Breaking Bias in your organisation

How you can create a more inclusive workforce 

Following the tragic death of George Floyd, it’s no surprise there’s been a global reaction of protests after three months of lockdown. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests will force our Governments to foster a more inclusive society but we all need to take individual responsibility if we are to achieve true change. We’re certainly not computer chips that can be erased and reprogrammed, but we need to become more courageous and open-minded if we are to drastically reduce discrimination in our teams, communities and organisations. We also need to recognise that this isn't an isolated incident; this is systemic.

Bias-free organisations perform better

Dr Jo Kandola, an expert in gender bias and the founder of The Bias Gym[1], suggests that “bias can be defined as a set of learnt habits…our brains have learnt to react to the world in a certain way, and sometimes that is absolutely needed and necessary in order to navigate the volume of information we deal with…. But some of the rules we’ve learnt are faulty.”

Crucially, “having a bias free organisation helps your organisation to perform better.” Typically, large organisations draw their talent from “white men”, ignoring “women, black, Asian and ethnic minority individuals”. As a result of this “incredibly talented people” are ignored: “they’re drawing their talent from just one population” and essentially hindering their own performance.

Choosing to be inclusive

Stephen Frost was the Head of Diversity for the 2012 London Olympics and is a global thought leader and writer of The Inclusion Imperative[2]. When I met him, he said something that will stay with me forever: “Diversity is the reality, but inclusion is a choice.” Diversity is a word we hear often but it feels passive; inclusion calls for us to take action, which is the only way to generate societal change. All businesses and organisation have a responsibility to build a more inclusive workforce.

If your workforce or business isn’t particularly inclusive, Frost explains the possible rationale as follows: “People choose to surround themselves with people like them, which is natural and normal and understandable…It's natural and normal that we often choose homogeneity and to be surrounded by people like us because that's comfortable…” But this is neither fair or crucially, the way to success.

His alternative is to “choose difference and…consciously choose to surround ourselves with people who will challenge…our own world view…our own regard, our own decision-making capacities, our own ability to formulate decisions and to interrogate our own belief systems…It's a courageous decision, but it's ultimately a sensible and productive decision… We can't have complete homogeneity because we're not going to get the best outcome. If you want to get better results as a consequence, clearly there's a balance to be struck. And as leaders, we have to decide where that balance is.”

Taking responsibility for our own bias

Our bias can be viewed as a crude rule which leads us into the fallacy of staying safe through the choice of people most like ourselves, hence less likely to create conflict. The best leadership has a responsibility to recruit talent inclusively actively avoiding clones and considering a variety of perspectives, genders, cultures, age groups and career experiences. In today’s uncertain and unknowable world, the last thing we need is either to rely on our own thoughts or to create an echo chamber of people who just agree with every word we say.

Professor Binna Kandola, psychologist and author of Racism at Work: The Danger of Indifference[3] explains: “We need to actually accept that this isn't somebody else's problem: this is something that I have to take responsibility for and that everybody is biased. That's an important first step, because once you recognise that bias isn't about other people being prejudiced or bias, it's actually me, then actually then we're in a better state then to be able to say I'm going to take responsibility for it.”

The Harvard implicit test [4], is designed to reveal our awareness of our unconscious bias towards a particular group. Kandola advises that research tends to show that whatever group you might think of as “bad” for instance, you will also assume that your own group, “people like me” are “decent and honest”. In order to actively break these associations, we need to think about examples of people from both groups who might not fulfil the stereotype of “good” and “bad” you have given them.

This exercise encourages us to identify conflict within our beliefs and re-programme any binary judgements: consider the people in your team, your community, and your clubs, who may have been discriminated against or given less airtime or less opportunity because of bias and stereotypes.

Checking our bias is a wise investment of our time. The subconscious beliefs we hold manifest themselves into micro gestures that can become the norm across teams and organisations, affecting people’s self-esteem, their opportunities and ultimately their lives.

Confronting bias in your organisation

People judge us by our actions not our intentions, and this is where transformational change can take place in our organisations. It can be a sensitive issue to confront but Dr Jo Kandola has the following encouragement:

“it’s not a comfortable subject when we talk about race (or) … sexism and you often get a number of reactions to that. You get a kind of a guilt or a realisation of bias. You also get a reaction…no, I'm not biased. I don't believe bias exists or I'm not bias. But other people are. Unfortunately, the people that have that belief…. are very difficult to engage in a conversation or start challenging …that can very much lead to conflicts in the workplace.”

Dr Kandola advises us to consider our approach from the outset, stating clearly that such behaviours are wrong, inappropriate and will not be tolerated. If we observe them in someone in our workplace, you ‘do not challenge the individual… you challenge the behaviours.” Questions you ask should designed to begin a dialogue and encourage them to reflect upon behaviours from different reasons. For example: ‘I see these kind of behaviours over and over again – what do you think is going on there? Could this be an explanation?’

If this doesn’t work, try to include “perspective”: “Would you be happy to stand up in front of your team, for example, and say, I have no biases? Would you prepare to do the announcement across the organisations?” Often, people’s defensive reactions to being challenged are rooted in the “fear of accepting” their bias and “what it might mean for them in terms of change…You need to work with people at different levels or understand where there coming from, what their fear is and how to move them along.”

This is a process that takes time and effort, which can be a barrier, because organisations are often driven by the desire to obtain quick results and outcomes. We need to work slowly on our awareness; most of us would be shocked to realise that our behaviour has caused offence. If these behaviours are commonplace, we need to accept that it is says something about our beliefs and our bias about particular groups of people we interact with.

How to maintain momentum

In the coming weeks and months, protest will wane but this doesn’t mean the issue has disappeared. Personal leadership has never been more important. Instead of passively watching the news and thinking about the police and extremists in that city or country, we should watch the news and questions our teams our organisations, and ourselves: Am I being inclusive here? Is this the kind of decision or comment I want to make?

If we can make this central to our organisation’s ethos, we can transform the way we communicate, the decisions we make, and indeed, the culture that we build within our businesses. As Professor Kandola said, we are all biased and where these biases come into contact with other people from a multitude of backgrounds, cultures and perspectives, we need to ask, are we responsible? Are we able to choose our response, a response which unites people, not which causes even more division? Have we got the courage to be open minded and treat people fairly?

The Covid 19 crisis has created a massive pause. I hope that we can emerge wiser and more tolerant as a result.

#leadership #resilience #podcast #sport #business

This article has been adapted from Jeremy Snape’s Inside the Mind of Champions podcast, episode 11: Breaking Bias[5]

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Simply click the link below to get access to the podcast — Inside the Mind of Champions podcast, episode 11: Breaking Bias

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References & Citations

[1] https://www.thebiasgym.com

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inclusion-Imperative-Creates-Business-Societies/dp/0749471298

[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Racism-at-Work-Danger-Indifference/dp/0956231888

[4] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

[5] https://www.sportingedge.com/podcasts/episode-11.html

[6] https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jeremysnape/

[7] https://www.facebook.com/sportingedgeukltd/

[8] https://twitter.com/thesportingedge

[9] https://sportingedge.com/services/digital-coaching-programmes.html