From the course: Leadership through Feedback

Addressing common biases

From the course: Leadership through Feedback

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Addressing common biases

- Anais Nin famously said, "We don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are." Since judgment plays a huge role in our survival, and judgment and bias are intertwined, it's important then to acknowledge that we all carry biases. Bias is not always a negative thing. It helps us make sense of the world. It becomes negative when we're not aware that it's operating and we allow it to alter our perception of the world and the people in it. Biases lead to positive or negative perceptions of people, which in the workplace affects expectations, performance reviews, and ultimately, who gets promoted, or who gets a raise or who does not. The best way to address these biases is to understand their origins, acknowledge you have them, and keep an eye out for when you're assessing a situation, like an employee's performance. In this video, I'm going to briefly describe four common biases found in the workplace, how you can recognize them, and what you can do to prevent them. Affinity bias or PLU bias describes our tendency to gravitate toward people like us. This may look like hiring, promoting, or just enjoying working more with people who share characteristics with you like race, gender, or educational background, or share common interests or hobbies. To counter this, think about the people you think most highly of, or most often recommend for promotion and see if there could be any affinity bias affecting your judgment. Assessing your motives is a great way to double check you're not inadvertently favoring some people over others. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms an initial opinion of someone. A great way to combat confirmation bias is to think like a scientist and look for data that disproves your initial beliefs. If you have an unfavorable impression of someone, seek out evidence that your initial assessment of them is wrong. Recency bias is also referred to as "what have you done for me lately?" bias. If someone bombed a presentation or knocked one out of the park last week, this recent performance is going to be more of a factor in the overall picture because it's the one fresh in your mind. To prevent this, you need to track and note performance over different points of the year. Ask for performance input from several people who've interacted with this person since the last evaluation period. Using more frequent data points from different sources will help even out the recency bias. Attribution bias. Because some people see women, people of color, and other marginalized groups as less competent, they may undervalue their accomplishments and overvalue their mistakes. To combat this, give specific feedback to your people and tie it to concrete work goals and outcomes. Research shows that feedback given to women is more vague and focused on communication style, while men are given specific feedback tied to business goals and skills that can accelerate their advancement. Another common bias we all have is what's known as the fundamental attribution error. This is where you put far more credence on their character and not enough weight to the circumstances in which they reacted. You make assumptions that they are bad at time management when in fact they may just have way too much work on their plate. Bias can undermine morale, performance, retention, and ultimately, company bottom lines. The best way to minimize its negative effects is to start by educating yourself about them, and then seeing where they might be affecting your interpretations. So add safeguards to your processes, like making sure that there are at least two candidates from underrepresented groups in your hiring pool, and making sure that you are getting performance feedback from several different people. As James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it's faced."

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