Why We’re Approaching Diversity Training All Wrong—And How To Get It Right

Raised by my Indian immigrant parents in a predominantly white town in Connecticut, I never felt like I 100% belonged in my family. My life choices didn’t always fit with my parents’ traditional Indian views, such as their religion or choosing to wait until later in life to get married.

You see, I’ve been thinking about belonging my whole life. Looking back, that’s probably why I went into the business of belonging.

When I started Consciously Unbiased, I contemplated how polarized our society is on the left and the right, and how so many of us get defensive when faced with ideas and viewpoints that are different from our own. I also thought about how traditional unconscious bias training doesn’t work because it makes people feel bad. You walk into a session thinking that you know what you know, and you ultimately walk out feeling guilty because now you know what you didn’t know.

Learning To Own Bias

Shame doesn’t inspire most people to change because, overall, there is a bell curve: Some people out there become aware of something bad and respond by trying to solve it; others simply don’t respond and don’t change. However, the majority of us on that curve — myself included — respond by getting defensive when someone points out our differences, missing an opportunity to connect and come up with solutions together.

Although we’re taught to feel bad about biases, the truth is that bias isn’t inherently bad. If you have bias, it simply means you’re human. We all have biases. And they are based on two things: our life experiences and our biology.

It’s partly about survival because our brains want to categorize things. They can’t process all the data they receive, especially today with the onslaught of social and media messages we’re constantly navigating. In 2011, we received five times the information we did in 1986, according to The Telegraph.

But it’s also partly based on life experiences, so let’s own that and be proud about it. Instead of making yourself feel bad about who you are, owning bias says you’re in control of it and enables you to take your life experiences and apply them in a positive manner. Make an active effort to apply your biases in the right situation and to not apply your biases in the wrong situation.

Transforming Bias Training

Biases are not one-size-fits-all. In an effort to be inclusive, businesses have created a generic message for bias training. The same message doesn’t work for everyone. Rather, if the training is customized to be more personal, it will resonate with people where they are and better illustrate how bias impacts them personally — both their own biases and those they experience from others.

The truth is that we are all different, but we all belong. Our differences can actually be our greatest strengths. And it’s not just about differences in gender, race, age, sexual orientation, ability or disability, but also about differences in mindset and bringing a variety of thought processes to the table. For example, I may have brown skin, but I share a similar background to my white counterparts who I was raised alongside in Connecticut.

Think about it. If you have six people at the table who may not look the same but all have similar perspectives, why do you really need more than one? Yes, representation of marginalized groups matters, but we also need to ensure there are different thought processes at the table — and that those voices are being heard — in order to be successful.

The key is to become conscious of our unconsciousness and break the thought patterns that hold us back, such as those that prevent us from interviewing or hiring the best candidates for the job or simply speaking to someone who may look very different from us.

Connecting Heart And Mind

So how can we retrain our brains? How can we overcome ingrained thought patterns, become conscious of our unconscious and stop making assumptions about who others are based on surface-level labels?

Real change comes from connecting the heart and mind. When it comes to our minds, we have certain patterns in our thinking and hard-wired learning that can impact how we respond to certain situations. So, it requires both education and an emotional connection to form new habits and change behavior.

There’s an internal struggle between curiosity and fear of the unknown. If you let curiosity win and expose yourself to things or people you think are a certain way, it might change your bias because you’ll realize they aren’t the way you thought they were.

That’s the heart part: Empathy motivates us to change. Once we become conscious of our unconscious, we have to connect to our hearts and feel compassion in order to motivate us to overcome hard-wired thinking patterns, such as our biases.

I come from a tech background, so I thought about how to create a bias database: As you learn about a new bias, rather than feeling bad, just add to your database of when to apply it. This will retrain your brain to act on bias when it’s positive and change bias-based behavior when it’s not helpful.

Overcoming systemic inequities won’t happen overnight. However, if each of us takes personal responsibility for recognizing and better managing the biases that may be contributing to the status quo, our small moves will add up to a big impact. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Article originally published in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/03/24/how-to-provide-bias-training-in-the-workplace/#385d467068ed