Poker-face. Naturally people develop affinity towards things and people they feel and share strong connections with. Even without being intentional about the posture and disposition we harbor when it comes to perhaps the way we interact with people, humans as we are, there are certain categories of people we take a special liking to simply because of how they look, talk, laugh and express themselves or otherwise.
These preconceived notions usually linger on from the informal of situations to the professional circle where leaders and employers tend to register their biases and create an imaginary line between the Haves and Have-nots in terms of how they tickle his fancy and inspire his hope.
Making a Case for Biases
Forbes reveals that people management has a lot in common with poker and other similar card games. A good player can use their knowledge of the odds of each card and make decisions based on that. However, the great players observe their opponents as much as they consider the cards and become experts at noticing “tells” in other players, even if it is a micro-twitch of an eyelid that broadcasts what that player might be holding. Being a manager of people can be an arduous task and leaders have to embody the same thing.
It is essential for managers and employers to have a comprehensive grasp of all the data and metrics avail- able that demonstrates good business ethics and practices. However, if the manager doesn’t have good knowledge of what makes the employees and subordinates who work tick, then the employer having his pulse of the actual business without enough on the employees, becomes a defeated cause.
Predominantly, a vital element that makes us who we are is our unconscious biases. We look at other people and situations from these unconscious biases or judgments. These can come from past experiences, the environment and culture in which a child grew up and the educational systems where he or she learned, among other sources. The key is that these unconscious biases have a lot to do with how people conduct themselves at work.
Reflecting in the Judgemental Mirror
Leadership bias is a form of unconscious bias that causes leaders to categorize, compare, and make assumptions that reinforce their own favoritisms, preconceptions, and prejudices, as well as common stereotypes.
Whether we have the most honest, loving and near indiscriminate wind blowing around us, there are always those moments where we make decisions based on what we know, have seen and believe as true or otherwise, and employers, being humans, are also the same. It is not always natural for some people who are thrust into or take a manager’s position to know how to communicate effectively with their staff.
Although it is relatively fine, it is prudent for these persons to understand it’s a problem and can seek help or training to overcome it. Likewise, not everybody is a natural leader or exceptionally good at the interaction required to communicate with staff.
Unconscious or implicit biases often run counter to our conscious, expressed beliefs. And whether we want to accept it or not, we all have biases— even the best leaders among us. Every time we engage with other people, our unconscious brain filters and categorizes hundreds or even thousands of micro messages we pick up from and about them.
Multiplicity of Leadership Biases
In the first place, managers must first reconcile them- selves with their own unconscious biases before delving into those of the people they work with. Understanding how their biases affect them will help any supervisor have better insight into how they might be influencing another in their job. This is important if a manager is working with someone who can help their decision-making abilities. For example, a person could be very well-educated and knowledgeable to perform their particular duty in a company, but the underlining biases might be affecting their performance.
The prejudices managers subject employees to can take many shapes and forms and most often than not, the recency or “what have you done for me lately?” bias comes at the forefront of the judgement scale.
When it comes to recency, it is the tendency for leaders to focus on the most recent time period instead of the total time period being evaluated. It is common in the workplace as busy leaders tend to gauge performance based on the most recent experience with an employee, especially on larger teams where people are working autonomously. According to Thoughts Exchange, recency bias leads to the common workplace adage, “you’re only as good as your last X.”
Another form of bias is the ‘similar-to-me bias’. With this, bias it most often leads managers to rate people
with similar interests, skills, and backgrounds more highly than people who are different from them. Similar-to-me bias is more common than you’d imagine and can negatively affect everything from workplace inclusivity to diversity hiring initiatives.
Proximity bias on the other hand occurs when leaders give preferential treatment to those who are physically closest to them— this is especially common in hybrid workplaces where some employees are office-based and others are remote. Remote employees often feel as though they are “out of sight, out of mind” as they’re overlooked for projects and promotions over their in-office peers.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms your pre-existing beliefs. This is a common leadership bias which makes it easier for leaders to trust people and information that aligns with their values and beliefs and harder to trust those that don’t.
This list is not exhaustive by any means. There are many ways to identify leadership bias. For example, leaders who obsess about “the way things were,” or get distracted by the latest “shiny object,” or worse— won’t let go of a strategy that clearly isn’t working, are often driven by bias instead of facts and evidence.
Cracking the Whip on Ingrained Biases
Regardless of how objective we may desire to be, humans are programmed to respond positively to people we perceive to resonate with us and react negatively, consciously or unconsciously to people we perceive as too different to “fit in” to our social or professional groups.
This is why Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that most human decisions are not based on facts or logic. Instead, they are based on biases, beliefs, and intuition.
Research shows that leaders can rein- force harmful organizational biases that were in place, even before the leader came on board. These biases, when left unresolved, are built into supervisory relationships and groups due to the intrinsic nature of workplace hierarchies. For starters leaders must acknowledge the bias because the first step to address the problem is to admit it exists. Also, the first step towards rooting out leadership bias is to make leaders aware of their blind spots. Leaders must be encouraged to reflect on whether they are drawn to candidates or employees because they meet the company’s criteria for success or because they share certain similarities with them or simply “like them”.
Furthermore, creating self-awareness training to tackle unconscious bias is important.
Top leadership consultant Michael Brainard emphasizes the three desired key outcomes of tackling leadership bias: humility, discomfort, and discipline. Anti-bias training can help force leaders to get out of their comfort zone and create self-awareness.
Feedback as a measure in addressing biases are also key. As a consequent, managers must structure employee feedback as the reverse serves as a breeding ground for bias. Without structured criteria, leaders will inevitably reshape the criteria for success in their own image.
Stanford researchers recommend leaders focus specifically on situations, behaviors, and impacts— not on personalities. The whole idea of feedback is to guide someone to change something. It’s almost impossible to change personality.
Meanwhile, the most honest, unbiased feedback is often the toughest to hear, but that’s exactly why it must be heard. Data can help leaders back up or debunk hearsay or biased feedback.
Moreover, ThoughtsExchange assert that gathering more collective intelligence is a requisite to dealing with the situation. It stated that unconscious leadership bias stems from a variety of shortcuts our individual brains take to make life easier. And although bias is al- most impossible to eliminate, it is easy to interrupt through collective intelligence.
“At ThoughtExchange, we refer to this paradigm shift as going from loud leadership to crowd leadership. This means making the shift from empowering one leader with a voice, direction, and strong decision-making skills, to empowering leaders that can activate crowds of people, tap into their collective intelligence, and build stronger organizations.”
As long as leaders understand their deficiencies and are willing to work through them, they will be open to any help they can find from other people or resources. When you manage others, you collaborate with people, not just data. The metrics of a manager’s responsibility come from the employees’ efforts. The leader among his numerous responsibilities has to motivate and work with his or her people to help them be successful in their positions, thus, enabling the manager’s success.