UNBIAS. Stacey A. Gordon
report, 69% of executives see diversity and inclusion as important. And this is an increase from their 2014 survey, where only 59% of executives saw it as important. In 2020, belonging, along with well‐being, is at the top of the Global Human Capital Trends survey as one of the most important human capital issues; 79% of survey respondents said that fostering a sense of belonging in the workforce was important to their organization's success in the next 12–18 months, and 93% agreed that a sense of belonging drives organizational performance – one of the highest rates of consensus on importance they have seen in a decade of Global Human Capital Trends reports.1
The Need to Ask “Why?”
Why should your organization prioritize diversity and inclusion now? Why should unconscious bias education be a priority? These are questions that you will have to answer, and it will be difficult to do so. “Why” puts people on the defensive. “Why” makes people uncomfortable. “Why” requires an explanation, which then requires you to dig deep for an answer. When it comes to unconscious bias at work, there's the possibility that you won't like what you find when you start digging.
However, “why” is the very thing you need to know when embarking on a journey to tackle unconscious bias and create an inclusive workplace. Just ask leadership expert Simon Sinek. In his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, he explains that answering the why can inspire cooperation, trust, and change. Why does unconscious bias education matter to you? The only way to answer that question is to understand what matters to your company. What is the goal and mission of your business? You may discover that diversity, inclusion, belonging, and creating a great workplace culture don't actually matter to your company at all, depending upon what you value. If you're unsure about your company's core values, you'll find further detail about this in the next chapter, but for now it's enough to understand that the motivation behind your decision to prioritize diversity and inclusion should stem from your organization's foundational values.
The Bandwagon Effect
When I worked at Prudential many years ago, there were teams of advisors whose job was to identify individuals who needed a financial advisor, convince them they were the right advisor for them, and then sell them a product. If you've ever worked in sales, you probably recognize these directives. Our teams were created by our manager, and living in Los Angeles, California, you might assume those teams were very diverse. And you would be very wrong.
The job of the advisor is to convince the client they are the best advisor for them. It is the basic tenant of any sales job. When selling, you are told to mirror potential clients, find things in common, get them to like you. There are thousands of sales education materials on the market showing salespeople how to sell. This is called the bandwagon effect, but did you know it's actually an unconscious bias? The bandwagon effect harnesses our need to want what everyone else wants. In sales, that's great. If you can show that you're the top realtor, the best advisor, or the most sought‐after designer, you have a much higher likelihood of closing the potential client. It's also why sales professionals love referrals. If they were referred to you by a current client, the odds of closing the deal increases dramatically. But that's the trouble with all of this. We connect with people in our circle, we refer people in our circle, and our circles aren't usually very diverse.
If you were to look at a demographic survey for our Prudential office, it would not demonstrate diversity. At least, not if you analyzed the data carefully. Our teams of advisors ended up being highly segregated. If you were Chinese, you were recruited by the Chinese manager and you were hired to a team that was 80% Chinese. Of course if you were not Chinese and you happened to make it onto that team, you did not last very long because you did not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, you did not understand the culture, you were not invited to attend client meetings if the client was Chinese, and not only did you feel excluded, you were excluded. You didn't perform as well as the other members on your team and in a commission‐only sales environment, you eventually quit.
This didn't only happen with the Chinese managers. It happened with the Korean managers, the Armenian managers, and the white managers. It also happened with female managers. A demographic survey of the office where I worked would be beautifully diverse on the surface. It would show that we had a vast array of individuals who were ethnically and racially diverse, spoke a number of languages, and even had decent gender diversity. But you would have to take a further look at the data to really see that the diversity was actually segmented, not through policy, but through human behavior and our desire for affinity.
Prudential was by no means an anomaly. One of my coaching clients worked for an investment management company for almost three years. The accounts were a minimum size of $2 million and he did a great job managing the money under his care. He made sound investments and increased portfolio size tremendously. He should have been on a trajectory to lead a client account, but instead he quit his very lucrative job after being told by his white manager that their high‐net‐worth clients wouldn't be comfortable with him, a Black man, being their account manager. Without the opportunity to become a fund manager, he would be unable to lead a team and essentially had no opportunity for advancement.
Unconscious Bias Is a Complex Issue: Defining Your Why
One of the reasons addressing diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias at work can seem difficult is that it is usually a complex problem. You don't normally have one straightforward issue to be resolved. There is nuance and it is multifaceted, which makes you have to work a little harder to unravel it all. It is necessary to tackle both the lack of diversity and the lack of “why,” and the process can be complex. However, complex does not automatically equate to difficult.
When a company is unable to discern why diversity and inclusion training is a priority for them, the default answer is often “to avoid bad publicity.” If we look at the Black Lives Matter movement as an example, your company might be one of the many who published a statement of support for George Floyd and told everyone that “Black Lives Matter” in an attempt to avoid being put on the list of companies to boycott. Maintaining good optics is not a “why.” It is inauthentic, not actionable, and your consumers, clients, and employees see right through it.
Numerous statistics indicate the positive financial impact of diversity and inclusion on the workplace. Companies that are inclusive are more likely to lead and capture new markets, 43% of companies with diverse management exhibited higher profits, companies with racial and ethnical diversity are 35% more likely to perform at a higher level, and companies with an equal number of men and women produce up to 41% higher revenues.
It's no wonder that in the absence of a why, the default answer is “to make money,” and we assume because we need to make money and our clients won't work with someone who doesn't look like them, that there is nothing that can be done about the lack of diversity. We throw up our hands and say that it is what it is. Yet when you have a true “why,” making money becomes a happy by‐product. A company that truly understands this concept is Vans, the footwear company. When a call was made to support Black‐owned businesses, they made it difficult to purchase anything on their website that day. On July 7, 2020, Vans posted the following statement on their website:
A NEW PAIR OF VANS CAN WAIT.
Today is Blackout Day, so before you spend money on our site, we ask that you consider shopping with your favorite Black‐owned businesses or donating to organizations such as the NAACP, GSA Network, and Color of Change. Learn more about what we are doing to support Black Lives Matter and racial equality.
The statement wasn't in a corner of their website. It wasn't a banner at the top or a footnote at the bottom. That statement was the only thing you saw if you visited their page that day.
Making the Decision to Answer Your Why
If