That sense of “you never know what can happen tomorrow” is still in you, and if you can recognize it, you will be able to apply it to your advantage at work. It will allow you to always be ready for any changes coming your way.

Certain behaviors reveal this attitude quite clearly. For example, you are likely to be more cautious about borrowing money, you have a tendency to prepare for the worse case scenario in every situation, you have trouble planning for the long term, or you still have a general distrust for the American system.

Does this mean that you are so prepared for change that you will not suffer during the next reorganization? Not really. What it does mean, however, is that you are likely to have more internal resources to survive than others.

Let's Practice
The objective of this activity is to reflect on situations that you or your family have faced in the past. You will see how the strategies you used to cope with these situations can be easily applied to experiences encountered at work.

• Write down a life example that involved change for you or your family. (For instance, the last economic crisis, which forced some of your family members to move to the U.S. to live with you.)
• List the actions taken to adjust to this change.
• To what extent are these actions similar (and applicable) to the latest big change in the workplace (reorganization, job transition, etc.) that you or someone you know have gone through?

When it comes to adaptability, you should feel comfortable to show it as part of who you are. This is a vital trait in the modern world and it is one in which you have been trained intensively. However, when you talk about this trait during a job interview, you need to prepare examples that are applicable to the professional world.

Extreme Adaptability
It is possible to take adaptability to an extreme by becoming too malleable and accommodating. There is a phrase that summarizes very nicely what happens when you become too adaptable: “If you adapt too much, you can have trouble remembering who you are.” Remember that it is who you are and everything that you have learned before that has made Latinos so successful in America. When you combine the nonconfrontational style of Latinos with your ability to adapt to almost any situation, you could end up with the short end of the stick. So be careful to avoid situations where you are taken advantage of. Analyze each situation carefully and try to break it down in smaller pieces. Evaluate if what you have is a real opportunity or one from which you need to push back.

Feeling discomfort is sometimes a trade-off for avoiding confrontation, one of Latinos’ most prevalent characteristics, but putting up with discomfort for too long may derail your career—if not your life. It is crucial to learn how to manage the downside of your adaptability in order to make the best of this otherwise positive trait.

Creativity
Usually when you hear the word creativity, you think of advertising and art. To some people it is such a mysterious concept that they think it is one of those skills that you cannot develop—you were either born with it or you were not. Both are misconceptions. There is much more to being creative than art or advertisement, and creativity is a skill that you can learn and develop. (In the case of Latinos raised in Latin America, for example, the environment forced them to be creative in order to survive.) The truth is that creativity is mainly about conceptualizing something that was not there bef

As Featured in the Book

Latino Advantage in the Workplace

Mariela Dabbah, Arturo Poire

Maximize your personal skills and talents for corporate success.

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