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A New Way to Combat Bias at Work
Joan Williams, professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, says that it’s...
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Joan Williams, professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, says that it’s extremely difficult for organizations to rid their workforces of the unconscious biases that can prevent women and minorities from advancing. But it’s not so hard for individual managers to interrupt bias within their own teams. She offers specific suggestions for how bosses can shift their approach in four areas: hiring, meetings, assignments, and reviews/promotions. Leaders who employ these practices, she argues, are able to embrace and reap the advantages of diversity, even in the absence of larger organizational directives. Williams is the author of the HBR article “How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams.”
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. Most good bosses want diverse, bias-free teams. They want men and women of all different ages, representing a variety of cultures and races. In practice, of course, that kind of melting pot is hard to create. In some areas, industries and functions it can seem nearly impossible. And then there’s the other problem. Even if you achieve the kind of diversity you want, you might struggle to manage the group in a way that makes everyone feel included and valued. The kinds of bias prevention programs that many companies use can be highly ineffective. Bias runs deep, and it’s hard to eradicate. But according to our guest day, you can interrupt it pretty easily, without spending too much time or political capital. The leaders she’s studied do this in three areas, hiring, day-to-day management and talent development. While workplaces might not ever be bias-free, they can become better if bosses learn to head off anti-diversity thinking of the past. She’s here now to walk us through the steps. Joan Williams is a professor and the founding director of the Center for Work-Life Thought at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, and the author of the HBR article, How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias. Joan, welcome to the show.
JOAN WILLIAMS: Delighted to be here, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: So, let’s start with a brief refresher. What are some of the common types of bias that we see in the workplace? What are we talking about here?
JOAN WILLIAMS: There are really four basic patterns of bias. The first I call, prove it again. It’s that some groups have to prove themselves more than others. So, for example, some groups are judged on their potential. Others on whether they’ve already nailed it. The second I call the tightrope, and that’s that, a narrower range of behavior is accepted from some groups than others. And that means that for those groups for whom a narrower range of behavior is accepted, their office politics is just a bit more complicated. The third is called the maternal wall, and that’s gender bias trigged by motherhood, also affects fathers, by the way, if they show that they’re taking an active role in family care. And then the final one is another race/gender pattern. It’s when bias against a disadvantaged group sets up conflict within that group. And again, like prove it again and tightrope, this last pattern, tug-of-war, is triggered both by race and by gender.
ALISON BEARD: And again, this is a refresher, but why is bias such a big problem for corporate performance and productivity? You know, aside from wanting to be better humans, why should managers be acutely focused on this?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Well, it’s now been well-documented that well-managed diverse groups simply perform better. They have a broader range of ideas. They’re not an echo chamber. So, that’s a very important consideration. I mean, every manager wants their team to perform as best as they can. Diverse teams also have higher collective intelligence that is different from sort of an individual brilliance, that is sort of collective team intelligence. But of course, that’s why we assemble teams. Right? Because we need the skillsets of teams. And of course, also, if you have diverse workplaces, people tend to be more committed, and they’re also better at solving problems. So, they just, well-managed, diverse teams just perform better. That’s the key reason why managers should really care about bias, in addition, of course, to just wanting to be fair.
ALISON BEARD: There was an important modifier in that phrase, though, well-managed diverse teams.
JOAN WILLIAMS: It is an important modifier, because if you bring diverse people onto a team who don’t share a whole set of cultural assumptions, for example, that can, without, and you don’t manage them in a way that communicates that everyone has been chosen for a specific skillset, and is valued for a specific skillset, and that the team will be judged on how well they deliver as a team, then the divergences among the diverse people you’ve hired who don’t share that set of assumptions, that can lead to conflict and corrosion in performance.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and organizations have tried to tackle this. But primarily with bias prevention training. So, why does that approach not work?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Well, companies have tried to address this through bias trainings, and I frankly think that bias trainings have gotten a bad rap. The work of Frank Dobbin and Sandra Kalev and Erin Kelly, of course, famously showed, looked at EEO records and showed that bias, a single bias training typically doesn’t help. And if it’s mandatory, it may actually be, to be taken in a wrong direction. But you know, they were studying a generation of bias trainings. Most of them were kind of feel-good sensitivity trainings. And it’s kind of a, you know, how can we say elegantly, poor quality data in, poor quality data out. There’s a snappier expression, but I’m probably not going to use it. [LAUGHTER] So it’s true that a poor-quality bias training is probably not going to help. And even an excellent training, that is, the kind of training, for example, that we give our individual bias interrupters training, that really focuses and teaches people how bias plays out in everyday workplace interactions in super-concrete ways, and has them brainstorm their own bias interrupters. Even that, you know, you can’t change a culture by doing anything once, even if it’s perfect. And that’s really the bottom line about why a single bias training just won’t work to address the problem, because if you have diversity challenges, typically it’s because you have these subtle forms of bias constantly being transmitted through your basis business systems, from hiring, to performance evaluations, to meetings, to assignments. And if the bias is constantly being transmitted day after day, again, just telling people about it once, without correcting the bias in your business systems, it’s not going to result in the result that you hoped for.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, once or even once a year, the programs don’t go far enough.
JOAN WILLIAMS: And that’s why we have the bias interrupters website at www.biasinterrupters. Those are basically full, open source toolkits that provide often very simple tweaks to existing business systems that will seamlessly interrupt bias day after day or correct it shortly after it’s occurred.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, let’s dig into interrupting bias. The idea is that there’s this underlying problem that’s really tricky to solve. Right? You can’t actually make everyone in your organization unbiased. So, you need to work around it and sort of create systems and processes that makes the organization more inclusive?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Exactly. There’s been a lot of focus, because of the implicit association test, the IAT, on changing people’s automatic associations. That is extremely difficult. Luckily, it’s also not typically required in the workplace, because, I mean, it may be required in, milliseconds matter in many policing situations. But the pace in workplaces is statelier, and so what people need to do is to have the tools to, once that automatic association arises, to provide that cognitive override and go like, no, that’s, you know, that’s my first reaction. It’s not going to be my last reaction. And so, the article about bias interrupters that individuals can use in their daily travels, it’s providing that cognitive override.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And this is important because your organization might not always be at the forefront of modifying its hiring practices or development practices to make sure that everyone’s walking down the right path. So, sometimes it is on individuals, and particularly managers.
JOAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely. And we’ve heard from managers saying, hey, my organization is not quite there. But I’m committed. What can I do? And that’s really what gave rise to this article, excuse me, and that’s really what gave rise to the article, How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams. We identified things that, you know, any individual manager can do, and they’re not a heavy lift, and they won’t require a lot of political capital. And they will likely help you get the best out of your team.
ALISON BEARD: OK, so let’s start tackling some of those buckets where a good boss can fight bias. First, hiring. What are some ways that, if I’m the manager, I can take prejudice out of a process that I didn’t set up, and make sure that I have a diverse team of people who want to be in it?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Well, first, insist on a diverse pool. And that does not mean just one person of color or woman. Once they showed that if there are at least two women in the finalist pool, women, you’re 79 times more likely to end up hiring a woman, and it’s even greater for people of color. If there are at least two minority applicants in a finalist pool, you’re almost 200 times more likely to end up hiring a minority. So, that’s the first thing. If you’re working with a recruiter, you just have to send really clear messages of, these are my expectations. If you’re working by yourself, then one of the things to recognize is that, although a lot of companies have had a lot of success with referral hiring, the people in your social network tend to be like you. That’s the strongest characteristic of social networks. So, if you want to reproduce the demography of your current organization, totally rely on referral hiring. But if you don’t want to reproduce the demography that you already have, you need to be keeping track carefully of which candidates come in through referral hiring, and which come in through other avenues. And then look. You know, either it’s a problem or it isn’t, but you need to establish that informal metric to see if it’s a problem. If it is a problem of having a diverse slate, or if hiring through referrals is a problem, then you just need to do a little more work in recruiting for more diverse pools. And in most organizations, it doesn’t need to be a heavy lift, because there are already organizations that are designed, for example, we do a lot of work with Society for Women Engineers. And so, there are already affinity organizations that can help you broaden your pool. Then there’s also a lot of things that you can do that come in. They’re super well-established from industrial, organizations, psychology, if you’re hiring someone, it really is very important to sit down before you start and list the objective qualifications that the person needs. And then establish a rubric. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It’s just basically the qualifications. And then list the people, based on the rubric, as you’re going through resumes. And what that does is, it interrupts a lot of kind of shifting standards, and another pattern called casualistry, where people can unconsciously apply different standards to the majority group and to anyone who’s not inside that majority group. And so, if you set up criteria, consistently use them, keep track of where they’re waived, because there’s often a sobering pattern for whom they’re waived, and that can go a long, long way. And we give an example of Alicia Powell, who was managing chief counsel at PNC Bank, and she was hiring, and she just sat down and articulated what makes, what made new team members successful in their roles. And it was very simple, a set of four or five criteria, clearly communicated that to the people on her team. That kind of thing. It’s very simple. But it can make a big difference. Very similar at the interview level. Now, if the interview is going to be just kind of a lunch test of, do I want to go out to lunch with you, that’s going to have probably a negative effect, not only by gender and by race, but also it’s going to disadvantage first generation professionals, because if, you know, if you love hang gliding, and somebody grew up in the heartland in a blue collar family, they probably ain’t going to be able to talk about hang gliding with you. Also, I mean, hang gliding is not actually typically a job skill, and so, again, the same thing. You need to figure out what are the skills and the qualities that you’re looking for, number one, those criteria. Design interview questions that are designed to test those qualities or those skills, and then ask those questions, actually, preferably the research shows, in the same order, and grade them immediately on a rubric. So, it’s just providing a little bit more structure. And the other thing that’s really important is, if you’re trying to figure out whether someone has a concrete skill, rather than asking them, are you comfortable with Excel, give them data and tell them to do it. So, it’s also, we actually at my organization, we have shifted to skills assessments, and you know, hiring is always just a bit of a crap shoot. But we have made it far less of a crap shoot, and we have gotten actually a whole series of what I call meteors, where people, where we hire them at one level, and then they’re so phenomenal, and their skills are so good, and we’ve really identified what we’re looking for, they kind of, the raise three levels in one year. So, it’s a little more work, not a lot. It really, really pays off.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And obviously the insisting on diverse pools is explicitly linked to bias. But the rest of what you’re describing doesn’t have to be a big announcement, we’re seeking more diversity here. It just has to say, we’re evaluating everyone on the same criteria.
JOAN WILLIAMS: And that’s the, that’s really an important point, that all of these making the system a little bit more formal, it will definitely interrupt prove it again bias for bias and people of color. But it will also make sure that you’re selecting people with a very specific class background, and frankly, it will also help people, particularly men, who are more introverted, because they may not, for example, interview with as much charisma as other people. But for certain job skills, for certain job roles, that’s actually not that important. Other things are more important. And so, if you shift to a system that’s just a little bit more analytically designed to choose what you need, surprise. You’re going to get more of what you need.
ALISON BEARD: Let’s move on to day-to-day management. You know, you’ve hired, ideally, this very diverse team, but then you need to think about work assignments. And how you communicate with everyone, how the team communicates together. And this is where you see a lot of bias play out. Right? So, how do you make sure that it doesn’t come in on those issues?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean, you assign, we have two different toolkits online. One is for assignments, which as you point out, is really important, and a lot of bias tends to creep in. And then the other you mention is meeting dynamics. A lot of bias tends to creep in in meeting dynamics. And again, just a really vivid example of why it’s important to interrupt the bias, one study found that men with expertise tend to be more influential in meetings, but that women with expertise tend to be less influential in meetings. And why is that? It goes back to the tightrope, which is really my name for what’s called prescriptive stereotyping. That’s what we think of, for example, a good woman should be. If you ask most people what a good woman should be, they’ll come up with something that boils down to, modest, self-effacing, nice, a good team player. If you ask people, hey, what’s a go-getter in a guy, they go like, direct, competitive, ambitious. And so what happens, if a woman has expertise in a context where bias is unchecked, she will find it really hard to speak up and asset herself to bring her expertise to the table, without being seen as a prima donna or someone who’s difficult or someone who’s dominating, because of that prescriptive stereotype that she should be sitting back and being modest, self-effacing and nice. And in fact, this was really dramatic, for example. This kind of thing also carries over to assignments, where we were doing some research in a major STEM facility that involved handling of materials that were highly dangerous. And one woman had caught a mistake in the analysis of one of her male colleagues. And the reaction was so negative, I mean, she was supposed to not be asserting her expertise. She was supposed to sitting back and being modest, self-effacing and nice. She said, oh, I’ll just keep my mouth shut and bring in cookies. That’s clearly what they want me to do. In that context it’s downright dangerous.
ALISON BEARD: That’s awful.
JOAN WILLIAMS: It’s downright dangerous. So, it’s really important to interrupt bias both in assignments and in meeting dynamics. And I can begin with the one or the other, whatever works.
ALISON BEARD: Speaking of meetings, when I was working with you on this article, I learned two new words. Bropreating and whypeating. I knew menteruption. But can you explain all those to our listeners, and how managers can deal with them?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yes. Yeah, there’s a simpler name for all of them. We just call it the stolen idea. And it is that there, in a subtle way, often what our research shows is that if you ask people, do people at work see you as a leader, something like 87% of white men say yes in some of our samples. Much lower percentages of women and people of color. But if you ask people, do people at work see you as a worker bee, just the opposite happens. So, the white men go, oh, I’m not a worker bee. But the other two groups, like, yeah, people kind of see me as a worker bee. And so, what, one of the things that goes into that is that in meetings, often white men feel very comfortable jumping in with their ideas at the start, and also a pattern that we find is that women and people of color report at much higher rates that other people get credit for ideas I originally offered. That’s the bropreating or whypeating. Now, typically this is not done maliciously. Typically, this is done unconsciously because of what called confirmation bias. You notice the brilliant idea when it’s put forward by someone whom you expect to have brilliant ideas, someone who’s a leader, not just a worker bee. But that’s a very important and common, super-common form of bias that affects meetings. It’s been widely discussed about in the gender context. But like so many of things, our researcher finds that it also happens in the racial context. And so, as a manager, number one, you just have to watch out for it. And once you do it, you can, you do see it. You begin to see it, because I’m afraid you probably will. You can interrupt it without embarrassing anyone. You can say something like, you know, Tim, I liked that idea when Pam first said it. You know, you’ve added something intriguing. I wonder if Pam has the next step. And you can do it in a very gentle way, but in a way that interrupts the pattern. And in fact, I recount in the article that a member, a friend of mine who was on the boards of public companies was in a situation where it was only her and one other woman, and everybody else was a man. And she found this stolen idea was happening all the time. So, they had, she and the other woman had the meeting before the meeting, and like, this is happening. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it’s really happening. So, they decided it was really happening. And then they decided they would interrupt it for each other, like, oh, you know, as Jane was saying, yeah, Tim. You mentioned that, and I loved it from the moment Jane said it. And started to do stuff like that. And then, kind of male allies kind of saw what they were doing, started to do it too, and then very quickly it disappeared. This is something that can have a profound effect, because obviously, and it’s easy to interrupt, because obviously if other people get credit for your ideas, you have to have a heck of a lot more ideas in order to end up at the same place. So, it’s powerful, and it’s easy to interrupt. The other thing you can do is, and this is important, actually, for three groups. It’s important for Asian Americans. It’s important for women. And it’s important for first-generation professionals. All of those groups were brought up with what’s often called the modesty mandate. So, for example, if you have a first-generation Asian American, they have most likely been brought up in a family where kind of braggadocio is a sign of somebody, it’s like a character defect. And so, it’s, they have been brought up often in a context where there’s a lot of expectation that you don’t toot your own horn, and you’re deferential to those above you. That actually, that modesty mandate is a challenge for a manager. And it’s worth running it through your head and saying, OK, this is a challenge. How am I going to get this person to contribute? Because that’s why I hired them, so they could contribute.
ALISON BEARD: So, how do you do it?
JOAN WILLIAMS: So, one way to do it, if you find somebody is having trouble kind of jumping in, it’s very simple. Just ask people to weigh in. You know, Camilla, you have experience with this. What are we missing here? What are your thoughts? And you can even, if the person is super shy, you can even say, you know, I’ve noticed that you’re not jumping in in areas that we really need to hear from you. So, I’m, you can totally, you can start jumping in, or I can make it a little easier for you by bringing you in. Which would you prefer? And that kind of cues her that you’re expecting her not to conform to the modesty mandate, but to be, bring the skillset to the table. So, you can work with someone and find a way that they feel comfortable. There are other ways that work in narrower contexts. You can just say, you know, X, you’ve been quiet. What are your thoughts here? Or, you can have a norm that whatever subject you’re talking about, the person who’s the expert speaks first, or speaks last. But it’s just, again, it’s worth being mindful. And then, a couple of other things are just to schedule meetings inclusively. So, obviously, you know, intense business meetings in the men’s locker room probably are not a great idea. Equally unsubtle, of always having super important meetings at a time when, this is going to be now typically parents, men as well as women, they’ll go, they just can’t make the meetings, because they’re taking the kids to school, or picking them up from day care.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, people know my schedule needs to be meetings between ten and four.
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yeah. And that’s, this is the kind of thing that can happen unconsciously, but it can have a big effect. And then the other thing, we have an example of Emily Gold Sullivan, who has led the employment law functions for a couple of Fortune 500 companies. She has become very attuned to, if there is one person who she shares and interest with, for example, they’re both on an exercise regime, so they have like walking meetings, she asks herself, who is at the same level who I’m not seeing as often? And she proactively kind of equalizes it up. Otherwise, people who happen to share your interests are going to be artificially advantages, and even worse, from a boss’s point of view, people who arbitrarily don’t share your interests, you’re probably not going to get the best work out of them. So, again, all of these are simple to do once you know what the patterns are, and you provide that cognitive override. So, all of that has to do with everyday workplace interactions. And then there’s assignments.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, so it seems like a lot of those other ones actually would apply to assignments, too. You know, don’t just look at the people from the dominant group who are more apt to raise their hands, make sure that you’re reaching out on important projects and important tasks and certainly anything that’s high visibility to people who are in minority groups, or might face bias. And then also just making sure that you’re not playing favorites. Right?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yes. Yeah, there’s a very strong pattern that our research has documented and actually, we invented the term, the office housework, which is now widely recognized. Women report doing more office housework than their colleagues, at 20% higher than men do. That’s really dramatic.
ALISON BEARD: Like how [OVERLAPPING VOICES] women from the other podcast is always saying, I don’t want Alison to be doing the office housework here. So, I’m just very conscious.
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, that’s the power of naming. And so, you, we actually, on our website, it’s very easy, we have an open source survey where you can just ask your team, hey, fill out this survey. It’s extremely short. To find out who’s doing the office housework. And then you need to sit down as a manager and figure out what really are the career enhancing assignments. And then I would really encourage you, just for a while, to keep a rough track of who’s getting them. And then look for patterns. And if the patterns that you see are not the patters that you would want, when it comes to office housework, one really important message is, don’t ask for volunteers, because if you do, women would be under strong informal pressures to volunteer. Men actually would be under strong informal pressures not to volunteer. He doesn’t know what’s valued here. Sometimes people go, well, I end up giving this stuff to women, because they do it well, and the men do a bad job. And that is, that actually is an artifact of bias, because somehow the men have picked up that it’s going to be costly for them to do a bad job. And it’s the easiest way to sluff off that scut work, whereas women know they will be judged if they do a bad job. So, you need to say in a very concrete way, if you find a sobering office housework pattern, is to establish a rotation, for example, who takes notes, of people at a certain level, preferably people, for whom it’s a developmental opportunity, maybe they wouldn’t necessarily be in the meeting if they weren’t taking the notes. So, that’s, and then when it comes to the glamour work, the office, the career enhancing work, our research shows that not only do women report less access to that, men of color do, too. So, again, you need to run those assignments through your head and keep track for a little while, jot down who’s getting the plum assignments.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And then those plum assignments typically lead to more development. Right?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely, yes.
ALISON BEARD: Training, promotions, yeah.
JOAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely.
ALISON BEARD: Bigger and better assignments. So, how can managers do a better job of taking bias out of those decisions?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Well, in terms of developing your team, first of all, again, this is, at a company level, please don’t eliminate performance evaluations. I know that that’s kind of what’s new, what’s hot. But that is basically a petri dish for bias, to eliminate performance evaluations. Because our research shows that, then, in that context, white men are going to end up getting a lot more feedback, and probably helpful developmental feedback than women and people of color do. And doing things on the fly is exactly when the automatic associations and the stereotypes just completely dominate. So, first, I hope your organization still has formal performance evaluations, but if they don’t, just make yourself up a really simple little form, and make sure you sit down with people once or twice a year and tell them how they’re doing, measured based on the skills that the job requires. So, it’s really important to start out with, again, this is the same, I’m singing the same tune here from an industrial organizational psychology, clarify the evaluation criteria and provide concrete evidence of whether that criteria are met or not. And what you should really be holding yourself to, and a performance evaluation as a manager, to having clear criteria, and then providing enough evidence of the, whether that criteria are met, so that a third person reading the evaluation would go like, yeah, I can see that was met. Yeah, I can see that was not so cool. Because that’s more useful for you that you’re going to be judging the people based on evidence and objective criteria, rather than stereotypes. It’s also much more useful for the person getting the performance evaluation, particularly if you make the statements, the data concrete rather than, she writes well. You know, she wrote X well, and this is how I know. So, she can write an effective summary judgement under a tight deadline, for example, as a lawyer, something much more concrete.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, this emphasis on objectivity, equity, fairness, concrete examples, those are all efforts to resist accusations of reverse discrimination. Right? You know, this idea that in protecting women and minorities from bias, you’re creating a new bias against the dominant group?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yes. Well, and also, it’s just choosing to develop and promote people based on what’s actually valued in the workplace. I mean, it’s just literally a better practice for everybody, white men included. So, for example, if somebody is a coder, you’re not going to be saying, you know, this guy really doesn’t have the fire in his belly. What the heck does that mean? Right? It may mean he’s not extraverted. You don’t need extraversion in a coder, often. So, it’s going to help everybody. The other thing that our research shows really strongly is that, and this is one of the reasons that these informal performance evaluations are kind of a petri dish, is that women and people of color are much, much more likely to be judged on whether they navigate that tightrope right. They’re much more likely to get comments on their personalities. And whereas white men are much more likely to get comments on their performance and specific developmental feedback of the sort that’s actually helpful, rather than the, she’s friendly, and everybody loves her. How about saying something like, she’s a strong collaborator who can manage complex projects across multiple teams.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. In your experience and judging by the people that you’ve worked with, how long does it take for a manager to get used to doing all of these things, just as a matter of routine?
JOAN WILLIAMS: You know, I wouldn’t, if I were a manager, I wouldn’t do them all. I wouldn’t try to do all of this at once. I would start with some simple things. And do them for a few months until I felt comfortable, and then I would take on some other things. And just make it part of a longer-term sort of self-development program to make you a more effective manager of the talent that you’ve been charged with.
ALISON BEARD: And you’ve seen a lot of managers do this on their own in the absence of organizational support?
JOAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean, I think some people, you know, we’ve heard from managers that are frankly like crawling the walls of like, I am done waiting for the organization to do this. And one of the challenges that we have found with bias interrupters is that the organizational structure for diversity is basically, you hire someone and give them a diversity and inclusion portfolio. Well, that makes sense if the diversity and the inclusion portfolio is to hire outside speakers, to teach women how to negotiate well, and to establish employee resource groups, all of which are important. But if you’re goal is to interrupt bias in the basic business systems, that organizational structure is difficult, because typically, the head of diversity and inclusion doesn’t own these other organizational structures. May not even own hiring. Certainly doesn’t own assignments. And so, it’s taking businesses longer than we had hoped to do this at an organizational level. And I think for people listening, what’s really important is that you can start doing these tomorrow.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and you make a good point, that organizations probably do have control over hiring to some degree and do have control over promotion and development in that they can track what’s going on across the company, you know, enact certain mandates. But the work assignment thing, the day-to-day work, that really is the job of each manager.
JOAN WILLIAMS: And you can be writing a performance evaluation. You only have two choices. Writing performance evaluations that constantly are influenced by bias, and crimping some people’s careers and artificially elevating others. Or you write performance evaluations with not that much more effort that actually are going to identify and develop the best talent. Which do you want to do? You don’t need to wait until the org redesigns performance evaluations. What you need to do is start doing it, seeing that it works, and then we’re going to create a situation where we’ll have a lot of examples of, hey, this is not that hard. And it works.
ALISON BEARD: Right. So, start doing it yourself, and then get all of your peers to do it, and then have it expand from there.
JOAN WILLIAMS: You know, I think in terms of a strategy, a great strategy is to start doing it yourself, and then start chatting with the head of diversity and inclusion, or someone in HR who is receptive, and say, you know, I did this. It didn’t take, it was not a heavy lift. I just handed out this sheet, and it really made a difference. What if we think about doing it organization wide? My experience is that the heads of diversity and inclusion love bias interrupters. But what they need is help in building an organizational change movement to use bias interrupters. That’s why we’re so focused on managers right now.
ALISON BEARD: Joan, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.
JOAN WILLIAMS: OK, many, many thanks. And I say, thanks for all your work on this. We’ve had a big, big bounce from that. I hope it’s done for well you, too.
ALISON BEARD: Joan Williams is a professor and the founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California’s Hasting College of the Law. Hastings College of the Law, and the author of the HBR article, How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias. You can find it at HBR.org. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart. Adam Buckholts is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.