Sondra Thiederman and Making Diversity Work

From a "Bias-Free Leadership": An E-Zine from Sondra Thiederman.

The material in this article is adapted from Sondra's book: "Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for Defeating Bias in the Workplace."

"Thinking It Through - How to Analyze Away Bias"

Have you ever found yourself meeting someone new and immediately jumping to conclusions about what he or she is like? If you're anything like me, this happens all the time. I hear a particular accent and into my head pops a full-blown idea about what that person is good at, what characteristics they have, and even how they want to be treated. I see the way someone is dressed or notice that they are from a particular part of the country and it happens again. Unto itself, these initial few seconds of guessing - and, yes, that is exactly what we are doing, guessing - are no problem. What is a problem is what happens if we allow that first guess to linger long enough to distort our ongoing perception of the person. At that point, we are getting perilously close to having a bias.

As those of you who regularly read this e-zine know, I define "bias" as an "inflexible belief about a particular category of person." The bad news is that most of us have biases. The good news is that there is something we can do to minimize the damage they cause and, if we work hard enough, even make them disappear.

In my book, "Making Diversity Work," I write about seven steps that can help us minimize bias. Fortunately, one of the most important of those strategies is the simplest: Subject your bias to the bright light of logic. Do this by asking yourself the following questions. Before you know it, you will begin to see how illogical that bias is and will be on your way to getting that particular distorting thought out of your life and out of your thinking.


1.	From whom did you learn this bias? When you think back on this person, do your respect him or her or, through the clarity that distance can provide, do you now see that this person's judgment was flawed and not to be believed?

2.	How many people do you actually know who in fact conform to your bias? Probably when you closely examine that number, you will find it to be remarkably small.

3.	If you have had an experience with a person who conforms to your bias, was the person really that way or did you just see what you expected to see? Alternatively, did you somehow create the behavior that you expected to encounter - in other words, were you guilty of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?

4.	Has your experience with the target of your bias been intimate in some way or was your meeting perfunctory and formal? In other words, did you really have the opportunity to get to know this person?

5.	When you had a bias-generating experience, were you in an emotional neutral state? Emotions such as anxiety can cause us to perceive danger or negativity where none exists.

6.	Is your bias influenced by the media? How accurate is that depiction?

The final question is the most important: Do you make an effort to have interactions with a wide-variety of people different from yourself? As we have said over and over in the two years these e-zines have been published, nothing relieves bias faster than getting to know people as individuals.

My father who had, I'll admit, his own bias-related foibles, finally got it right when dying of cancer in a Los Angeles hospital. One day while on one of our final visits, he turned to me and said, "People are people. We need to take them all, just one person at a time." That says it all.

Source: "Bias-Free Leadership": An E-Zine from Sondra Thiederman

The material in this article is adapted from Sondra's book:
"Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for
Defeating Bias in the Workplace."

It can be purchased by
clicking here

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