February 19, 2010

Dear Colleagues,

It was a pleasure to have you join Unbound Ideas and Dr. Shirley Davis for Dr. Sondra Thiederman’s Februay 18 webinar, “Bias-Free Leadership: Making Diversity Work for Your Organization.”  Thank you for being part of a very lively and frank discussion and for providing feedback on the event.

We are pleased to make this session summary available to you along with several resources provided by Dr. Thiederman.  On the right side of this page, you’ll notice a light blue column that contains several elements.   Just under Sondra’s picture, you’ll find a slide image that links to the on demand recording from this session (if you did not sign up for the recording, please contact Tad Furtado at (202) 422-5245 or via email to learn more about gaining access for you and your team).  Next you will find a list of artifacts that includes the session handout material as well as any links to outside articles or resources Dr. Thiederman suggests as part of uncovering bias.

During the session, Dr. Thiederman began by linking her presentation to others in Unbound Ideas’ Diversity series, specifically those presentations by Dr. Mary-Frances Winters and Dr. Roosevelt Thomas.  She said that the goals of the presentation were to clarify what bias means, better identify personal biases, and develop skills for reducing and managing bias. She then polled the audience to select a definition of bias. All participants answered correctly that: A “bias” is an inflexible positive or negative, conscious or unconscious, belief about a particular category of people. The important consideration to note is that biases can be positive or negative. Positive beliefs can be almost as damaging as negative ones. It should also be noted that biases are beliefs and attitudes not behaviors; though behaviors can grow from biased beliefs.

Dr. Thiederman then set about making us aware of our own personal biases through a number of activities and helpful anecdotes.

An output of her first exercise was to highlight that once we have a negative opinion of someone it is very difficult to see good things about them. While not a bias, such a frame of mind is similar to the way biases work. The inflexibility in perception and thinking creates problems in the workplace.

Dr. Shirley Davis cited research about size and beauty discrimination that supported Dr. Thiederman’s definition of bias and its impact on the workplace. Dr. Thiederman referred to this as “lookism” and called it an under-analyzed aspect of diversity.

The price we pay for bias in the workplace includes: reduced productivity, reduced creativity, wasted time, reduced morale, and lost employees. The host of “micro-inequities” which Dr. Thiederman referred to as “leakage” add up and lead employees to feel disenfranchised, and contribute less to the organization. Dr. Davis cited research from the Level Playing Field Institute’s 2007 Corporate Leavers Survey in which it was estimated more than 2 million people voluntarily leave organizations because of perceived biases, costing US corporations $64 billion each year. That is a business case for diversity training.

Dr. Thiederman said, the good news there is a lot that can be done to reduce biases and improve the workplace.

Step 1 is to become aware of your biases, particularly by surfacing unconscious biases. If we’re able to become aware of them we have the power to control the behaviors they create. The standard attitude is there is nothing we can do about our biases; Dr. Thiederman disputes that and, through a series of powerful examples, exercises and anecdotes made it clear how much we are entrapped by our biases, and how possible it is to become aware of them on an everyday basis. A resource she recommended is The Implicit Association Test.

Once we become aware of our biases, we can move to Step 2 which is to dissect bias in order to weaken its foundation. Dr. Thiederman asked initially, where the audience feels its biases have come from, including family, media, teachers, friends, etc. An insight Dr. Thiederman shared is that biases are often rooted in bad experiences which threaten our survival, self-esteem, or happiness. In other words, “Biases are all about fear.”

Such experiences are extremely unreliable in terms of their applicability to future circumstances. Specifically, a bias formed because of one bad experience with one particular group does not demonstrate any validity when assessed against a wider pool of representatives of that bias. It’s human nature to extrapolate from limited fearful experiences to form inacurate generalizations about larger groups. A bias, however, is by definition inflexible and not open to being shaped by new data or information.

Asking questions that assess the validity of a bias helps weaken the logic behind them and defeat them.

Dr. Thiederman then demonstrated the power of kinship groups – which are a way of developing a sense of “Us” even in a diverse collection of people. We tend to see members of other groups (“Them”) as all alike and members of “Us” as individuals with unique qualities. Identifying what we share helps defeat bias by transforming a “Them” into an “Us.”

Finally, Dr. Thiederman talked about the power of changing behaviors in order to effectively alter or manage beliefs. She defined this as “Acting as if,” and she provided us with a series of steps and exercises we can undertake to make this happen.

This frank discussion, touching on difficult issues and topics in a completely open and extremely helpful way, was intellectually stimulating and left us feeling positive about the potential for making good changes in our own thinking, our workplaces, and our communities. We’d like to encourage you, if you have questions or discussion points that you’d still like to raise, to do so on this page, and we will continue the dialogue.

A copy of Dr. Thiederman’s book, Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for Defeating Bias in the Workplace will be mailed to each paid registration site shortly.

Once again, on behalf of Dr. Sondra Thiederman and Dr. Shirley Davis, we thank you again for joining us, and look forward to the next occasion.

Warm Regards,
Unbound Ideas