How Are Your Biases Impacting Your Success At Work?

You've likely heard the phrase 'unconscious bias'.

Lets break it down to ensure we're on the same page. Your brain is constantly assessing situations and peopleyou come into contact with. Our bias or frame of reference, is built up over time - usually based on our own experiences and upbringing. You are not always consciously aware of the judgements and assumptions you are making.

This is the main point of this weeks blog.
 

You are not always consciously aware of the judgements and assumptions you are making, which are typically informed by your experiences and personal frame of reference.

This is because of a lazy tendency in our brains. We love shortcuts. Our brains are busy processing lots of information. It is much easier for our brains to use shortcuts, stereotypes and historic information to interpret our current situation.

Once you understand this - you can accept you have unconscious biases.
 

Unconscious means you're not aware of it. And therein lies the problem.

It's much easier to deal with what you know. This requires you to assess your own thoughts and behaviour. For example, how do you expect to feel about the new graduate joining the team? 
Delighted that you've got someone new to train & develop? 
Cynical that someone with that little business experience could be put in front of clients? 
Annoyed that they've dropped straight in as an Associate when you had to work for 10 years to get to that level?

I'm not trying to put thoughts in your head. Just asking you to pay attention to your preconceived ideas. When you're aware of them you can change your behaviour or choose to write new neural pathways. Use those often enough and they'll become a habit.

I bet you want a diverse team and an inclusive culture. To be known as someone who understands and respects our differences and gets the most out of people. 

Here are a few points you can consider:
- use facts. If you hear generalisations e.g. a colleague mentions someone in the team is 'too aggressive', or someone is always late to work, ask for specific examples. Dates, times, who was there. By focussing on the facts in specific examples you reduce the risk of making assumptions like 'he's always late because he has a young child'.

- when recruiting, get HR to delete personal identifiers from CVs. Block out names, ages, ethnicity to give yourself the best chance of having a balanced perspective. Agree up front the most important criteria for the role you're interviewing for and core interview questions. 
By creating a fair and consistent process, you're giving everyone an equal chance.

- be aware of group think. When you run meetings is it always the same people contributing? Do you generally have a short debate and then all agree with each other?
All groups need a 'challenger' to break this up. You can achieve it by inviting different stakeholders to your meetings to get their perspectives. You can also encourage more idea generation before fixing on a solution.


I hope that highlighting unconscious bias in the workplace helps you to build and look after a diverse team. 

What are your key takeaways on this subject?