The Shadow of Bias on Leadership (1)
This has been many years in the making and, finally, I am happy to announce that I completed my book on inclusive leadership. If everything goes as planned, and in this VUCA world one never knows, the book titled The Shadow of Bias on Leadership — How to Improve your Team’s Productivity and Performance though Inclusionshould be available during the month of July 2019 as an eBook and August as a paperback book.
I am very excited about the opportunity to share my research and experiential learnings with you all. I was inspired to write the book after working for many years as a global executive in different parts of the world, my work with the Center for Creative Leadership and more recently, facilitating workshops on diversity and inclusion.
Several years ago, I read a very telling survey. If my memory serves me right, a survey was conducted about organizational bias on managers and leaders in global organizations. The study related how, when managers were asked if bias was an issue within their organization, the majority of the surveyed managers categorically answered that “yes, bias was an issue” (they were differences between the individuals based on gender, race and ethnic background). When asked if they, personally as managers, had any biases, the response was — “bias is not an issue for me”. When asked if they believed that their decisions were influenced by their own biases, again, the answer was negative. In other words, there was a bias component to the decision making of the organizational culture, but they were not a contributor. Organizational bias just… happened?
That study reminded me of another survey that argued that the majority of parents believed that their children have above average intelligence. While this is not a mathematical impossibility (you could have children at the lowest part of the range that bring the overall average down), It is a mathematical improbability — Most curves in this world are beautiful normal bell curves, with most people falling in the middle around the average . Remember your stats course? 68% of the population falls within 1 standard deviation from the mean, 95% within 2 standard deviations and 99.7% within 3 standard deviations). Very few people fall on the extremes of the curve. If everyone is above average, then the average would just move higher, keeping its beautiful normal bell-shaped distribution, and dividing the population into half above average and half below average.
We are all biased. Some of us may be more aware of our own biases than others, and try to manage them in different ways. Not being aware of our own biases — hence having unconscious biases — or being aware of our own biases — having conscious biases — does not necessarily mean that we allow those biases to affect our decision-making process. We may consciously decide to create processes to reduce the effect of those biases. For example, as a college professor, I do have favorite students (don’t tell my students). So when I correct papers, discussion blogs or projects, my first round of corrections is done using the anonymous mode which reduces my ability to know the author of the marvelous work that I am about to grade. Organizations can also establish processes that reduce the effect (positive or negative) of a manager’s bias.
Let’s take the hiring process.
You have all heard that we like to hire people like ourselves. I am not sure if that’s true or not (I would not want to work with another “me” personally), but, since I am not in a research mood this morning and my battery is running low, let’s assume that it is true. During the hiring process, we could establish a process that would neutralize those individual biases by (1) using an interviewing panel formed by diverse individuals, with diverse functions and potentially diverse backgrounds; (2) nominating a diversity champion that has been trained to seek out those biases in the hiring procss; (3) agreeing beforehand the type of questions that would be asked and agreeing how those would be score — what are the types of answers that we are looking for? You will be amazed how many interviewers like to ask about a person’s values without knowing what the organizational values are; (4) give everyone the same opportunities — if you are interviewing local and non-local candidates, conduct all interviews using Skype, BlueJeans or any other video conference call solutions; (5) if the new job has a technical aspect that needs to be tested, make sure that the test is corrected anonymously; (6) create different levels during the interview to involve as many individuals as possible and different layers to avoid groupthink. The idea is to include as many individuals from the organization as possible to have diverse perspectives. In this example, the interviewing panel should not choose the final candidate but choose 2 to 3 finalists and move those 2–3 candidates to the next level for other individuals to evaluate and make the final decision. Yes, this process will be time consuming but hiring the right candidate will save any organization money and headaches in the long run, and yes, there are tons of studies to support that view.
In The Shadow of Bias on Leadership, I provide the reader with different processes to reduce the effects of the bias at an organizational level. And then there is the aspect of self-awareness. And we will leave that topic for another post. Remember, I am running low on battery and I am on vacation — I only allow myself one battery charge per day. We’ll talk to you soon.
