Tag: DEI

President Biden has continued his series of executive orders, the latest one focusing on DEIA. Here are some brain-based actions agencies can take.

Juneteenth has been officially recognized as a federal holiday by U.S. Here’s a list of resources to enrich your understanding of this important holiday.

Bias affects the way we communicate, often obscuring our feelings and intentions. Science offers a better way to communicate.

If leaders can make their organization a psychologically safe place to speak up, they can tap into a wellspring of new ideas from otherwise quiet folks.

Priorities aren’t enough to make lasting changes to diversity and inclusion. Leaders must also focus on building the right habits and systems.

I&D initiatives should build upon other each other in meaningful and coherent ways, like movies in a shared universe. We call it the “Marvel Model.”

Diversity without inclusion can lead to a revolving door of talent, which means leaders should focus on uniting teams around shared goals.

Leaders who offer flexible work arrangements increase the diversity of their hiring pool, new data suggest. They may also build greater inclusion.

It’s one of the most common missteps leaders make in expanding their talent pool: creating diversity without inclusion. Here’s why both matter.

Diversity goes far beyond the mere notion of quotas. It’s how modern teams raise their collective intelligence and make smarter decisions.

Whether it’s sharing an idea or challenging someone else’s behavior, speaking up at work is fraught with feelings of threat.

A great deal of research makes it clear that identity diversity matters just as much as cognitive diversity in creating effective teams.

Whether someone speaks up at work or keeps quiet often comes down to their sense of social threat or reward, which leaders play a crucial role in creating.

The NeuroLeadership Institute is set to launch a new journal article, “Debunking Gender Myths: The Science of Gender & Performance.” It’s our deep dive into what the research says about how being a woman or a man shapes the way you lead and succeed. In order to broaden the conversation around this incredibly important issue, we are holding a short discussion on Facebook Live on December 4 at 12pm ET with NLI Chief Science Officer, Dr. Heidi Grant. It’ll be an opportunity to ask questions about men and women at work and discover the latest insights emerging from the research literature. To get the conversation going, please submit a question below and we’ll consider it for our on-air discussion. Create your own user feedback survey

Everyone knows the pain of feeling left out, but fewer discuss the dread of needlessly being left in. This is what we at the NeuroLeadership Institute call over-inclusion, and the downsides are massive. In the rightful pursuit of lifting up diverse voices and opinions in recent years, leaders have started over-correcting. In order to reach a happy middle ground, they must pay attention not just to moments of exclusion, but over-inclusion — cc’ing more people than necessary in emails, jam-packing meeting rooms, and creating multi-armed project teams. According to our research, the way to create that efficiency is through a careful process of expectation matching. Swinging into the danger zone At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we think of inclusion as a pendulum. It can swing from under-inclusion, where people fail to loop in the right team members in meetings, projects, and emails; to optimal inclusion, where the right people know the right info at the right time; to over-inclusion, where people sit in meetings wondering “What am I doing here?” We recently discussed this phenomenon in a Quartz article entitled “It’s possible (and dangerous) to be over-inclusive.” Most people know from personal experience that over-inclusion is possible. But the science of why it’s dangerous is perhaps less well-known. Research has shown that humans naturally want to empathize with others, which is why we do our best to be fair and include everyone. The downside is we may unknowingly burden their cognitive load and create decision fatigue, leading them to develop an unhealthy, “always-on” attitude toward work. Getting everyone on the same page We find the solution to over-inclusion is thoughtfully excluding. It’s about leaving people out of meetings and emails because you recognize their time and energy are better spent on other things. Based on the leading brain science, we contend the way to do that is through expectation matching. When we run into something that violates our expectations, it causes our brain to do some heavy lifting. With a finite amount of cognitive resources at our disposal, the more those expectations are violated, the less focus and thought we can give to other matters. Leaders who want to thoughtfully exclude can follow the wisdom of science by laying out expectations ahead of time. They can explain who needs to be involved and for what purposes. If everyone is on the same page around those priorities, those who are left out will better understand why. The certainty and fairness will feel rewarding, and they may even thank you for excluding them, as they can now use their cognitive surplus for more productive ends.

This week, Starbucks responded to public outrage following the arrests of two black men who were simply waiting to meet a friend at one of its Philadelphia locations. As a part of a larger response, it announced it would shut down 8,000 stores for one day to give racial bias training to 175,000 workers. That’s $12 million in lost revenue, according to some estimates. This move sends a powerful signal that avoiding bias is a priority for Starbucks. But by itself, mandatory racial bias training is suboptimal, with the risk of many counterproductive effects. In some cases, compulsory trainings like these can actually lead employees to display more bias. When autonomy needs are violated—like when training is mandatory—people often react. In a classic example, white participants who perceived that they were forced to agree with an argument about bias against blacks felt more prejudice compared with whites who felt they could choose to agree, who felt less. In studying decades of industry data, researchers have found that mandatory training usually uses negative incentives (don’t do this/be like that) and the positive effects only last a couple days. Voluntary training, on the other hand, has been linked with significant increases in under-represented groups entering into management. As a research organization, our scientists have spent years studying why organizations that have, like Starbucks, made commitments to inclusivity have not achieved the results they sought. The science suggests that such initiatives have failed to fully reach their goals not because of a lack of commitment or focus—which Starbucks’ leadership is clearly addressing—but because of faulty theories of how bias works and how to mitigate it. Here’s what the science suggests matters most for breaking bias, especially if you’ve made an intervention mandatory. Work on both kinds of biases Bias plays a role in why the loudest person in the room gets listened to the most, why we hire people who remind us of ourselves, and why we give better performance ratings to people who impressed us recently. But it’s also the reason why we can guess where the forks are stored in a friend’s kitchen. Our biases are simply cognitive shortcuts. How you stock a store, how you do scheduling, where you invest resources, and other everyday business decisions can be guided by biases. Instead of focusing on only social biases, companies should think about how biases appear in all of their operations. Spotting biases in business decisions gives people practice in identifying biases and puts focus on the fact that we all make accidental errors across the board. This broadening decreases the likelihood of defensiveness when a social bias is called out. It normalizes the fact that if you have a brain, you’re biased. Mitigate biases not just as individuals, but as teams Too many bias interventions are based on prescriptions for learners like “search your mind for bias.” This is ineffective, to say the least. Bias is individually unconscious, no matter how much you intellectually understand it. While humans tend to be terrible at self-evaluations—we all think we’re more beautiful and better drivers than we actually are—we can see other’s behavior a little more clearly. Our own biases are largely outside of our conscious awareness, but other people’s biases can become quite obvious with some training. To do this, teams need a common language for identifying bias that is non-threatening. “We have a habit of letting the people in the room lead the discussion during conference calls—do you think that’s a distance bias at work?” such a conversation may go. “Maybe we should start the meeting with the people on the line?” You’ll get no arguments from us against people individually striving to become more equitable and fair in their interactions with the world. But in an organizational context, having normalized, nonthreatening conversation about bias is one of the quickest ways to lasting change. Across organizations in three industries, we found that two weeks after a light, digital training, a full 95% of 274 participants reported discussing bias at work at least once a week, with a third of participants doing so at least four times a week. As in so much of life, it’s about having the right words, in a group setting that lets you use them. We believe that this process of identifying process in groups with shared language is central to the success of bias-breaking initiatives. Build habits, not intentions Priorities and intentions have a way of going out the window when you’re stressed, tired, or multi-tasking. To create behavior change, it’s better to focus on building habits—which, the research says, is best achieved through if-then plans. That takes making the right action out of the responsibility of deliberative cognition (“should I do this or that?”) and instead allows you to stick to a script. In a retail context, an if-then plan could be formulated as “If you’re in doubt about a customer, ask three different colleagues who think differently than you.” In the churn of multitask-laden knowledge work, where distance bias has a way of crowding out strategic thinking, a personal if-then plan could be “when I get to my desk in the morning, I’m going to pick out the most important task relative to my goals that day, and make sure it gets done.” Prioritization is vitally important, but awareness is overrated. Real culture change, regarding bias or otherwise, requires cultivating the right habits, fortified by the right language. The most effective learning happens over time, with topics surfaced and revisited repeatedly. These habits then need to be supported by systems that reduce bias at the source. Just like you can’t become strong by lifting a single gigantic weight, you can’t change habits in a single day. The education needs to be ongoing, baked into the rhythms of the organization. Lasting change requires lasting learning and sustained prioritization. Take it from Johnson himself: “Closing our stores for racial bias training is just one step in a journey that requires dedication from every level of our company and partnerships in our local communities,” he said. David Rock is director, Khalil Smith is head of diversity and inclusion, and Heidi Grant is head of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute. Continue Reading on Quartz SEE ALSO: The Biggest Myth

Assessing “culture fit” shouldn’t be a gut decision. Here’s how to interview candidates with more precision, based on what your work culture is actually like. One of the hardest parts of hiring new employees is figuring out how well they’ll fit into your work culture. Unlike education and job experience, where there may be specific credentials you’re looking for, “culture fit” can be dangerously vague–and uniquely vulnerable to unconscious bias. Still, hiring managers tend to take pride in trusting their gut, and many screen for culture fit the same way: They get a candidate talking, try to establish rapport, and then make an intuitive judgment about whether the person would get along well with current employees. But since we all gravitate toward people we consider to be similar to us, even the most scrupulously fair hiring managers tend to think more favorably of people who remind them of themselves. The result is an uneven process that limits diversity and fails to secure the best talent. The solution? A more structured interviewing process that’s designed to reflect what your work culture is actually like–and getting more specific about what traits it demands. This also means asking the same questions in the same order with every candidate, and being systematic about how you score responses. Here’s what to ask candidates–and what responses to listen for–depending on the nature of your work culture. 1. AN INDEPENDENT, ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE To assess a candidate’s ability to work independently in an environment made up of solo operators, try using a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you planned and executed a project with little or no supervision. What approach did you take to achieving your goals, and what was the result? What challenges came up along the way, and were you able to solve them on your own? The idea here is to look for evidence of autonomy, focus, and resourcefulness. Listen for (and score candidates against) these three job skills in particular: Vision: Do they set and achieve goals on their own? Planning: Can they organize, schedule, and formulate a clear strategy on their own? And how well does that plan actually reflect the underlying vision? Execution: Do they manage their time efficiently and stay on task without much oversight? How well do they make critical decisions and solve problems without outside help? When the unexpected happens, how well do they adjust and without leaning on directions from a superior? 2. A COLLABORATIVE CULTURE Other work cultures are much more team-focused, and collaboration is more important than autonomy. To assess an employee’s ability to work on this kind of team, try a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you worked with a team. What was your approach to collaborating with your teammates? What role did you play on the team and how did you contribute? What were some of the benefits you experienced from working collaboratively? What collaboration challenges arose, and how did you address them? Here’s what to look for in a good team player: Work style: Does the candidate enjoy working collaboratively and thrive in a team environment? Collaborative mentality: Does the candidate prioritize the success of the team above their own individual goals? Collaboration skills: Does the candidate have the interpersonal and communication skills to work well with others? How well does the candidate contribute individually to the goals of their team? 3. A CHANGING CULTURE Maybe your organization is evolving rapidly, or perhaps you’re actively in the midst of a culture shift. To get through this transitional period (and thrive as an organization afterward), you’ll need to hire someone who can not only adapt to change but help push the culture in the direction it’s moving. So try a prompt like this: Tell me about a time you encountered a difficult problem you didn’t know how to solve. Maybe you were asked to perform a task outside your job description, or maybe you had to master a new system, process, or technology. What was your approach to learning new skills? How did you deal with the challenge and uncertainty? And what did you learn from the experience? What you’re looking for here is adaptability, resilience, and the ability to achieve goals and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Specifically these three attributes: Growth mind-set: Does the candidate view their skills and abilities as fixed and unchangeable, or do they believe they can learn new things and grow in order to meet unfamiliar challenges? Agility: How does the candidate react to change? Do they see change as a threat or welcome it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion? Emotional regulation: How does the candidate react to stress and failure? Do they find negative emotions debilitating or motivating? Do they get overwhelmed or push ahead? Of course, no job interview is completely free of bias, but the more concrete you can get on what you’re looking for in terms of culture fit, the better you can interview and select for it. After all, more deliberate and fair hiring decisions benefit everybody–no matter what your work culture might be like. Continue Reading on Fast Company….

In 2004, Pamela Smith, now an associate professor of management at the University of California, San Diego, happened upon a clue into what power does to the brain. She was having coffee with a friend who had just changed jobs, going from one advertising firm to another. With that, she moved from frontline work to a management gig overseeing four people—and as if by magic, things in her head started changing. “It’s like I have to think differently, to use a different part of my brain, now that I’m a supervisor,” Smith recalls her friend saying in what’s now a highly cited 2006 Journal of Personality and Social Psychologypaper. “It’s nice because now everything has more purpose. I’m thinking about the agency’s 5-year plan, not just what I need to do to get through the week. But I feel so removed from what’s going on in the office. I give my employees tasks, and they complete them. I just have no idea how they do it—and I used to have their job!” Spurred on by this tip, Smith led the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study. In seven experiments, she and her collaborator showed a range of ways that people made to feel powerful—like by writing about times in life where they felt in control of a situation—think differently than their low-power peers. Is a purse an item of clothing? It is if you’re powerful. In study after study, Smith and researchers like her started piecing together evidence for the profound ways that holding power—whether through experimental manipulation or real-life experience—changes the way people process their worlds, in ways that explain not only corporate greed or erratic executive behavior, but sexual harassment. Power is nonconscious, Smith and her colleagues have found; we can have power, and absorb its cognitive effects, without realizing that we’re doing so. Other researchers have found that powerful people consider others’ perspectives less, and that the experience of power increases optimism about risky decisions. It also gives people an “illusory” sense of control over what will happen, increases the anticipation of reward while reducing the perception of threat, and prompts people to perceive sexual interest that isn’t there, among other effects. While we don’t have all the answers, we have started organizing the literature on power and found four major ways that its cognitive effects explain harassment. These categories may provide a better conceptual framework than we have today for understanding what power does to people, how to maximize its positive qualities, and how to curb its dangers, especially in terms of sexual misconduct. This is a crucial step, as sexual harassment training has received such shockingly little research, while sexual misconduct itself dominates the cultural conversation as 2018 begins. The first thing to know: Power blinds you to others’ perspectives In the 1960s, sociologists—like novelists and political theorists before them—described how not having power requires you have to think more about what’s going on inside the minds of the powerful than they ever would of you. Since the less powerful depend on the powerful to feed and clothe themselves, their habits of mind are going to be different. You’re going to ruminate more on what your boss thinks of you than she would in the opposite direction, just as a court has no choice but to try and infer the whims of a king. Powerful people “aren’t thinking about the meaning of the world in other people’s heads,” says Joe Magee, a psychologist studying power at New York University. “They’re only thinking of the world and their actions from their own perspective.” That shows itself on tests of empathy—powerful people feel less distressed when someone sitting across from them tells a story of great personal hardship—and perspective taking, where high-power people are less likely to realize that others don’t share their same privileged knowledge about things—suggesting they anchor too much on their own experience. While there is relatively little research on perspective taking and harassment, one 2008 study of nearly 500 participants did find links. The participants, recruited via newspaper flyers and the like, watched videos of actors playing out situation pulled from major harassment cases. Both men and women higher in perspective-taking were likely to rate the sexualized behavior as unwelcome. The interaction of power and perspective taking also has implications for how organizations treat harassment claims. Powerful people are likely to take cynical views of others motivations. “It is interesting to see how some people have reacted to sexual harassment allegation, with the claims that this person is making a claim of sexual harassment because they’re out to get something,” Smith, the UCSD researcher, says. “Is that an extension of some of the cynicism that comes from having power?” In organizations, cynicism from leadership regarding sexual misconduct can lead to what clinical psychologists refer to as “institutional betrayal”—where the trauma of an assault is compounded by bureaucratic incompetence or opposition or indifference from management. (In a 2013 study, just under half of college women with a history of sexual assault felt betrayed by their schools.) The opposite of institutional betrayal is institutional courage, where bureaucracy is minimized and victims stories are believed—whether it’s on campus or in a corporation. Power turns people into abstract thinkers At the close of Smith’s formative 2006 paper, she and her co-author proposed an abstraction hypothesis. “We propose that … those with power tend to process information in a more abstract manner than those without power,” they wrote. “The ability to see the bigger picture, to plan ahead, to keep an eye on higher goals, may be prerequisites for obtaining power as well as requirements for maintaining it.” In subsequent studies, she found that abstract thinking increases your own personal sense of power, and that just using more abstract, rather than concrete, language makes people appear more powerful. Other researchers found that when experimental participants were asked to think about their lives in a year, they used more abstract thinking in an unrelated follow up task than those who mused about tomorrow—suggesting that abstract thinking in one thing you’re doing can bleed into the next. While abstract thinking sounds innocent, it too has implications for harassment. Researchers have identified a gap in how people describe their sexual

I had a fascinating conversation with a coworker the other day. The essence of it was a question: “Why do companies put diversity and inclusion in a silo?” What we meant is why, so often, instead of seeing diversity and inclusion as a business driver, or a mechanism for increased performance, do we see it as a box that has to be checked or a team we need to check in with? And if organizations around the world hold that perspective, what are the implications? The dangers of that sort of myopic thinking are the business blunders that have a way of making headlines and trending on Twitter. They prompt the collective response: What were they thinking? Look no further than recent controversies around H&M, Dove, and Pepsi: These ads that seem so culturally insensitive were not accidentally disclosed, they were marketed! And the companies made no significant effort to justify or explain; they just acknowledged that they had missed the mark and gave the obligatory apology. Conversely, we can see examples of companies that are trying to infuse diversity and inclusion into everything they do. Consider Airbnb’s scene-stealing Super Bowl ad, which featured neither celebrities nor puppies, but simply a collection of diverse faces and some thoughtful copy: “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful, the more you accept. #weaccept.” While the housing platform can’t claim to be perfect, it’s modeling how to breathe diversity and inclusion into a culture (and a brand). This transcends a sentiment best exemplified by the statement, “Let’s have the D&I team take a look at this.” Rather than being requisite, Airbnb’s D&I approach is strategic. But D&I goes well beyond avoiding mistakes: inclusion means getting the best ideas to inform the best decisions. The industry data finds that diverse teams develop more products than non-diverse ones, while diverse companies make more than double the cash flow per employee than homogeneous companies. The academic research sheds light on the mechanism: diverse teams not only focus more on facts, they process those facts more carefully. Great leaders know that the workforce is changing, as are the expectations along with it.  Great businesses know that consumers are changing, as are their expectations. And some great leaders running great businesses understand that the walls between what happens inside a company, and what people see — in both product and culture — are inextricably connected. Employees care about the brand from the inside, consumers care about the brand from the outside, but it’s the same brand. Inconsistency equals hypocrisy, and hypocrisy quickly equals irrelevance. My simple recommendation is to treat diversity and inclusion the same way a learning organization treats training and development, how a great brand treats marketing, and how a fiscally responsible company treats controlling costs: It’s everyone’s responsibility. Having a Diversity and Inclusion team can be the right decision for your business, but they can’t be the only ones thinking about how diverse perspectives and inclusive habits combat organizational myopia. You might have a small team that spends most of their time thinking about D&I, but everyone should spend part of their time thinking about D&I. The science says this will lead to better decisions, made with more carefully evaluated information. The alternative is to patiently wait until it’s your turn to make an avoidable, visible, and costly mistake. Just be prepared to answer, “What were you thinking?” Continue Reading on LinkedIn…