Who’s on your team?
How do you go about choosing someone to be on your team? When I say team, I mean your partner, friends, sports team, your team of volunteers or your team at work. In making those choices we usually think we’re picking the best person for the job – and some of the time we might be. BUT when we think about what best looks like – it looks like us.
Because that’s what makes us feel safe.
We are programmed to recognise more quickly the people who look like us. To value more the opinions of people who are like us and who have more shared experiences. To listen more closely to the people who sound like us. And so, to choose the people on our team who are 'the best', but by our standards.
‘We are programmed to recognise more quickly the people who look like us. To value more the opinions of people who are like us and who have more shared experiences.'
I was delivering one of my sessions around unconscious bias in Lewisham last year. At the break I was looking out of the window and could see a group of school children about to play a game of football. The male teacher made two boys captain. This was a visibly diverse class but both captains happened to be tall, skinny and white boys.
Maybe they were picked purely on merit, but maybe not.
The toing and froing of picking went on until the last person standing was the short, chubby, black girl and she went by default to the final picker.
I’ve thought about the scene a lot since then. About how these ideals of what ‘good’ looks like and what ‘best’ is are drilled into us at such a young age. And I reflected on how it can be so damaging for the individual and for society. We only need to look at the make-up of leaders around the world to see that similar to me bias wins out in structures unchanged for years. Homophily is a theory that’s been around since the 1950s. It roughly means ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Homophily is choosing people who are like you to spend time with, associate with, and to be in your team.
In his book Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed talks about homophily, homogeneity and collective blindness. He uses the CIA as an example who, up until very recently, had archaic recruitment practices. They are still not as diverse as they need to be when you consider the vastness and complexity of the problems they need to solve. In discussing 9/11, Syed argues there was no way the complex and dangerous threat could have been identified by a team of white, English speaking, protestant, middle-aged, middle-class men. Some of the subtleties in the symbolism we saw the world over on our screens were missed, the seriousness of the message not considered.
The selected analysts were individually perceptive but collectively blind.
How can we expect to solve some of the most complex problems if we don’t choose people to be on our team who have a diverse set of perspectives and experiences?
‘Think about how you go about choosing people to be on your team. Are you creating the systems and processes which enable true inclusion to play out?’
Think about how you go about choosing people to be on your team. Are you creating the systems and processes which enable true inclusion to play out? Or are you (unwittingly perhaps) attracting, sifting and choosing people who are all the same? We can identify many ways in which conscious bias, prejudice and stereotyping plays out in the world. We are constantly reminded that despite our progress there is so much further to go. But let’s consider Unconscious bias. It is deep, engrained, in all of us, hard to notice in ourselves and even harder to stamp out completely. Part of the problem is that unconscious biases sink very deep. We cannot be seen to be allowing anything but a fair, transparent, objective and consistent recruitment processes, so we don’t talk about our own unconscious biases.
Our unconscious biases can be expressed through micro aggressions; small, subtle signals that we communicate through our behaviours. Albert Mehrabian found that only 7% of what we communicate to people consists of what we actually say. The use of our voice, such as tone, intonation and volume, takes up 38%. More than half of what we communicate to others consists of body language. So, we can be sure that our biases are showing up even in the way we sit across the table from our candidate or welcome someone into the interview room. And that’s before we’ve even asked the first question.
So how do we get around this? Well, sometimes we get around it by talking about FIT. Fit is important – it’s important you assess whether someone shares your values and is driven by your organisational mission. But fit can cover up a whole manner of biases. And fitting in means complying. It means being like the rest of the team.
Now back to my last girl standing. As an avid football fan, I nipped out on that break to catch the second half. Do you know what? That girl scored. Whilst everyone else was running as fast as they could to compete, she placed herself strategically on the edge of the D and scored. She used her strengths in a different way, a way that looked different to everyone else, and she thought differently about how to play in that team. She didn’t comply but she did win.
So, I want you to think about this:
How many times have you appointed someone just because they fit and what is it about them? And why was the person who didn’t quite fit the wrong choice? Perhaps it is time to think:
"This person challenges my assumptions, they are different, they are going to disrupt the norm here, and that's all OK. Because they are the right person and they deserve the job."
‘So, a call to action. Check your recruitment processes are objective and fair. Check that you are you casting the net wide and not going to the same places that you’ve always gone to find new talent.’
So, a call to action. Check your recruitment processes are objective and fair. Check that you are you casting the net wide and not going to the same places that you’ve always gone to find new talent. Make sure you are being transparent about your processes – they don’t need to be a secret! Make sure your frameworks allow you to objectively score a candidate’s performance. Use a common language and consider the wording in your job adverts and how they might exclude certain groups of people.
And finally, are you personally aware of your own biases and how they show up for you? Are you? Really? Because sometimes that’s what leadership and allyship is. It’s not glamourous, it’s about a quiet grind of making systems and processes fairer. We’ve seen what happens when the quiet grind runs the other way. As leaders, as allies, as recruiters, review that advert, tweak that policy, re-design that interview and never assume there is no bias. Sometimes that is the biggest lever you can pull.