Who’s interested: Primary – DEI Team, CXOs and L&D, Secondary – Senior Leaders
Takeaway(s):
– Unconscious bias training is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the attitudes and behaviors of employees
– A narrow focus on implicit bias training sidesteps the much larger–and more difficult–issue of conscious bias and ignores the type of systemic changes that will be necessary to drive DEI results
– Eliminating bias will not be enough for companies to achieve their DEI goals; rather, managers will need to “explicitly hire a diverse base of employees, provide mentoring of future leaders, and seek out opportunities to enable more women and people of color to take on key roles”.
– Management must be willing to make unpopular decisions and communicate openly about the company’s DEI intent and priorities in a way that keeps employees focused and motivated.
ideascape view: Implicit bias is a “low-value target” in the larger scheme of DEI. To the extent that a management team has already committed to this type of training, using a decision science approach that helps managers recognize important assumptions and gaps in their own thinking may have more practical impact than approaches designed simply to “raise awareness” of association bias.
