Understanding workplace bias.
Michael Carter
Principal @ Energy Business Strategy Ltd. Advisory and Strategy leadership. Deep experience in strategy and building value in data, data analytics, and intelligence for the electric power and utility industry.
Leadership Series April 2024 Boulder, Colorado-Michael Carter
When leading a business, or aspiring to, it’s critical for us to understand our bias and to look for ways to separate our bias from how we might otherwise function in our every-day life.
Diligent focus on bias can unlock significant value to a business. Failure to acknowledge bias can cost you your best employees and severely limit your firm’s upside potential. The good news is, that for you, your leadership team, and your board, you can work to counteract these biases by implementing some guidelines.
Recognition that we can’t remove all our biases from who we are, still gives us a good chance to reduce the bias we have in our every-day leadership. Why? Because awareness, and specifically self-awareness, is a powerful agent of change.
“If your business is consistently missing targets chances are pretty high that you’ve got a bias challenge to solve.” ?
When it comes to bias, it’s the unconscious biases, the implicit prejudices, that trip us up. Think stereotyping or judging people too quickly. The cost that such prejudice can levy on your business can be extreme[1][2]. Worse yet is that many of these prejudices are likely hidden from clear view behind processes and things like hiring practices. Prejudices may make you feel comfortable, but your lack of awareness may end up costing you by getting rid of great people or doubling down on hiring the wrong type of person, or even robbing your teams of chances to collaborate more fully. Overtime this is extremely costly. If your business is consistently missing targets chances are pretty high that you’ve got a bias challenge to solve. ?
Most people might cringe at the thought of diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) training, yet this very specific training increases awareness of bias and aids in reducing the total amount of bias that each of us bring to the workplace. It’s more about being aware of bias and thinking about how people and how teams can work together to create better outcomes. If your still stuck on this, then think about it this way; The more diverse a team, the better the chances for novel and beneficial remedies to old problems[3]. Good news is there are abundant sources on bias, workplace bias and how to better understand bias.
Here are a few to get you started on resetting your decision-making criteria.
Judging based on unconscious stereotypes. Rather than assessing folks on their merits we succumb to our biases. When we allow these biases to go unchallenged it can lead to extremely costly decisions that can rob us or our best team members. These biases cause us to overlook highly qualified candidates when hiring, in favor of candidates that fit our comfort/biases. With our current workforce, we can overlook how we make assignments based on our biased associations that we make with people.
In-group favoritism. Granting favors to people from the same background, nationality, alma mater, or people who may even support the same football team as you, effectively discriminates against people who you judge to be different from you.
Misjudging contributions. Another bias is how we assess how much work we do relative to others. When it comes to people pulling their own weight, everybody considers themselves above average. Logic tells us that not everybody can be above average. Misjudging the contributions we make in a team leads us to feel like other people aren’t working as hard. That lowers our willingness for future collaboration in part because workers may feel like they’re not appreciated fully.
The good news is there are some guidelines that you can take to limit the amount of skewness you have or to try to diminish the amount of bias if they have a particular situation.
Data First- One of these guidelines is to gather data. Really take time to understand your people, your employees, and recognize that under the right conditions, people can and do change. Make sure that you have a system or process that gives you good ability to estimate the contribution of your colleagues and workers before they can get into situation where they can claim a preponderance of credit for a given task.
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Limit Time for Bias- An effective measure is to limit the amount of stereotypical cues and stereotypical bias. For example, if you find yourself in the first five minutes of a meeting talking about the football game on the weekend, recognize that that is just a set of inside language and inside jargon that sets up in-group favoritism. So, cut this out in favor of asking the team to share about how they may have handled a mistake. Also, it’s unlikely that people will tell you that they don’t appreciate such situations. That’s because you have set up and promoted a favoritism dynamic and the chances of finding out if people appreciate this type of talk are severely limited. Better to not start in the first place.
‘Like what you like’ bias- Some other biases can trigger us to promoting the same type of manager. We want somebody just like Steve, or we want somebody just like Jennifer. It takes a lot of skill, observation, and clarity to slow down and hire people that best fit the responsibility and skill set that you need.
‘The way it should be’ bias- Senior leaders often have ideas about “how things should work”. The most obvious example being the 'work remote' or 'return to office' decision in our post-COVID world[4]. In many cases those organizations that applied careful thought to remote work had the easier transition to getting folks back to the office. It’s important that we consider our biases and how these may skew what we decide for our employees in key areas, like, health insurance, vacation policy, work from home, or even bonuses. The questions we need to answer: How do we set-up our employees for success? and How might we create a better workplace?
Once we are aware, these elements allow us to the opportunity to step back from our own biases and see from a broader perspective. That perspective should be to acknowledge your biases and challenge what you know, because it’s usually what you don’t know that gets you in trouble.
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?#leadership #strategy #DEI #workplacebias #selfawareness
[1]Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter by David Rock and Heidi Grant 2016 HBR.org. Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter (hbr.org)
[4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9988592/ Working from Home: Before and After the Pandemic, Hilary Silver National Institute of Health, National Library of Medicine. March 2023.
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