How to Tackle Your Unconscious Bias & Master Decision-Making

In this LinkedIn Article I delve into the physiological effects of Unconscious Bias. The aim is to help you to recognise your own biases so that you can start with yourself to transform. This article will guide you on how to overcome the effects of unconscious bias and gain greater control of your own decision-making. Ensure you reflect on your own biases as you read on.

Why is this important?

First, let’s acknowledge the magnitude of this topic. The world is focused on racial justice and gender inequality, and we must ‘strike while the iron’s hot’ to seize this opportunity for transformation. 

The pandemic has negatively impacted groups based on race, socioeconomic position, gender, and disability. It is critical for organisations to actively tackle these issues within their own behaviours and design. As a growing wealth of research shows the strong business case for greater diversity, it is up to us as leaders to look inward and outward, to ensure that we are leading from the front and driving this transformation. Leaders and organisations have started to strive beyond Diversity & Inclusion and towards the higher outcome of Diversity & Belonging.

There has been a huge push in workplaces across the world for more D&I in the past few years and particularly the last 12 months. Many companies have targets, outcomes and mission statements centered around a diverse workforce. According to the latest LinkedIn research, 64% of L&D professionals globally and 73% in North America say that their executives have prioritised D&I programmes. They want to build teams that reflect the wider population and produce diversity of thought while responding to recent events. Investment in these programmes has an intersectional impact across multiple areas of the business at once. 

However, this push to prioritise skill above characteristics can only be achieved once implicit biases are recognised, otherwise the significant benefits, like 2.3 times higher cashflow per employee, are at risk of being diluted.  

Second, we need to understand how our amazing and yet flawed brains work! Our unconscious brain processes information up to 200,000 faster than the conscious brain. This part of our cognitive engine is hyper-efficient and is able to sift through this vast amount of information at lightning speed by outlining immediate patterns. This then rewires our brain by making indelible correlations that influence our behaviour and future decision-making. 

Our prior experience, world view, or ‘internal reference map’ all impact our split-second judgements and fuel our longer-term decisions. We’ve evolved to function this way with the best of evolutionary intentions: to keep us safe from danger! However, in most daily situations the efficacy of this hard-wired and subconscious reaction can hamper our ability to be inclusive, without us even realising.

Imagine this

It’s 6.30am on Monday. You’re woken by a loud rumbling as the waste disposal truck crashes and bangs its way along the road outside your window. You look out to see one of the bin collectors picking up your neighbours rubbish which has somehow found its way across the pavement, again. 

There’s no getting back to sleep, so you get up, get dressed and head out on a long walk through the park before work. You go into a brand new cafe that’s just opened up where the smiley barista loads up a double espresso for the day ahead. It’s a short stroll into work but you take your time. You’ve left your employee ID pass at home again but Tony, the young doorman buzzes you through. 

Now think back to your story. Of the people clearing rubbish off the street, how many were women? In that cafe, was the barista white? Does Tony check staff IDs while standing or from his wheelchair?

Those were the assumptions you made based on your own preconceived notions of what people with these jobs look like. These come from a host of life experiences.

What is Unconscious Bias?

Unconscious bias is defined as “social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness.”

As social beings we need ways to structure and make sense of the world around us. We start doing this at a young age predominantly as a learning mechanism; to find patterns, make connections and simplify the abstract, and then adapt our own behaviour accordingly. 

This method gives us helpful boxes to chunk the world into, but a lack of nuance can also lead us to gloss over important details or even misread situations entirely. This is where our unconscious bias starts to impact the mastery of our own mindset.

Outlined below are five key areas of unconscious bias:

1. Affinity Bias - we have a tendency to like people who look more like us, sound like us, have a similar background and make us more likely to gloss over any faults. Conversely, this can lead us to be more critical of those we perceive as ‘different’. 
2. Confirmation Bias - we actively search for information which backs up a preconceived notion and become blind to evidence that contradicts this theory.
3. Attribution Bias - jumping to conclusions before knowing the full picture. If a team member is underperforming it can be very easy to heap assumptions onto them and attribute blame for the failure of a project without knowing the full story of their workload, home circumstances or wider job demands. 
4. Gender Bias - a 2017 study by Harvard Business School found that both men and women are more likely to hire a man. Subtleties of language and the prioritisation of subjective skill sets contribute to men being hired on average 1.5x more than their female counterparts.
5. Conformity Bias - Individuals are more easily persuaded when the majority of the group is of one opinion. Also known as ‘group mentality’, this can lead us to compromise on our own beliefs in favour of fitting in or not wishing to be difficult. 

Recognising Unconscious Bias in Yourself

Reflect for a moment. It is likely that you employ all of these to some degree in different areas of your life. A good example is in the hiring process, when we are forced to make fast decisions on candidates, based on limited information. 

Many organisations in attempts to mitigate the risks of the hiring process have begun to use artificial intelligence. Yet, this is often highly flawed because those designing AI themselves have their own biases that make it into the technology! Instead, an action we can all take now is to raise our self-awareness.

Recognise (the more your recognise, the more effective you become at recognising, it's like building a self-awareness muscle!) unconscious bias in yourself. Implement procedures to reduce the risks in areas such as hiring by ensuring you have checks and balances including diverse interview panels, job descriptions with gender-neutral language checked by a specialist, and remove all names from applications.

Ask yourself: can you identify times, either at work or in your home life where you made a biased decision? What brought you to that decision? Would you go back and change that decision now? How would the result be different?

Moving Towards Conscious Decisions

We need to be aware and take responsibility for our choices and to practice and work towards reasoned, factual decision-making is an integral part of that.

It is important to note that unconscious bias is not always a 'negatively' skewed occurrence. You may recognise yourself in a young, struggling team member and want to go out of your way to help them as someone once did for you. 

These biases may be inherently unconscious, but they are not permanently beyond our control and understanding. It is only through practise and unflinching honesty that we can start to master our choosing mechanism. 

What can we do about it?

Firstly, having certain unconscious biases does not make you a ‘bad person’! Many of these will have been built up in our childhood or from perfectly rational stimuli at the time. 

1. Slow down. Due to the processing speed of our brains, we are far more likely to make a prejudiced decision when in a rush. First think, do you have all the information needed or have you leapt to a conclusion? If in doubt, stop. Meditate, go for a walk, physically reset and cast your mind onto something else before coming back to the decision afresh. 
2. Analyse yourself. Have you been presented with a situation like this before? Is that affecting the way you are behaving now? Are there certain environmental factors at play such as your mood or a pressurised setting that could be influencing you?
3. Diversify your life. Do you tend to gravitate towards certain types of people? How diverse are the important people in your life? An affinity with particular groups may be creating a ‘halo effect’, where a positive impression of one person influences the impression of another.
4. Be honest. We all get it wrong, no one person can completely eradicate all the subconscious factors in their lives. It is important, however, to hold our hands up, admit when we may have made an error and use this to improve and grow so that these choices become more fair, justified and in control over time. 

LINKEDIN RESOURCES TO HELP YOU NOW

Understanding and confronting unconscious bias

Confronting Bias: Thriving across Our Differences by Verna Myers and Arianna Huffington

Unconscious Bias by Stacey Gordon

Bystander Training: From Bystander to Upstander by Catherine Mattice Zundel

Creating diverse and inclusive workspaces

Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging by Pat Wadors

Rolling Out a DIBs Training Program in Your Company by Dereca Blackmon

Having inclusive conversations and communicating across cultures

Skills for Inclusive Conversations

Skills for Inclusive Conversations by Mary-Frances Winters

Communicating about Culturally Sensitive Issues by Daisy Lovelace

Communicating across Cultures by Tatiana Kolovou 

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If you need expert advice on anything you have read today, or even if you would like to discuss this or other topics in more depth with us, get in touch with me to schedule a free consultation call partnerships@breakthroughglobal.com 

Zannah Ryabchuk is the Managing Director of Breakthrough Global, helping her clients to turnaround and grow by transforming the business cultures. She is an expert, speaker and coach on business culture and mindset, and an advocate for female empowerment and diversity.