The combination of words “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” have been co-opted by disingenuous and craven lunatics.
These words each have real meanings. Here they are:
Diversity: A wide range of visible and invisible differences that exist among people. These include values, religion/beliefs, cognitive/educational training, sexual orientation/expression, physical differences, experiences, backgrounds, preferences, and behaviors.
Does your social identity change when you’re working from home?
Social identity comes in many forms, and shows up for everyone in different ways on different days. I’ve found that one of the most helpful tools for discussing personal identity in my manager training workshops is the “social identity wheel”, a visual aid that displays the various identifying characteristics a person might feel about themselves at a given time.
For the same person, different aspects of the wheel might feel more salient (or at the surface) in some settings, while in other environments, they might be less top of mind.
For example, when I’m facilitating in a room full of C-suite executives 20 or 30 years older than me, my age is always top of mind. However when I'm teaching to international groups where English isn’t the first language of the majority of the audience, my own language ability and national origin are at the forefront for me. Whether you feel part of the “in-group” or “out-group” can also affect which parts of your identity are most “top of mind” to you at a given time.
This all leads me to the big question of the day - how do our identities show up differently when we’re working from home? I know that during the lockdown, it was clear to me that being a parent or caretaker was something that was very visible for many, having to manager childcare with kids at home and doing double (or triple) duty as a parent, teacher and worker had many work from home parents feeling completely overwhelmed.
Many other aspects of identity that were exciting and energizing to share with colleagues in the office have become harder to express in a remote work environment. Sharing one’s personality through fashion, body language or voice has been harder. Sharing religious holidays or traditions with colleagues through celebration, food or drink has also become harder to do.
But then again, the flip side is also true - target identities, “social identity groups that are positioned as targeted by oppression, to be disenfranchised, subordinated, exploited and/or otherwise harmed” may find that working from home grants some relief from harm. For instance, people with physical or mobility limitations don’t have to endure through challenging commutes, less-than accessible office buildings or conference rooms without adequate support.
How has your own conception of personal identity at your job changed while working from home? If you’re in a hybrid work situation, does your identity feel different on the days you’re in-person vs. the days you work from home? If you’re comfortable, please reply back to this email with your reflections, I’d love to hear them!
Quick Reads:
A “how-to” for hybrid work - All In person work should be “Voluntary, Strategic and Intentional”. I love the suggestions here about how to push back on the myths of the benefits of in-person work. Just because you don’t know how to do something (yet), doesn’t mean it’s wrong!
Actionable ideas for hybrid meetings - Simple and practical ways to make your hybrid meetings more human.
Virtual Public Speaking
When presenting on video calls, do you ever think…
I don’t know where to look. Do I look at the camera? At my slides? I've been doing this for months and it still feels awkward to me.
I have no idea if anyone is paying attention. I feel like my ideas are strong but I don't know how to engage the virtual audience in discussions. Whenever I ask a question all I hear is crickets.
I feel nervous even though I know what I'm talking about. I used to present in meetings all the time in person, but now when I'm working from home I don't have the same level of confidence sharing in hybrid meetings.
We have officially launched our “Virtual Public Speaking Skills” Online Class!
This self-directed, online video class is perfect for experienced presenters looking to "level-up" their virtual communication techniques. By the end of the course you'll be confidently preparing for virtual meetings, "dominating the mechanics" of virtual presentation software, engaging with your audience in quality two-way dialogue and wow-ing each and every virtual audience you find yourself in front of!
Want a Workshop or Coaching for Your Team?
Oak and Reeds offers training on hybrid communication, managing remote teams, interviewer skills, change leadership and more.
All our trainings can be conducted virtually using Zoom or in person.
Interested in scheduling a training for a team? Click the link below to set up some time to chat with Dave Collins about your training and coaching needs:
Imagine you’re a 20-year-old super-athlete. You just finished up your senior season playing at the top level of your sport. You can run faster than anyone you’ve ever met, lift more weight than professional bodybuilders and have the intelligence to process and anticipate the movements of 21 other similarly gifted athletes on a football field. You’re looking ahead to a million-dollar payday in a few months and you’re feeling on top of the world. Then you walk into a room where the men in charge of determining your future look you in the eyes and ask you if you’re gay.
This is precisely what happened to Derius Guice at this year’s NFL scouting combine.
In March, the National Football League hosts an event called the “NFL scouting combine.” At this event, held every year in Indianapolis, a little over 300 former college football players are invited to showcase their skills in front of NFL scouts. The goal for the players is simple, run fast, jump high, lift a superhuman amount of weight, and prove that they’re ready to be drafted into the NFL and play in the pros.
Every team has the opportunity to schedule a formal, sit-down interview with any player at the combine. Typically, each team will meet with somewhere between 10 and 25 players before the week-long event is complete. Some teams look to assess a player’s ability to quickly understand and communicate strategic concepts. They’ll have an athlete draw and explain plays from his college’s playbook, or ask about how they would respond on the field in certain circumstances. Other teams take more of a behavioral approach, asking players how they’ve responded to adversity, injuries or tough losing stretches. Some may even ask how they would respond to theoretical struggles when they arrive in the league.
Unfortunately, many teams also seem to purposefully try to upset players in the room in an effort to judge their ability to keep calm in the face of adversity. This is what happend to Guice when he stepped into that interview room.
In a bizarre way, the teams are trying to generate an emotional reaction in order to disqualify a player due to a perceived lack of emotional stability. Players have been asked about committing hypothetical crimes, family histories and even sexual preferences, the type of questions that would get any normal corporation in serious legal trouble if these questions were a part of a normal interview process.
For the players, these kinds of questions are not only offensive, they’re completely unfair. How would you react if you heard that kind of question in a job interview - of course you would be upset! These questions only underline previous assumptions about a player. You think he’s a hothead who will lose his temper when pushed about his rough childhood? Asking a question about that will only reinforce what you already know, rather than discovering new or interesting skills or attributes. There are no surprises in an NFL combine interview; only bizarre questions that reconfirm biases.
The NFL combine is a fascinating case study in talent evaluation. With a static set of challenges to complete, athletes look to be measured fairly against their competition for a job. But of course, the process has its weaknesses. In the mid-90’s a player named Mike Mamoula decided he would train specifically for the tests, not just for the football skills. He showed up to Indianapolis in 1995 and blew all the other competitors out of the water. He ended up getting drafted with the seventh pick in the first round and went on to have a spectacularly mediocre career in the NFL. In his case, the evaluation process failed, because he understood and exploited the weaknesses inherent in the talent evaluation and interview process.
Unconscious biases are the shortcuts one’s brain uses to make decisions quickly. As people, we have a tendency, when faced with limited information about a person, to map onto him or her our experiences working with people we feel are similar.
Think about the interviews you’ve conducted in your career. What assumptions did you have about job candidates before they walked into the interview room? Had you reviewed their resumes? Or looked at their LinkedIn profiles? How many conclusions had you already drawn about them, their skills or their ability to succeed in the role?
It’s impossible to totally eliminate bias from your interviewing process. Fortunately, there are some simple tools and techniques to help you reduce the role of bias when evaluating talent. And even more fortunately, there’s another sports league, besides the NFL, that can teach us about those techniques!
Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets, sees talent evaluation differently from his NFL counterparts. Morey has always been referred to as a “data guy,” and his evaluation processes have helped him assemble a team that’s currently in first place in the NBA’s Western Conference. Long ago, he recognized that the traditional methods scouts used to evaluate players were rife with opportunities for bias to sneak into their evaluations.
In Michael Lewis’ book, the Undoing Project, Lewis interviews Morey about his struggle to eliminate bias from his staff’s talent evaluation process:
The problem was magnified by the tendency of talent evaluators—Morey included—to favor players who reminded them of their younger selves. “My playing career is so irrelevant to my career,” (Morey) said. “And still I like guys who beat the shit out of people and cheat the rules and are nasty. Bill Laimbeer types. Because that’s how I played.” You saw someone who reminded you of you, and then you looked for the reasons why you liked him.
Morey recognized the role that unconscious bias was playing in his front office’s process and set out to fix it. Here are some of the things he did:
Banned Nicknames - After one nickname led to the staff’s constantly joking about a player’s being out of shape, they passed on him in the draft and saw him become a perennial all-star for another team.
Reduced the role of private workouts – Morey realized that a season’s worth of data was much more valuable than how well a player performed during a 30-minute workout in an unfamiliar gym.
Forbid intraracial comparisons – If a scout wanted to compare a college player to an NBA pro, he would have to compare him to a player of another race. Lewis writes about the change in the book: “A funny thing happened when you forced people to cross racial lines in their minds: They ceased to see analogies. Their minds resisted the leap.”
Professional sports talent evaluation has a lot to teach us about our own interview processes. One bad decision by the Houston Rockets costs their organization millions of dollars in lost opportunities, team successes and overall fan interest. They have the highest stakes and need to take the utmost precautions to ensure they’re making smart decisions with clear eyes.
There are a lot of things you can do to reduce the role of unconscious bias in your own organization’s hiring process. The first, most important step, is to encourage your team members to take an unconscious bias training to examine the specific “leaps” that their minds take when confronted with limited information. Short of taking a class, there are free online resources prepared by researchers at Harvard University’s “Project Implicit” that allow you to test your own social biases online.
In the context of an interview, there are some small, but hugely important things you can do before, during and after an interview to reduce the role of unconscious bias in your talent evaluation process:
Include job candidates with uncommon backgrounds,
Plan ahead to ensure consistent structure and questions,
Ensure that all interviewers understand and agree on the definitions of the skills they’re evaluating.
Avoid unnecessary “small talk” on unrelated topics,
Allow yourself to be surprised by uncommon backgrounds or skill sets that allow the person to be successful in the role,
Validate assumptions about the candidate while they’re still in the room by asking follow-up questions.
Write and record notes immediately before you discuss your thoughts about a candidate with other interviewers
The next time you and your team set out to hire for a new role, take a moment and see if you can use some of these “bias-reduction” ideas. Or see if you can come up with some of your own rules that more closely align with the talent you’re evaluating. The more you build these questions into the front end of your talent process, the less likely you’ll be to miss out on future all-stars.
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