BIAS FX PROFESSIONAL 1.4.3 (Full Crack)
Josephine Heathershaw
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I was excited to spend a bit of time with Buki and understand his thought leadership in this area. Before diving right into the interview questions, I asked Buki to elaborate a bit more on who he is and what he does.
So, I know that one of the things Buki says is that unidirectional strategies for tackling workplace bias are creating a bit of a diversity and exclusion nightmare. I asked if he could expand on that topic.
The problem with that is it reinforces to the traditional victim that everybody who's in the majority is a guilty perpetrator. So, you're reinforcing a bias already. Secondly, you reinforce the bias that is one of the most destructive and most demeaning biases of minorities. This could cut across all the different minorities but let me do it from a Black minority perspective - they're a bunch of hapless victims who can't make it in this world unless you are empathetic to their needs and show them and give them a helping hand.
What also became the basis of the IDU Methodology was an acceptance of the multi-directional nature of workplace bias. It's not unidirectional. That means that sometimes, and as I alluded to earlier if all bias is sensed, I can misinterpret a person's decision or a person's behaviour as driven by unconscious bias.
I touch on implicit bias in a lot of the work that I do. In one of my workshops, I use the definition by Verna Myers, who's the head of diversity over at Netflix. She lives in America and is a lawyer by background. She's done a couple of good TED talks, and in one of those she says that biases are the stories that we make up about people before we get to know them. I just love the simplicity of that definition because there are a lot of academic definitions out there.
Then I quite often tell people the story about when I was first on unconscious bias training when I worked for the BBC, I found out that I was mildly biased against disabled people. This shocked me because I'm a wheelchair user and I was born with my disability and my brother's got the same condition.
Interestingly, to your point, the IDU Methodology has an inbuilt mechanism which forces you to recondition yourself and the other person by firstly recognising there's a multi-directional nature to bias. This way you realise that you can be as much of the perpetrator as the victim. I think that's important. Just by doing that, it makes me think of your story and it makes me think sometimes I need to check my own self. So that's the first thing.
Isn't that fragile? Isn't that the same fragility attributed to white people? Right? That philosophy of white fragility is a major example of what I describe as the guilty perpetrator hapless victim model, which is driven by unidirectional views of workplace bias. Saying that it's one way when it's not one way. What do you call my example? Black fragility? Actually, it's not a colour fragility. It's what I describe as defensive fragility. It's the propensity for human beings to be upset that you paint them in a negative light.
It's important to understand that it's human nature to get your back up when somebody paints you in a negative light. Actually, the biggest obstacle to navigating bias at an interpersonal level or an institutional level is defensive fragility. It's the propensity for people to get their back up. Because if I sense bias from you as my boss, I don't want to tell you because you might get upset.
The way Buki has explained the difference is interesting and it makes a lot of sense. As I was listening, I wondered how does it work in practice and how can I call out this multi-directional bias when I see it or sense it within my world of work? I asked Buki if he could give people some practical hints and tips?
I'll give you an example. When I started speaking, people would say to me, "Oh, Buki, oh, you speak so well, you are very articulate." I would immediately think and wrongly in many cases, oh, you're white you're shocked because I'm a Black guy. You don't expect a Black person to be articulate. This was my bias, right? But this is what I would think. Sometimes it was the case, but I'm sure more often than not, it wasn't. They just thought I spoke well.
So that's one way for simple bias. And then the complex bias, which is the stuff in between. This is the stuff where it could be gender or it could be gender identity issues or any of these things that you can't put your finger on. Anyway, you are not being promoted or you are not getting the opportunity, you're not getting the same crack of the whip. I'll give you the edited highlights version way to deal with that.
The key is to maintain the developmental inquiry. I don't understand type of conversation. And what you are going to find is that the bias, either theirs or yours in some cases will call itself out. Then what you can do, step four, is collaboratively work with that person to agree on the next steps. Very simple. And if their bias towards you has called itself out, work to gain what I describe as worthy recompense for your loss. And if it doesn't work, if you've done all of that and it doesn't work right, and the person is stubborn or doesn't want to own up to the unfairness, for whatever reason, you now have a trail of a conversation that you can now go to HR and have.
He agreed and we did the pilot which they loved. They went on to do business with us, not to the complete exclusion of the other organisation, but we ended up getting more business with them. If you take that example, I followed all those four areas. I dropped the baggage which allowed me to ask the question for my own development. That invoked a coaching approach in the other person who was open to telling me the criteria. So we've got into a conversation. I didn't make it a black thing, right? Or a class thing. I just kept asking questions, criteria-type questions, which is a form of I don't understand, IDU.
This article will probably appeal to (or possibly irritate) more of my Talent Acquisition friends than Candidates, but it may also give Candidates some insights about who they should approach in their network of contacts when asked for Professional References and provide ideas on what a Candidate should ask their References to discuss if they're contacted.
Professional References, they've been with us as long as Companies have been hiring staff. They typically include past Managers, Peers, and Business Customers that a Candidate has worked with and/or supported. Ideally, these individuals have witnessed the Candidate doing their job, they have seen them in action, if you will.
One post I read stated that a bad hire has the potential to create a -298% cost to the organization, while their math was a little sketchy to back that up, it implied that a bad hire can cost you up to 3 times (3x) what it took to hire them. If that's true, it's certainly some good motivation to try to avoid a bad hire.
I should also point out that it can also be expensive not to have necessary work done in a timely manner, those costs can be -- lost business opportunities/sales, project delays that affect multiple departments, team morale when being over-worked, errors or re-work, etc. which is what ultimately justifies hiring new people in the first place. So I do believe Companies are actually motivated to hire good Candidates as quickly as they can.
Contrary to how it may feel to Job Seekers on any given day, Companies are not purposefully trying to rule everyone out of consideration. Hence there is a strong desire for something like a Professional Reference to boost confidence in a Candidate when considering offering them a job.
Professional References are usually viewed as part of a hiring quality control process, good References must equal a good Candidate, don't they... Consequently, bad References then, must equal a bad Candidate, don't they...
You can stop nodding your head in agreement with that last statement (sorry, not sorry). It was intended to demonstrate one of the many fallacies related to Professional References, primarily because most of the time you don't typically get a bad reference provided to you by a Candidate, not intentionally anyways...
If you've never really given Professional References a thorough or complete analysis, for your own good and the good of your Employer, it's time that you do. You may be doing things regarding Professional References that are not really helping to mitigate risk and you may be making decisions with really sketchy data.
So, if you do really believe that Professional References are key to reducing the risk of a bad hire, there are some things you need to be aware of related to using them for that purpose. Professional References, if not done correctly, completely, and with a pre-determined purpose/focus in mind are just not going to be all that useful. So I'm afraid I may just have to play the bad guy here and burst your bubble a bit on this topic...
While Professional References can generally be considered one data point in the overall evaluation of a Candidate, they are pretty flawed in their very nature since they are based on a 2nd hand perspective of a Candidate, and then compounded by the subsequent 3rd hand interpretation of the answers given & recorded (paraphrased) for the questions that were asked...
It's a no-win question since -- the person may not have a dog in the first place, and if they do, they probably have never actually kicked their dog anyways. So regardless of how they would answer - either with a "yes" or a "no" - the interpretation of the answer is going to be a negative. So unless they answer stating - "I don't have a Dog and I would never kick one if I did", or "I would never kick my Dog and this question is completely out of line" -- and -- that response is then written down even though this was a yes-no question, the usefulness of the question and it's answer is basically -- a big fat zero.
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