May 25, 2020, may have been a lightning strike, the dry brush was already smoldering. There was a demand for marriage equality, a push to destigmatize hiring recently incarcerated individuals, and we watched the privileged cheat their way into college, alongside the realization that attending a high‐ranked university doesn't equate to career success. The amalgamation of these realities, in addition to the Black Lives Matter movement, started a fire companies can no longer ignore.
George Floyd Sparked a Global Outcry
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died after a white police officer, in an attempt to arrest him, knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes as he lay on a sidewalk in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
His death sparked global protests that were captured in more than 77 countries, including the UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Kenya, Brazil, China, Japan, and India. The protests began in Minneapolis, where the four officers present during his murder were fired. While protests continued for many weeks and were documented in cities across every state within the U.S., the question remains, “Why did this particular death cause such an outcry?”
He was not the first Black man in police custody – and unfortunately he probably won't be the last – to say, “I can't breathe,” before being pronounced dead.
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, a borough of New York City, after a New York City police department officer put him in a prohibited chokehold while attempting to arrest him. In the video footage that captured his death, Garner can be heard repeatedly stating that he can't breathe.
The application to the workplace comes in the understanding that there are injustices in the world and a good leader realizes they cannot be blind to the fact that injustices in the world will equate to injustices in the workplace.
No one leaves bias and bigotry at the door when they come to work, so while you cannot change people's beliefs, you can change their behavior in the workplace.
This book is a resource to guide you through the steps for leading your company through unprecedented change and to tackle various types of unconscious bias along the way. The information in this book is the culmination of more than a decade of my professional experience working with clients in the capacity of recruiter, coach, and diversity consultant as well as the more than four decades of personal experience navigating the world as a Black woman. So one of the first biases we will tackle is what you might think about me.
Making Assumptions
You may have made assumptions about what I believe, who I am, where I'm from, and how those things might affect the information you're about to get. But bias isn't only about race and no matter where in the world you are, there are hundreds of ways we can be biased. However, race always enters the discussion because it's easiest to spot.
But consider this. I am black and I am female, two things you can usually tell just by looking at me. What you can't possibly know just by looking at me is whether I'm heterosexual, where I was born, my status as a citizen in the United States, if I have children, how old I am, where I live, how much money I have in the bank, who I pray to or whether I pray at all, who I voted for in the past presidential election, or whether I have a college degree.
So I'd like you to take a moment to ask yourself what you actually know about me. And if that is nothing, I'll ask you not to put words in my mouth before I've had the chance to say them.
More than 150,000 individuals have gone through my course on unconscious bias on LinkedIn Learning in English. It has also been translated into Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese and the number one comment I receive can be boiled down to “It was surprisingly informative.” I make an assumption that the course was “surprisingly informative” because viewers took the course with the expectation that it would not in fact be informative at all. I may even go so far as to say that many may have believed it would push an agenda that was different from theirs and they were ready to hate it. I say that because I have also received those comments from quite a few individuals who were mandated to take the course and they have blatantly said as much. Comments included:
I just finished taking your unconscious bias course through my company and it was better than I thought it would be. Great job on delivery.
Thank you for putting together a training on bias that was actually unbiased.
I really enjoyed your course on “Unconscious Bias”… it has made me pause and think and hopefully change my actions going forward … It was unexpectedly insightful!!
All that is to say, if you're at all skeptical about my motives for this book, I'd like you to know I understand why you might feel that way, and I'm still going to ask that you save your assumptions until the end.
Unconscious Bias: Diversity and Incusion as a Strategy
With that being said, I will return to your need for unconscious bias education. Unconscious bias as a topic is seen as a solution to tackling the diversity and inclusion issues that companies now find themselves faced with. Companies have become global organizations, whether they intend to or not, and these organizations can't operate without people. While that may seem obvious, people are a network of teams; they thrive on engagement, need open dialogue, and are an amalgamation of inclusive working styles. Diversity and inclusion need to be a comprehensive strategy embedded into each and every aspect of the talent life cycle.
CEOs are beginning to take ownership of this strategy and this is revealed in a 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report by Deloitte. According to that report, 69% of executives see diversity and inclusion as important. And this is an increase from their 2014 survey, where only 59% of executives saw it as important. In 2020, belonging, along with well‐being, is at the top of the Global Human Capital Trends survey as one of the most important human capital issues; 79% of survey respondents said that fostering a sense of belonging in the workforce was important to their organization's success in the next 12–18 months, and 93% agreed that a sense of belonging drives organizational performance – one of the highest rates of consensus on importance they have seen in a decade of Global Human Capital Trends reports.1
The Need to Ask “Why?”
Why should your organization prioritize diversity and inclusion now? Why should unconscious bias education be a priority? These are questions that you will have to answer, and it will be difficult to do so. “Why” puts people on the defensive. “Why” makes people uncomfortable. “Why” requires an explanation, which then requires you to dig deep for an answer. When it comes to unconscious bias at work, there's the possibility that you won't like what you find when you start digging.
However, “why” is the very thing you need to know when embarking on a journey to tackle unconscious bias and create an inclusive workplace. Just ask leadership expert Simon Sinek. In his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, he explains that answering the why can inspire cooperation, trust, and change. Why does unconscious bias education matter to you? The only way to answer that question is to understand what matters to your company. What is the goal and mission of your business? You may discover that diversity, inclusion, belonging, and creating a great workplace culture don't actually matter to your company at all, depending upon what you value. If you're unsure about your company's core values, you'll find further detail about this in the next chapter, but for now it's enough to understand that the motivation behind your decision to prioritize diversity and inclusion should stem from your organization's foundational
