What do you do if your organization's leaders need to address unconscious biases and promote equality?

Change what’s expected in leadership skillsets. For example, all leaders should be trained to facilitate meetings inclusively to foster ideas and discussion. Once clear competencies and behaviors are defined, they can become embedded in performance measures.

1. Identify and celebrate benefits of accessing a diverse labour pool and maximising all talent in your organisation. 2. Top management to self-examine themselves by identifying current state of organisational diversity across a number of metrics (women, racial etc).Create plan with targets. Periodically track and communicate metrics plus progress reports on addressing gaps and celebrate successes. 3.Have a Senior management sponsor who owns plan. This will help drive buy-in from leaders cross the organisation 4. Educate!! It has a powerful impact on unconscious bias as it creates awareness and a safe space to engage 5. Nurture culture that takes the opportunity to bring diverse teams to collaborate in problem-solving project teams.

In my experience education is only one element of addressing the issue. Leaders need to examine their own biases and begin to model the kind of behaviour they want to see- creating inclusive spaces and speaking about it.In addition leaders should examine their organization’s processes to eliminate bias in their hiring, promotional and training opportunity processes. For example when hiring, ensuring there are candidates from different backgrounds, women and underrepresented groups . A challenge function in both hiring and promotions can help eliminate bias. Finally they need to track results throughout the organization to ensure the processes are effective in eliminating bias.

Education in unconscious bias is key but sadly has lost its impact through dilution. The one size fits all approach has dulled the effectiveness of the training as people view it as a tick and flick exercise. The training must be relevant to the industry and contain specific examples of the bias that can be experienced in the settings. Being in the field at a construction site is very different to being in an office. So the examples used here need to reflect typical scenarios and behaviours that are biased, not inclusive or acceptable in creating a safe and equal workplace for all.

It is essential for leaders to understand the extent of unconscious bias and its profound impact on employee well-being and career progression. Often, leaders may not even realise the depth of bias and its implications. An evidence-based approach is key. Advocacy groups around the globe have conducted invaluable research into the lived experiences of marginalised individuals, shedding light on the realities they face daily. These reports are not just anecdotes; they offer valuable insights and data-driven approaches to understanding and combating unconscious bias in the workplace. They are a powerful way to add credibility to your message. Sharing them with leaders can help foster awareness and drive meaningful change.

It’s not always obvious to leaders in these spaces that they are a part of the problem, yet they set the tone for the team. Companies must make a conscious effort to listen to feedback from employees and revisit the effectiveness of policies and how leaders are playing their role to model and exemplify them. In addition to self assessments, group meetings with a focus on inclusion effectiveness of the team would be beneficial.

In the work we do with leaders, we find that there is a huge resistance when they hear the term biases. It is frowned upon and they deny being biased. In the education program on this topic, it is therefore important to make it experiential and help them discover rather than tell. And most importantly, it should be stressed that having biases is a very human thing. Therefore rejecting its existence is counter intuitive. Rather, accepting and then working to overcome is the key.

Recognising that psychological safety plays a role in people’s willingness to participate in dialogue is key. Often people who are minorities don’t want to rock the boat, fear losing their jobs or being ostracised for challenging the current culture. Yet they are key players in ensuring the environment is inclusive for all. Ways to get around this include having cross-department focus groups or having an external company facilitate the conversations that keep people’s contributions anonymous. The data is more telling, and the way people feel heard is when things actually shift and change as a result of them bringing things up.

When witnessing an act of exclusion, leaders should assume positive intent and embrace the discomfort that arises from differing perspectives. They should engage in dialogue, not debate, with the goal of shared learning rather than winning arguments. Leaders must clarify without making assumptions, seek to understand and be understood, and accept that they may not always communicate perfectly.

Going beyond policies and mitigating biases in the talent processes will go a long way to overcome systemic biases. The burden of creating inclusivity should not be placed only on the leaders. Systemically, they have to be supported too.

The leaders need to lead by example. They have to practice inclusive behaviour and inspire colleagues to start following their footsteps. Calling out biased behaviour each time it is witnessed eg in team meetings, interactions etc. And going beyond the call of duty, at times, to make some felt included. Put in efforts to practice non biased behaviour till it becomes an intrinsic part of your system as well as your organisation's system. Recognise the right behaviour.

Inclusive leaders should be courageous in supporting change, acting on convictions and principles even when it requires personal risk-taking and difficult conversations.

The strongest way to bring awareness to bias issues is data. If you can, try to pull data like engagement scores, promotion rates, turnover etc., and use it to tell the story. Numbers and data should be used to build the case for change and or the burning platform. You can also check what the external buzz is about your company, and leverage those negative perceptions to show how it doesn't align with the organizations stated values. Having to convince leaders is always tough, enlist the help of other influential allies in the company to bring awareness.

The key is to change the talent management processes to become transparent, much more objective and measure every aspect. Once leaders start to see that, for example, their leadership developmental stages are often arbitrary and based on likability, they can be changed to use and develop the competencies that are needed. The process is a key step in this.