Elvis

Over the weekend I decided to take my 9-year-old daughter, a die-hard BTS fan, to try to introduce her to "Old Music", Elvis the Movie in a theatre no less, with popcorn and all the fixin' :-)

While I was enjoying songs like Jail House Rock, Hound Dog, and Blue Suede Shoes (Elvis version) also while explaining to my daughter, the impact that Elvis had on the world of music, all the while she was trying to convince me the BTS is also very good :-) and we could debate this quite loudly, without worrying about disturbing anyone since we were the only people in that particular screen in the multiplex.

During the depiction of early childhood of Elvis, where his family is forced out of their home to stay in the "Colored" part of town, my daughter turned and innocently asked me what do you mean by "colored". This stopped me in my tracks. I tried to explain to her the difference between the color of the skin, and her response to that was "So what ", At the time of showing Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, she was very involved in the movie, - BTS had been forgotten- and her question to me again why was Dr. Martin Luther King killed, he was trying to do something good.

We are told about biases - conscious and unconscious bias, and how to recognize them and perhaps even deal with them. In my daughter's question of "So what" lies in what I believe is the beginning of creating bias. Very clearly in her life till then she has met quite a lot of people of varied hues, and she has always considered them people without attaching any particular significance to their skin color.

As human beings and as parents I think it is critical to try to eliminate those emerging thoughts which may lead to biases later in life. Whilst, it is impossible to grow up without biases, certain biases could be eliminated early in life with some right conversations.

Leadership is a lot like those early conversations with your children, have them early to build culture, reduce inherent biases and foster wellbeing among teams. Elvis broke the conformity bias and gave the world some of the greatest music of all time. As leaders, we need to encourage team members to break the conformity bias, so we might just be nurturing the next Elvis :-)