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The decision to dissolve the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) is a setback to a more inclusive society, with implications for both the public and private sectors. But there’s one big difference: Business can do something about it.
These best articles from 2023 offer clarity around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In this infographic, we dive into how the brain reacts to unfairness and why systems must be overhauled to achieve true equity.
Here’s how to recognize — and mitigate — the most common mental shortcuts.
Corporate jargon is annoying, exclusive, and confusing — so why do we keep using it?
Five generations in the workplace provides plenty of opportunity for friction — and innovation.
Diversity isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s a key element of an innovative business culture.
Four steps organizations can take to ensure DEI is a business asset with a bottom-line business value.
As we look to 2023, we outline four leadership trends to keep your pulse on.
Don’t miss out on the many upsides of candidates with “portfolio careers.”
Taking inclusion beyond lip service requires constant, dynamic efforts at improvement.
Power doesn’t have to corrupt leaders. Here’s how to keep thinking about people first.
As the evolution of telework for the federal workforce continues, neuroscience can help leaders navigate new dynamics.
Whether you’re a seasoned DEI practitioner or looking to dive into organizational DEI efforts, NLI’s guide will get you up to speed.
If you think you need to focus #change or #DEI efforts on the people who disagree, you’re missing out on the power of the middle.
As we celebrate Pride month and Juneteenth and look to other national awareness months and holidays, set your sights on goals that show your company’s authentic activism.
Transitions are tough. In this Q&A, we speak with a recent college graduate about what she’s learned about transitions, and why her viral video on the topic struck a nerve.
We spoke with three neurodiversity advocates about how to create more neuro-inclusive hiring practices and workplace cultures.
As companies return to office, a staggering statistic has arisen: only 3% of Black Professionals want to return to in-person work. Why?
How could companies start doing better around diversity and inclusion — but for real this time?
What three scientific elements should we focus on to create more inclusive Australian workplaces for the differently-abled?
Many workers won’t be returning to an in-office situation anytime soon. We know the biases baked into telework; now’s our chance to mitigate them.
Let’s Start a Conversation Read the Full Case Study KEY INDUSTRY Financial Services PRACTICE AREA Diversity, Equity & Inclusion PRODUCT Trusted as the Bias Mitigation Partner To Some of the World’s Most Impactful Organizations Case Studies by Practice Area Across industries, we make organizations more human and higher performing through science. These case studies show the change we can co-create. Diversity, Equity & InclusionTake inspiration from firms that mitigate bias and create equitable cultures.Accelerate Inclusion Culture & LeadershipExplore how organizations transform their culture, and shift mindsets at scale.Transform Leadership Talent & PerformanceLearn how companies harness feedback to improve employee retention, engagement and development.Optimize Performance Want to Find the best solution for you today? Commit to Change Connect with NeuroLeadership experts to explore how you can transform your organization at impact, speed, and scale. Scroll To Top
The pandemic has played havoc with our mental health, and a significant factor in our malaise is that we’re missing our people—terribly. We long for friends, family and colleagues. We are hardwired for connection, and with the need for social distancing and the reality of being away from the workplace—and everything else—for such a long period of time, we are struggling.
Change can be scary and tiring, but it also represents an amazing (and fleeting) opportunity to build a better world of work. Here’s how.
Unlocking the power of a diverse organization requires creating a sense of inclusion. These three action-oriented ideas can help offer a roadmap.
Inclusion is proven to be good for business, but it’s also been shown to afford employees a host of psychological and physical benefits.
Understanding the nuances between allyship and inclusion is important to helping your team act in everyone’s best interest, and correct past imbalances.
Deb Bubb, IBM’s Chief Leadership, Learning, and Inclusion Officer, is bringing her work home in an inspiring and transformative way. Here’s how.
Leaders who practice optimal inclusion—that is, deploying the right people for the right jobs—can create more efficient, effective teams.
The data say leaders need to get more intentional about cultivating diverse talent. The science of allyship and inclusion can show us how.
For over two years, Microsoft has been on a journey of cultivating allyship in its leaders and employees, and CDO Lindsay-Rae McIntyre has led the charge.
A recent Wall Street Journal article put Google’s diversity struggles on full display: Googlers of all ideologies and political leanings are finding it difficult to reconcile their personal beliefs with those of their colleagues. Googlers For Animals are clashing with Black Googler Network. Conservatives At Google say their preferred candidates get unfairly smeared at work. And Sex-positive Googlers take issue with Google Drive staff removing explicit images from the platform. Google grapples with this kind of infighting in part because Google encourages people to bring their full selves to work. The policy may be noble on its face, but as our client work has found, complete inclusivity often leads to clashes over conflicting viewpoints. Everyone is saying something different, so no one is getting heard. The solution we propose for optimizing inclusion is developing a shared language. The psychology of inclusion We know from the research that diversity makes inclusion harder — no matter if you’re talking about gender, ethnicity, or belief. Teams with more differences must exert greater effort to help others feel like they belong. Too often, well-intentioned companies start groups to celebrate these differences, such as those focused on women or minority ethnic groups. Studies have shown this only makes things worse. One 2015 review found that efforts to celebrate differences can lead non-dominant members to feel uncomfortably aware of their group identities. They feel more marginalized, not less. The way to make people feel more in-group is to celebrate similarities. Colleagues feel like they belong when they are reminded of what everyone has in common, such as a shared sales target or project objective. Psychologists call these “superordinate goals,” and they’ve been shown to improve cohesion and reduce conflict. This is where shared language comes in. If coworkers are united around similar goals, they can begin to adopt specific vocabularies for talking about those goals. By using similar phrases, they can ensure mutual understanding. Shared language must be brain-friendly Unfortunately, typical D&I mantras are too exhaustive to add any real value for companies. In our own work, we rely on the science of memory to help clients build a handful of short, sticky phrases that are easy to recall and share in daily conversation. The phrases have the added benefit of getting people to automatically think in terms of the team’s goals — a process known as “unconscious priming.” In matters of bias, for example, having a shared language equips people to call out biases in real-time. If someone notices a coworker hiring only people of their same gender, race, and age, they can ask the person if there might be a similarity bias at play. Asking questions and using the same language allows teams to broach big issues in a non-threatening way. Tips for your organization To get the most out of shared language, explain your thinking to create clarity. People won’t always agree with decisions, but at least they’ll understand and respect them. Tell stories to pass on cultural cues about ideal behaviors and show how inclusion can get misunderstood. Generating empathy helps align people to the company’s goals, without telling people to sacrifice who they are as a person when coming to work. SEE ALSO: 5 Habits for Holding Less-Biased Meetings
Bias and inclusion may appear together in D&I conversations, but from a scientific standpoint, they are undeniably different.
We’ve written before on the importance of creating priorities, habits, and systems (PHS) when it comes to large-scale culture change. But with so many organizations taking a renewed—or perhaps unprecedented—interest in reshaping their D&I efforts to boost inclusion, mitigate bias, and become more human overall, we felt compelled to revisit the model and explain the underlying science. Because when it comes to addressing systemic racism, you can’t do it just by making it a priority.
You wouldn’t expect to find Buzz Lightyear at Monsters University. It just wouldn’t happen. The miniature space explorer and the institution of higher learning for mythical creatures exist in two separate universes.
While many people have started going back into the office, talent leaders should stay mindful of those still at home—and how to cater to both groups.
Leaders may understand why inclusion matters, but still fail to put it into practice for their organization. Research from NLI can offer some strategies.
Social interaction significantly contributes to mental health—taking it away jeopardizes our stability. To stay connected, we to need bring back the personal.
Diversity & inclusion isn’t a “nice to have” during a crisis. It’s how organizations ensure the best ideas help solve the most pressing problems.
Learn the essential habits for leading inclusive virtual meetings and keep your team engaged, collaborative, and innovative in the process.
With many employees working from home full-time, developing these five habits to mitigate distance bias is critical to good decision-making.
Amid the CV-19 crisis, work relationships can be complex. The science of social threat and reward can help us understand and fulfill our partners’ needs.
Working remotely may be the new normal for the foreseeable future. Learn how you can make working remotely more brain-friendly, productive, and inclusive.
Speaking up does more than just elevate new voices. It creates a richer, more creative network of ideas within an organization.
Individual contributors all the way up to CEOs are curious where to start when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Here’s the brain-based answer.
Powerful people are revered for their visionary thinking and ability to inspire. But research also reveals the more dangerous, negative effects of power.
In order to create more diverse and inclusive cultures, leaders need to learn how to change behaviors, rather than focus on changing beliefs.
It’s hard to know when we’ve assembled just the right people for just the right jobs. That’s where the idea of “thoughtful exclusion” comes into play.
This year’s NeuroLeadership Summit will feature scientists doing research around teamwork, learning, motivation, and more.
Author and speaker Douglas Rushkoff will give the opening keynote address at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, speaking on why we should keep teams human.
When the right people come together, teams can think and act more efficiently. At NLI, we call this balance “optimal inclusion.”
Here’s how leaders create an environment in which both extroverts and introverts feel comfortable sharing their ideas in meetings.
Every meeting contains some mixture of extroverts and introverts — people who speak up and those who keep quiet. Here’s how to raise quiet voices.
Leaders typically think of growth mindset in terms of performance, personal growth, career development, and skills improvement. But the concept also can be crucial to driving diversity and inclusion efforts. The key: Whether you believe you are capable of improvement often determines whether you think other people are capable of change. That, in turn, shapes how you view your team as a whole. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we define growth mindset as the dual belief that skills can be improved over time, and that improving those skills is the goal of the work people do. We recently explored this concept in a white paper featuring growth-mindset case studies from five leading global organizations. What science says Research has found a number of benefits to building a growth mindset culture, specifically around inclusion. For instance, growth mindset can reduce stereotyping. Researchers have found that whether or not you think people are fixed or mutable in who they are shapes how many stereotypical judgments people make. If you use a growth mindset, you are more likely to attribute stereotype traits to environmental forces, rather than inborn traits. When making judgments, a growth mindset also helps people gather more information before coming to conclusions. In one study, those with a fixed mindset needed less context before making a decision, potentially leading to undesired or unforeseen outcomes. Growth mindset doesn’t just help people doing the stereotyping; it also helps people on the receiving end. Consider the idea of “stereotype threat.” It’s when members of a certain group do poorly on a task because they’re told they’re not “supposed” to excel. A body of research has shown that growth mindset can reduce the effects of stereotype threat, enabling people to perform closer to their true potential. The business case For organizations, the implication here is that cultivating a growth mindset culture can help drive down biased behavior and create stronger teams. Leaders who help their employees see failures as learning opportunities, and threats as new and exciting challenges, can also help those employees see others’ shortcomings not as signs of personal failings, but merely as a product of being human. When employees start accepting diverse team members as generally well-intentioned, though perhaps fallible, they can move from a culture of competition to one of true and inclusive collaboration. This article is the twelfth and final installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
By Khalil Smith, Heidi Grant & Kamila Sip Organizations have rightly started making diversity and inclusion top priorities. And accordingly, managers have become more sensitive about who they hire, promote, and assign to projects. They’ve also become more sensitive to sharing information equitably among their staff, and worked harder to give people the right amount of exposure within the department or organization. Continue reading on Quartz
Bias isn’t just something that happens within a person. It also happens between people — namely, in meetings. Without meaning to, people at the head of the table routinely make mental shortcuts that save time, but also may impair decision-making. This expedience may feel good, but teams and organizations may ultimately suffer from the scarcity of input. The key to holding less biased meetings is diversity, a premise we explored in a recent Corporate Membership article called “How Diversity Defeats Groupthink.” The piece uses tested research to show how more diverse teams can cut through bias and improve decision-making. We’ve posted an excerpt below, featuring five strategies to help leaders change their behavior and incorporate greater diversity of thought. 1. Bite your tongue when you’re in charge As a leader, you naturally want to share what you know. But it’s important not to bias the discussion with the influence you wield. Next time you find yourself wanting to broadcast your opinion at the outset, remember to hold back until others have weighed in. 2. Solicit contrary perspectives People naturally want to get along, but that can make dissent feel unwelcome. Next time you sense team members hesitating to speak their minds, remind them it’s OK to disagree. The goal isn’t harmony, but good decisions. But you need to rotate the role of contrarian, so that it becomes a habit that people can employ. 3. Amplify quiet voices Bad decisions happen when team members keep their doubts and reservations to themselves. Next time you notice a discussion being dominated by a few vocal personalities, make a point of calling on those whose voices haven’t been heard. 4. Run the scenarios One way to defeat conformity is to change your time horizon. Next time your team’s plans start feeling too rosy, try projecting yourself into the future, running through scenarios and thinking through what could go wrong. Shifting your perspective can inject an important dose of reality and help you see through misplaced optimism. 5. Switch it up The more time you spend as a team, the closer you get. This camaraderie can be fruitful, as team members begin to share the same language and behaviors. But, dangerously, they can also think like each other. Next time that happens, make a point to shake things up. Swap in new people on the team, and shuffle roles. Change can be bittersweet, but it will help keep your team nimble and sharp. SEE ALSO: The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’
Over the last 25 years, we’ve cracked the code for culture change at scale. Discover what science-backed habit activation can do for your organization.
