The National Association of Corporate Director’s Global Board Leader Summit began with a Diversity Symposium. The afternoon convening brought together a variety of perspectives looking at diversity in the broadest sense from skill sets, experience, background and the more commonly discussed of race and gender.
While all if this is important, there were some startling, and not so startling, discussions around what is called unconscious bias. NACD explains it best: “Did you know that for every woman CEO of an S&P 1500 company there are four S&P 1500 CEOs men named John, Robert, William, or James? Or that under 15 percent of American men are over 6-feet tall, while almost 60 percent of CEOs are taller than 6 feet? No board thinks, “We need a tall man with a certain name at the top of our organization to be successful,” but statistics like these reflect the biases that pervade organizations whether we are aware of them or not. Unconscious biases influence how we make decisions, how we measure our own performance, and how we think and behave both inside and outside of the workplace. These biases can affect everything from product decisions to our interactions with coworkers and can lead to the loss of talented employees and decreased innovation.”
Studies show that most people view that those who have the same accent as them as more intelligent than those who have a different accent. The exception is that people tend to believe those they hear with a British accent as smarter. Bias is a tendency or inclination that results in judgment without question. The question is not if we have biases, the question is which ones do we have? A vast majority of people do not wake up in the morning thinking: How do we minimize the role of woman today? How do we marginalize people of color today? It is how people were unconsciously programed but luckily the problem can be both identified and corrected. Google conducts extensive training to reduce unconscious bias. Data is the central part of Google’s business. “Where might we have unconscious bias in our data? Training has helped to find and correct. The training wasn’t the end, we needed tools to remind us.” My favorite comment was “What do we call biases when we write them down?… qualifications.” How do we start to mitigate unconscious bias? Look at the unique qualities people bring beyond a preconceived list of criteria that tends to perpetuate the same.
Boards need to diversify their membership to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Looking at the “whole person” as a candidate, the forced multiplier of diversity of attributes such as skills, perspective, experience, background, education, upbringing, geography as well as gender, race, sexual orientation and age is critical.