Most organizations want diverse bias-free teams. They want men and women of all ages from diverse races and backgrounds. In practice, this is hard to create. That kind of melting pot is nearly impossible. Even if you can create a diverse team, you might struggle to manage the group where everyone feels valued and respected.

The kind of bias prevention programs used by many organizations can be wholly ineffective. Bias runs deep and is hard to remove. You can, however, disrupt it.

The most successful leaders have managed in these three ways:

• Hiring

• Day to day management

• Talent development

While workplaces can never be bias-free, they can become better if senior leaders learn to head off anti-diversity thinking in the beginning.

The most common types of bias are:

• Where some groups have to prove themselves

• A narrow range of behaviors is excepted from some groups more than others.  

• Gender bias triggered by motherhood.

Bias against a disadvantaged group sets up conflict within that group—triggered by race and gender.

Managers should be acutely focused on bias because well managed diverse groups perform better. They have a higher degree of collective intelligence, which is why we initially established teams. We need the skillsets of teams. Also, if you have diverse workplaces, people are committed and better at solving problems. Well managed diverse teams perform better when they share a set of cultural assumptions. If they are not managed where it is communicated that everyone has been selected for a certain skill set and is valued for those skills and the team is judged based on their ability to deliver as a team, then the divergencies can lead to conflict and corrosion and performance.

Companies have sought to approach this with bias prevention training. A single episode of bias training can’t be compelling, mainly meant to change behavior. If the activity is mandatory, it will cause conflict.

Our disruptive bias training, where we give that focus and teach people how bias plays out in concrete ways, we know it can’t change in a single training session. Because if you have diversity challenges, typically, it’s because you have these subtle forms of bias continuously transmitted through your business systems.

In the case of disrupting bias, the underlying premise is that there is this sticky problem challenging to solve. We can’t make everyone unbiased. But we need to work around it and create systems and processes that make everyone and the organization more inclusive.   

About Jim Woods

Jim Woods is President of Woods Kovalova Group Training. We enable managers and frontline employees to have meaningful conversations on race and reimagine diversity and inclusion programs that matter. His firm and partners have advised, trained, and coached individuals and organizations from over 30 countries since 1998. He is an author of 3 leadership books and two for children. Happily married to his business partner Lucy Kovalova-Woods their work has helped individuals and leaders in companies such as MITRE, Whirlpool, U.S. Army, and Chevron. Book a Zoom meeting with Jim.