"The Bias Burden: How a Bias Can Weigh Down Your Career"

The Bias: Harry has a bias that goes something like this: “All Latinos are familiar with Latino culture, speak Spanish, and regard it as an honor to work with “their own.” As a result, he transferred Hector--one of his most promising branch managers--to a region where most customers were Mexican immigrants. What Harry failed to realize was the Hector, despite his Latino heritage, had little affinity for or interest in the culture.
The Result: Because of his discomfort with his new work setting, Hector quit to work for another bank. In the process, Harry gained the reputation of being unable to retain valued employees of diverse backgrounds.

The Bias: Lucy manages a small group of native-Americans. Unfortunately, several of these otherwise good employees are chronically late to work. Having heard that some native-American cultures have a view of punctuality that is different from her own, Lucy decided to give these individuals a break and allow them to come to work 30 minutes later than their teammates.
The Result: The rest of her team deeply resented what they saw as preferential treatment and productivity, along with Lucy’s reputation as a manager, declined.

The Bias: George would have made a great Director of Training except for the fact that he was notoriously bad at coaching his direct reports. Apparently, his bias told him that women and members of emerging (“minority”) groups were too fragile to take criticism and, besides, as he put it, “I don’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
The Result: George performed badly as a manager and was passed over for promotion.

When we think of bias damaging a career, our minds immediately jump to the beleaguered woman, victimized gay person, or member of an emerging group whose progress within the organization has been compromised by a blatant bias directed against them. As these examples show, however, it is sometimes our own biases, not those directed against us, that slow our professional progress. These internal biases need not be blatant racism or sexism to do their damage. In fact, most often it is the subtler prejudices held by us otherwise “nice people” who, despite our “niceness,” still allow past experiences to color our accurate perception of those with whom we work.

I call this subtle kind of bias, “Guerilla Bias.”™ Like the “guerilla warrior” who hides within stands of lush foliage, “Guerilla Bias”Ô is concealed behind good intentions, kind words, and even thoughtful acts. As you can see from the cases of Harry, Lucy, and George, “Guerilla Bias”™ is based on the perverse premise that all women, emerging groups (previously called “minorities”), people with disabilities, and those who are outside the so-called Amajority@ population are to some degree fragile, quick to explode, or in need of special treatment.

Harry, Lucy, and George provide us with only three examples of how subtle bias can block a promising career path. Other ways in which bias interferes with effective functioning and potential advancement are:
· The inability to conduct fair and accurate interviews or assessments.
· The inability to accurately interpret the reactions and needs of participants in training programs.
· The inability to form effective teams with colleagues of diverse backgrounds.
· The inability to judge accurately the expectations of those to whom we report.

This list makes it obvious that a willingness to diffuse bias in oneself is key to career success. Below are seven steps for minimizing the biases that hold us back. Because biases interfere with our ability to see people accurately, I have called these steps the “Vision Renewal Process”.

The Vision Renewal Process
Step I: Become aware of your biases. All biases, even the most sub-conscious ones, periodically toss up a clue to their presence in the form of a thought. These thoughts are knee-jerk assumptions about the character of someone different from ourselves. Your task is to make a mental note of this first assumption, an assumption that just might be a whiff of smoke drifting up from an as yet un-identified bias. Once we notice the bias, we can name it and then have the power to target it for extinction.

I am reminded, for example, of my “knee jerk assumption” about the black-jacketed white-male firefighter who inhabited a seat in the front row of a diversity training class. My bias told me that, because of his occupation, gender, race, and taste in clothes, he had to be sexist, had to be chauvinist, and, most certainly, had to be utterly unreceptive to the material I was presenting. As a result of this bias, I found myself subtly excluding him from the rich discussion that was so important to the success of the program. Imagine my surprise when I later learned that he was a champion for diversity within his firehouse, had been an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, and was one of the few men in his division to support female firefighters. As embarrassed as I was at my mistake, I am glad the incident happened. Without it, I might never have become aware of a bias that clearly impacted my effectiveness as a trainer.

Step II: Identify why you hang on to your biases. The reason we are reluctant to let go of biases is that, like any destructive mental habit, they carry with them certain secondary gains. Some of these gains are real, many are illusions, but in all cases, we must identify those alleged benefits and weigh them against the damage that biases inflict on our careers. Your task in this step is to figure out the secondary gains that accompany the biases you identified in Step I. To help you do this, here is a list of alleged benefits that most often accompany a biased belief:
· Relief of guilt
· Protection of status
· Protection from loss
· Protection from emotional pain

Step III: Weigh these alleged benefits against the harm your biases are doing to your career and you will know which ones to work on first. Let’s face it, we all have biases – big ones, small ones, destructive ones, (almost) harmless ones. We need to prioritize those that cause the most damage. For the trainer, this destruction is most apt to be seen when our biases distort our perception of the needs of trainees or, as in the case of my friend the firefighter, of their attitudes toward what we have to offer. This distortion, in turn, will compromise your effectiveness and, ultimately, reduce the chances of career advancement.

Step IV: Dissect your biases to reveal their weak foundation. Ask yourself this question: Was the original source of my bias reliable? In most cases, the answer will be “no.” You might, for example, discover that your bias was spawned by the repeated messages of a frightened parent, from rumor, or from a media that loves to distort the truth. Even if it did grow from actual experience, you will be surprised at how unreliable that experience it can be. This is because what experience teaches us about an individual or a group can be grossly distorted by the presence of intense emotion, the trickery of self-fulfilling prophecy, or the filter of expectation.

Step V: Identify what you share with others by focusing on common kinship groups. A “kinship group” is any population that shares a self- or externally-ascribed category that sets it apart from others. This characteristic might be a disability, a profession, race, gender, a hobby, or any other of dozens of human dimensions. The virtue in the concept of kinship group is that it allows each of us to belong to many groups at once depending on the characteristic on which we focus. It also, and this is the best part, enables us to broaden our group to include many populations that we previously thought of as different from ourselves.

The reason that broadening a kinship group helps defeat bias is that those who share a kinship group are immediately re-classified from “them” into “us.” When this happens, we automatically begin to evaluate members of the “former ‘them’” group more fairly. One key strategy for achieving this transition from “them” to “us” is to focus on common goals – those goals, in turn, become the defining kinship group. When, for example, working with colleagues who are very different from yourself, the common goal of creating a successful learning environment can become a unifying factor that at once weakens biases and creates a winning team.

Step VI: Shove your biases aside. Once we have laid the proper foundation, shoving our biases aside when they come to mind becomes a mechanical act of habit and will. This is fortunate because bias-free vision has a cumulative effect. Because it allows us to see people accurately, we suddenly find ourselves meeting more and more individuals who do not conform to our bias. As experiences of seeing people as they really are accumulate, the balance between past biases and real life begins to tip in favor of accuracy, the bias begins to fade, and, ultimately, cases of mistaken identity become a rare occurrence that surprises us rather than a daily event of which we are not-so-blissfully unaware.

Step VII: Beware the bias revival. Biases, like all unhealthy attitudes, have a perverse way of lying in wait for an opportunity to re-exert their influence on our lives. Nothing, for example, can resurrect a prejudice faster than a negative event involving the object of your bias. Riots, a murder, employee layoffs, a publicized sexual harassment suit, or a case of violence in the workplace can unlock dormant fears. Once that fear is set free, there is the danger of it being directed, not at the actual perpetrators of the crime, but at those around us who resemble the players in that event; a bias is reborn.

The way to counter the effect of such occurrences is to undertake a deliberate, immediate, and systematic examination of the event. Ask yourself : “What do you REALLY know about what happened?” You may be surprised to find that much of what is prompting your bias is unsubstantiated rumor, misinformation, and, again, the exaggeration of a hungry media committed to the mandate: If it bleeds, it reads.

Taking It to the Workplace
You may, as step VII implies, sometimes get discouraged in your efforts to banish biases from your thinking. When this happens, remember that there is no genetic predisposition to bias, no bias gene rides on our chromosomes, there is no DNA test that can identify who is biased and who is not. Bias is learned. It is an acquired habit of thought rooted in fear and fueled by conditioning and, as such, can be unacquired and deconditioned. This is good news because none of us can afford to allow our distorted vision to interfere with our ability to function effectively, fairly, and successfully in our increasingly diverse workplaces.

Sondra Thiederman is a speaker and author on bias-free leadership, diversity, bias-reduction, and cross-cultural health care issues. She is the author of Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for Reducing Bias in the Workplace (Chicago: Kaplan Publishing/Dearborn Press, 2003) which is available at her web site or at www.Amazon.com. She can be contacted at:

Sondra Thiederman, Ph.D.
Cross-Cultural Communications
4585 48th Street
San Diego, CA 92115
Phones: 619-583-4478 / 800-858-4478
Fax: 619-583-0304
www.Thiederman.com / STPhD@Thiederman.com

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