Circus Acts

What is Ella Bell's own circus act? These days, she says, she's "high up on a trapeze, but it's a nice trapeze. There's no net, but there are all sorts of people and resources there to break my fall."

Bell feels visible and vulnerable because of the publication this year of Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity (Harvard Business School Press), the product of 10 years of research with Stella M. Nkomo, a professor at South Africa's Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership.

Our Separate Ways explores the differences between white and black women executives. "White women," Bell says, "get co-opted by power." They believe they will eventually fit into the organizations built and led largely by white men. "And everything is individualistic for them: Success is about what I do, how credible I am. "Black women, by contrast, can't hope to fit in so easily. "For black women, success is based on having a lot of people around who support and guide them," says Bell.

Put these women in a Circus Acts exercise, and some interesting things happen. White women, Bell says, often are surprised to find that their female colleagues are facing similar problems. "They say, 'Wait a minute -- you're going through that too?' "

Black women come to understand just how much energy they are dedicating to forging a community. "Their antennae are always up," Bell says. "They're always wondering, Who can I trust? Who can I talk to? And if they're doing all that monitoring, how much energy does that take?"