The Bandwagon Effect
When I worked at Prudential many years ago, there were teams of advisors whose job was to identify individuals who needed a financial advisor, convince them they were the right advisor for them, and then sell them a product. If you've ever worked in sales, you probably recognize these directives. Our teams were created by our manager, and living in Los Angeles, California, you might assume those teams were very diverse. And you would be very wrong.
The job of the advisor is to convince the client they are the best advisor for them. It is the basic tenant of any sales job. When selling, you are told to mirror potential clients, find things in common, get them to like you. There are thousands of sales education materials on the market showing salespeople how to sell. This is called the bandwagon effect, but did you know it's actually an unconscious bias? The bandwagon effect harnesses our need to want what everyone else wants. In sales, that's great. If you can show that you're the top realtor, the best advisor, or the most sought‐after designer, you have a much higher likelihood of closing the potential client. It's also why sales professionals love referrals. If they were referred to you by a current client, the odds of closing the deal increases dramatically. But that's the trouble with all of this. We connect with people in our circle, we refer people in our circle, and our circles aren't usually very diverse.
If you were to look at a demographic survey for our Prudential office, it would not demonstrate diversity. At least, not if you analyzed the data carefully. Our teams of advisors ended up being highly segregated. If you were Chinese, you were recruited by the Chinese manager and you were hired to a team that was 80% Chinese. Of course if you were not Chinese and you happened to make it onto that team, you did not last very long because you did not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, you did not understand the culture, you were not invited to attend client meetings if the client was Chinese, and not only did you feel excluded, you were excluded. You didn't perform as well as the other members on your team and in a commission‐only sales environment, you eventually quit.
This didn't only happen with the Chinese managers. It happened with the Korean managers, the Armenian managers, and the white managers. It also happened with female managers. A demographic survey of the office where I worked would be beautifully diverse on the surface. It would show that we had a vast array of individuals who were ethnically and racially diverse, spoke a number of languages, and even had decent gender diversity. But you would have to take a further look at the data to really see that the diversity was actually segmented, not through policy, but through human behavior and our desire for affinity.
Prudential was by no means an anomaly. One of my coaching clients worked for an investment management company for almost three years. The accounts were a minimum size of $2 million and he did a great job managing the money under his care. He made sound investments and increased portfolio size tremendously. He should have been on a trajectory to lead a client account, but instead he quit his very lucrative job after being told by his white manager that their high‐net‐worth clients wouldn't be comfortable with him, a Black man, being their account manager. Without the opportunity to become a fund manager, he would be unable to lead a team and essentially had no opportunity for advancement.
Unconscious Bias Is a Complex Issue: Defining Your Why
One of the reasons addressing diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias at work can seem difficult is that it is usually a complex problem. You don't normally have one straightforward issue to be resolved. There is nuance and it is multifaceted, which makes you have to work a little harder to unravel it all. It is necessary to tackle both the lack of diversity and the lack of “why,” and the process can be complex. However, complex does not automatically equate to difficult.
When a company is unable to discern why diversity and inclusion training is a priority for them, the default answer is often “to avoid bad publicity.” If we look at the Black Lives Matter movement as an example, your company might be one of the many who published a statement of support for George Floyd and told everyone that “Black Lives Matter” in an attempt to avoid being put on the list of companies to boycott. Maintaining good optics is not a “why.” It is inauthentic, not actionable, and your consumers, clients, and employees see right through it.
Numerous statistics indicate the positive financial impact of diversity and inclusion on the workplace. Companies that are inclusive are more likely to lead and capture new markets, 43% of companies with diverse management exhibited higher profits, companies with racial and ethnical diversity are 35% more likely to perform at a higher level, and companies with an equal number of men and women produce up to 41% higher revenues.
It's no wonder that in the absence of a why, the default answer is “to make money,” and we assume because we need to make money and our clients won't work with someone who doesn't look like them, that there is nothing that can be done about the lack of diversity. We throw up our hands and say that it is what it is. Yet when you have a true “why,” making money becomes a happy by‐product. A company that truly understands this concept is Vans, the footwear company. When a call was made to support Black‐owned businesses, they made it difficult to purchase anything on their website that day. On July 7, 2020, Vans posted the following statement on their website:
A NEW PAIR OF VANS CAN WAIT.
Today is Blackout Day, so before you spend money on our site, we ask that you consider shopping with your favorite Black‐owned businesses or donating to organizations such as the NAACP, GSA Network, and Color of Change. Learn more about what we are doing to support Black Lives Matter and racial equality.
The statement wasn't in a corner of their website. It wasn't a banner at the top or a footnote at the bottom. That statement was the only thing you saw if you visited their page that day.
Making the Decision to Answer Your Why
If writing a statement isn't enough and you don't know where to start, you might be thinking you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Instead, what you should be thinking is that you're damned if you don't have a strategy. One of the first questions I ask representatives from companies who have reached out to request unconscious bias education is “why?” Why do you want to offer this now? Why do you think this is the first course of action? Or the next step in a long list of actions that may have already been taken?
The answer is usually one of three things:
1 Silence, or we're not sure.
2 We started a DEI council and they decided we should have unconscious bias education.
3 Our employees expect us to do something because everyone else has done something and everyone is talking about unconscious bias, so we should tackle that.
Rarely is it something like this: “Our executive leaders wanted to know if we have adequately addressed unconscious bias in our workplace, so they tasked us with polling our workforce to determine where we should start. We conducted a survey that showed that many of our employees were concerned that bias may be to blame for some of the poor hiring decisions, lack of management diversity, and high turnover rates. We held a town hall to let our employees know the results of the survey and to inform them we are working on a strategy to address the findings.”
Unconscious bias training is being used as a comfortable activity that is just enough of an action that it won't ruffle feathers.
Going back to May 24, 2020, it is quite likely that one of the following was accurate:
1 Diversity and inclusion was a high priority,
