Failing to Address the Bias. Fighting for Fairness.

Midway through my career, I understood that perception wasn’t reality because perception, much like algorithms in the digital world, come preloaded with the biases of the individual.

So for the past decade, I’ve done everything in my power to address the bias rather than drowning in others’ perceptions. Honestly, I grew tired of letting other people tell me that their perception of me was more important than my truth.

However, I also learned that negative confrontation does little to move us forward. I learned that education and wisdom would move us towards a more positive space, where hard conversations can become regular conversations.

If you know me personally, I’m sure you’ve heard me say, “Perception is reality, but it comes with biases” dozens of times.

As a leader for the past several years, I made it my goal to help address these biases. I made it my challenge to help the people around me through education, through knowledge-based conversations, and through wisdom. I hoped to help them see their own biases and try to meet me in the middle by leading with empathy.

The thing about empathy, however, is that it has to be met with empathy to successfully work towards forward movement and growth. But in the South, organizations (at times) aren’t even aware or accepting of their institutionalized systems, often based on racial, age, sexual orientation and other implicit biases.

My suggestion isn’t that everyone is racist, although some are openly, but what I’ve observed in 20+ years of professional work is that most of these people aren’t even aware they’re part of a system built to keep people “in their place” based on those people’s culture, ethnicity and/or background.

Therefore, the battle for the mind begins. How can you have a legitimate conversation? How can you educate and inspire wisdom to someone who isn’t even aware of their own biases? How do we move forward together?

That pursuit broke my spirit. (For awhile at least.)

The compounding pressure of decades, if not centuries, is nearly unbearable. It makes one question their own existence. It makes one doubt their place in a company, industry and community. (I’m in advertising, but I’ve seen it in entertainment, retail, travel, technology and other areas of business.)

Why Does This Matter in the First Place?

In Natalie Clarkson’s Virgin.com article, “What is unconscious bias and why is it important to understand it?” (24 August 2018), she quotes the McKinsey&Company report, “Delivering Through Diversity,” about the findings of the direct correlation between financial performance and diversity.

“‘Gender, ethnic and cultural diversity, particularly within executive teams, continue to be correlated to financial performance across multiple countries worldwide.’” She added, “However, when unconscious biases are allowed into the workplace, diversity suffers.”

The report summarizes this concept in five key takeaways:

1. The relationship between diversity and business performance persists. The statistically significant correlation between a more diverse leadership team and financial outperformance demonstrated three years ago continues to hold true on an updated, enlarged, and global data set.
2. Leadership roles matter. Companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability and 27% more likely to have superior value creation. The highest-performing companies on both profitability and diversity had more women in line (i.e., typically revenue-generating) roles than in staff roles on their executive teams.
3. It’s not just gender. Companies in the top-quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading profitability. That this relationship continues to be strong suggests that inclusion of highly diverse individuals — and the myriad ways in which diversity exists beyond gender (e.g., LGBTQ+, age/generation, international experience) — can be a key differentiator among companies.
4. There is a penalty for opting out. The penalty for bottom-quartile performance on diversity persists. Overall, companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/cultural diversity were 29% less likely to achieve above-average profitability than were all other companies in our data set. In short, not only were they not leading, they were lagging.
5. Local context matters. On gender, while there is plenty more to do, some companies lead the way in both absolute average diversity and representation in top-quartile — Australia, UK, and US companies make up over 70% of this group. On ethnicity, there is less global progress, but South African and Singaporean companies have a higher representation in the top-quartile versus overall representation in data set, suggesting material progress on ethnic diversity.

My simpler takeaway is that if you care about business, you should care about people. Therefore, this matters because it will 100 percent affect your bottom line today and your brand in the future.

Failure or Forward?

Helping address biases rather than accept perceptions is an infinite undertaking. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how to achieve success. I believe that by the mere fact of different people, cultures and ideals being represented in these systems makes a difference. That’s why I call myself a diversity champion and I feed stories, people and ideas through my #DiversityMatters series.

Yet, I can’t help but accept that many of us get brought to our knees in defeat until we just wash ourselves with their systems as a strange bias baptism.

Exploring this area is meaningful to many. Yet the collective tiredness is ever present. That’s why I know we can’t stop. We can’t simply accept a system we know is broken because, whether we like it or not, nature keeps moving forward.

Thousands of years of observational facts in our own history has taught us that the only constant is change. Change seeks and finds balance and brings forth what’s just. And it always comes one way or another.

So in order to survive, grow and collectively move forward, we need to continue addressing negative biases and not allow these systemic pressures let us lose ourselves in the void of old ideas.

Be good. Seek balance. Love.