Bias will Destroy Your Company (But it Doesn’t Have to)
The following was written by Karla Monterroso, our VP of Programs.
As we roll into the third round of unsatisfying numbers progress with tech companies, we are hearing three points issued over and over again:
- We are trying.
- We believe in this work.
- We’ve been training people and will continue to train them on unconscious bias.
Last year, these statements were looked at skeptically but accepted as the first time that companies were making real effort. This time, upon showing little progress, companies are feeling the sting of the public. For good reason.
In our 4.5 years, we’ve done a lot of hypothesizing about what moves the needle and what stops it dead in it’s tracks. This felt like a good opportunity to share what we’re seeing in regards to training.
The Role
To put into context the role of “Unconscious Bias Training”, you have to really have a theory of the role of training in a work force. Your company time is valuable. Whenever you are pulling hours from your entire workforce and deploy it to anything, it’s got to be for a reason. Training exists to teach your employees to DO something.
Training employees to understand and operationalize competencies for diversity, equity, and inclusion is especially difficult because so many of us have stunted growth on this front. Understand I’m not making a value judgement here: 75% of all white people only know white people. If we’re in an industry that averages about 4% people of color per company (at best), that means we are not in each others lives. It makes sense that the competencies to create and operate in an integrated tech workforce do not exist.
Unconscious bias is one of many ways to start skilling up your workforce on this particular deficiency. The outcome should not be a workforce that is singing kumbaya — we all have bias — let’s fix it. The outcome should be a cranky group of people who want more information and training because they start to see the gap between their best intentions and the processes they have created. If that isn’t happening, this is a big fat red flag for the lack of effectiveness of your training.
At Code2040 we believe there are three foundational pillars to this work we would add to unconscious bias.
1. Understanding the business case for diversity
2. A working knowledge of your own personal blind spots and how they impact your operations
3. Training in how to have tough conversations about race
The three pillars and why we chose them
Business Case
Lots of folks know the basics of the business case for diversity, at least they think they do. But I’m telling you, the entire workforce does not get it. There are people sitting in your teams deeply resentful but silent, afraid of the social repercussions of pushing back on diversity work. Instead, they bite their lip, grin and bear training, then go right back into interviews and management exerting some very conscious biases. They don’t have the foundational knowledge about why diversity is financially valuable, and they don’t hold the personal belief that diversity is valued. Understanding the business case can help secure buy in from otherwise skeptical or resentful employees. And it can keep it a priority when the waters get choppy or everyone gets busy. Whereas our good intentions can be put on the back burner, our bottom lines rarely are.
Your Blind Spots
One of the primary reasons we skip unconscious bias trainings is that we find that the average person struggles to draw a direct line from the theory that everyone has bias to their own unique set of debilitating personal blindspots. Without fundamental insight into or understanding of the life experiences of other people, it’s common to invent your own understanding or negate that their experiences exist. These are called blind spots. Work must be done to understand our own areas of ignorance to move from ignorance to understanding. And It’s just not good enough to know the blind spots exist, you need to know how they make you react.
An embarrassing example
Many moons ago, I worked at a national volunteer program that did trainings with it’s volunteers in the Fall. A Jewish staff member approached me to give me feedback that trainings were constantly happening on the high holy days crippling the ability of Jewish staff members to participate in a cultural tradition for the organization and connect with their community of people. I wish I could tell you that my reaction was to say, “Oh wow, yes, we should definitely change that.”. Instead, my reaction was, “Let me think about it.” But internally I thought,“Oh GAAAWD, DON’T PEOPLE KNOW HOW BUSY WE ARE AND HOW HARD IT IS TO DO THIS? WE HAVE TO GET THINGS DONE. WHEN DO PEOPLE THINK THIS TRAINING CAN HAPPEN.” I am not remotely proud of my internal response but am sincerely grateful for years in the inclusion space that taught me to examine the strength of my reaction. I went home, brought myself down, and realized that as a person who celebrates Christmas, I have never once had to ask people to respect my religious traditions. I went back the next day and shifted training dates and apologized to my colleague.
I say this because I think it’s important to know that your privilege will burn in your throat. You will scream to high heavens about efficiency. You will lament how no one understands your particular set of struggles. We do not learn about our bias and turn around and live a bias free life. We can only hope that our reaction serves as a bright red flag to alert us that something is going on that needs to be examined. If your people don’t get that and don’t have tools for that examination, its over. Get your folks aware of what areas this will happen, how it frequently shows up.
Having tough conversations about race, equity, diversity, inclusion — but really race
Ya’ll, we are afraid to talk about race. We are afraid of anything that even touches it sideways. We have PTSD. Someone kicks a trigger and we are in fight-, flight-, or freeze-city whenever these conversations get brought up. We spend our time in these conversations justifying our own humanity, talking past each other, or not talking at all. I have been in companies where white people have told me that before training, whenever they said the words Black and Latino, they would whisper them. Whisper. Them. If you can’t even name a race or ethnicity out loud, how the hell are we supposed to create operations and systems that address bias? Researcher, storyteller, and social scientist — Brene Brown — talks about this phenomena as “Lizard Brain.” We go into survival mode and it’s much more about what it will take to survive the conversation then actually participate in it. We need tools to talk to each other across lines of difference. I give race as a primary example because while diversity impacts several verticals — and should — race is the one that carries the most cultural debt and fear. These conversations have been named diversity and inclusion conversations, and while I use the shorthand too, at the end of the day, we are talking about integration in the American tech workforce. This conversation freaks us out. And the more we prep with tools to be in the thick of this together, the better off we are.
Nefarious Bias
So no, it’s not good enough that you’re committed to train your people on unconscious bias. It scratches the surface of a miles deep issue. Bias is not an infection cured with an Unconscious Bias session. I have never known any behavioral training that didn’t preach to the already converted, unless there were 1) outcome goals participants had to hit and 2) participants saw the training as a path to learning enough to make those goals a reality.
Even at company all-call trainings, I’ve run enough workshops over the last two years to know who is and who is not in these trainings.. Your senior management is not there. Your VP’s of Engineering are not there. Shoot, even your middle managers are not there. It is always junior level or frontline staff who are already passionate about this work and desperate to find a way to get their senior or middle management teams to listen because they are in pain. No unconscious bias training alone will do that. Goals and accountability will do that. Training to meet those goals will do that. Post-mortems on what went wrong and why the goals weren’t met will do that. Our teams have to become clear on how big their competency gap is and what training/experiences/achievements they will need to undergo to gain competency. In short — what do you want people to know how to do.
I want you to picture bias like pollution. Everyday you will emit a certain amount of pollution into your workplace, whether you want to or not. It will slip into the cracks of everything you produce and destroy the culture of your companies. Now I want you to picture that the pollution is going to kill your company in 20 years if you don’t do something about it. Is your plan still one training that you optionally do with your workforce whenever they deign to participate in it? Is that how you deal with something that is quickly diluting your impact in the market? This is the defining workforce development, economic, and social justice threat of a generation. We have to make these conversations evolve and get sophisticated and our workforces need training in order to participate in them.
