What are the parallels between bias in our school-aged days and now? What can we put into practice for avoiding bias in recruitment and promotion?
Although I’m almost 40, I’ve spent over two-thirds of my life as a student. This means when I think about my journey over time I’m often thinking about my time as a student.
With over two decades of school, naturally I have a lot of memories about my work. I always delighted in, even going back to my early childhood, building out a big project or paper (U.S. State reports, anyone? I lived for those). I relished the creativity and unifying and organizing distinct ideas and arguments into a (hopefully) informative and captivating final product. Now, if I were preparing a paper or assignment longer than a few pages I would place it in a quarter inch binder. The kind with a laminate cover where insert a printed coversheet and even a bespoke label for the spine. In middle school with an Algerian font for the title and headings, because when you’re in middle school and you have important things to say you use Algerian, regardless of if your parents advise you otherwise.
Now, just a couple years ago, while strolling down memory lane, I thought about my project-passion from a new perspective. My environment, and parental involvement, made a lot of my preparation happen.
For starters, I had access to a computer and printer at home. I benefited from supportive parents that encouraged my skills and abilities, and provided me with a computer from grade school onwards. My binder practice was also made possible because my parents ran their own business and always had them on hand. On top of that, I was further privileged that my frequent use of them was never a problem, financially or otherwise. In fact, my parents encouraged me to go beyond requirements for presentation, emphasizing the importance of presentation.
Photo by Laura Rivera on Unsplash
My practice of going all in on projects whether it was a binder with a cover sheet, elaborate posters or bulletin boards to display in class, and typing out shorter assignments instead of writing, consistently earned praise and higher marks.
Now, was this fair? I was showing an element of preparedness and professionalism, but the binder, computer, and other supplies largely came from my environment and privilege. While everyone could create a coversheet, not everyone had in-home access to a computer, or parents with the time and knowledge to coach and support on assignments.
Fast-forward to today and my calling is building remarkable high-performing places to work. We know companies with diverse workforces are 35 percent more likely to outperform their competitors. Remarkable teams consistently reach their intended results while creating diverse and inclusive environments that allow all of us to thrive.
When hiring and promoting, our objective is to evaluate each person on their potential to contribute to remarkable. As we make upwards of 35,000 decisions and inferences a day, unconscious bias around race, gender, class, or any myriad of factors influence our decisions working our ability to build a diverse and inclusive workforce. How do we fairly and consistently evaluate and support others without bias?
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Unfortunately, it’s exceedingly difficult to take action to avoid all the binders that could affect our judgment. Without systems, our decisions are vulnerable to bias from our own preferences and experience (which may or may not predict performance – or support a diverse and inclusive team). It’s easy to think we’re measuring what we should while we're falling short. Indeed, common approaches to selection are often no more accurate than flipping a coin.
Briefly put, to increase diversity as well as your success start with understanding the core competencies your team requires. Then you can build systems with evidence-based tools like performance management and feedback (for promotion), and validated pre-employment assessments and structured interviewing (for hiring) that accurately measure those competencies. In this way you've built shared understanding about performance and are aligning your systems to that understanding. You'll also avoid, intentionally or unintentionally, hiring or promoting who you’d most like to be stuck with on a layover, have a beer with, or pick your own favorite hiring bias example.
As students we were more likely to learn and achieve excellence if we started with intention – the end in mind. We understood the assignment. The same is true for growing your team. Sustaining your own definition of remarkable and building a diverse and inclusive team start with thinking intentionally about you hire and grow.