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weLEAD
Leadership Series
Exclusive
interview with Sondra Thiederman
Interviewed
by Greg Thomas
Sondra Thiederman, Ph.D., is
an acknowledged leading expert on the subjects of bias, cross-cultural business
and workplace diversity. She
has shared her 25 years of experience as a columnist, seminar presenter and
author. The material in this interview article was
adapted with permission from her book Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for
Defeating Bias in the Workplace (
1.
Sondra, we have just finished reading your new book entitled, "Making
Diversity Work" and found that it boldly and frankly addresses a sensitive
subject for many people and organizations. What events led you to write this
book?
This
book grew, not so much from events, but from hundreds of conversations and
exchanges encountered in my years as a speaker and trainer in the area of
workplace diversity. Through those years, I noticed that discussions of
diversity and bias were riddled with myths and untruths and that those myths
are slowing down our progress toward creating harmonious workplaces. The book is, in essence, an effort to dispel
those untruths.
Among
the myths that I set out to disprove are:
·
The belief that biases cannot be cured.
·
The notion that white people – and white men in particular – are
the only ones who have biases.
·
The belief that political correctness is a viable way to diffuse tension
in a diverse workplace.
·
The
belief that it is OK to presume someone guilty till proven innocent when it
comes to charges of bias.
2. You
mention candidly and early in the book your own cultural background and how it
had filtered your view of others who are different. How were
you able to set this cultural bias aside and objectively write this fine
book?
As
with any attitude change, the first step in setting my culture aside was to
become aware of the fact that that culture exists. It is amazing how difficult
this can be because our culture is like the air we breathe – we can’t see or
sense it so we begin to think of it as “the way human beings are” (or, at
least, ought to be) rather than as something unique to our own upbringing and
environment. In my case, I became aware of my culture through exposure to
different ideas and values in my work. Unless we have something against which
to contrast our values, we have no way of understanding that those values are
specific – if not unique -- to our own group.
On
the other hand, although awareness of one’s culture is a great first step, it
is never possible to be certain that our cultural and personal experiences are
not influencing our interpretation of events. For that reason, I made a point
of stating in the book that the reader needed to be aware that my “whiteness”
might be influencing how I present a given story. To emphasize this point, I riddled Making
Diversity Work with personal anecdotes reminding the reader that I, like
everyone else, have a point-of-view that dictates my every thought and every
idea.
3.
Beginning in Chapter 1, you use a phrase I found fascinating and have never
heard before. It is likely to become a byword in business culture. Tell us what
"Guerilla Bias" is, and how it subtly influences our lives, including
the workplace?
Guerilla
BiasÔ, like the guerilla
warrior who hides behind stands of beautiful foliage, lies concealed behind
good intentions, kind words, and even thoughtful acts. The very fact that it is disguised and is
therefore difficult to spot, diagnose, and cure, makes this brand of bias
particularly dangerous.
Not
only is Guerilla Bias™ dangerous because you can’t see it, it also is a problem
because of the perverse premise on which it is based: All women, emerging groups (previously called
“minorities”), people with disabilities, and those who are outside the
so-called “majority” population are to some degree fragile, quick to explode,
or in need of special treatment. This
premise leads, in turn, to the destructive habit of pulling our punches on the
truth when coaching members of emerging groups. We do this because we are
afraid of hurting
their feelings, being sued, or being thought of as prejudiced. The result is an
employee who is never taught how to do the job and therefore will never be able
to move up in the organization.
This
premise also tempts us to provide preferential treatment to emerging groups –
treatment that often leads to unnecessary tension on the team. I am reminded,
for example, of the woman who was utterly confused about how to handle what
seemed to be a straight-forward management challenge. Apparently, she had
several Native American employees who came to work late every day. Having
learned that some Native Americans have a different view of time than people
raised in mainstream Anglo culture, the manager concluded that they would never
be able to grasp the corporate notion of punctuality. Her solution? Let
them come to work up to half an hour after everybody else.
Talk
about compromising the team! The
manager’s Guerilla Bias™ – that Native Americans
needed special treatment and shouldn’t be held to the same high standard as the
rest of the team – created terrible resentment. The sad thing about this
resentment is that it never would have happened had she kept her bias in check
and held all her employees to the same high standard of punctuality. Of course,
reasonable and respectful accommodation of cultural differences is a hallmark
of a highly-functioning diverse workplace; bending over backwards, however, at
the expense of efficiency and healthy teams is not.
4. In the
middle of the book you offer a number of interesting steps for the reader to examine
their own personal biases. In this section you discuss "zero-order
beliefs". Tell us what this is, and how we often respond to it in ways we
don't typically realize?
The section you are referring to discusses
the weak foundation on which so many of our biases are based. One of the most common sources for bias is
experience – usually, unfortunately, negative experience. Of all the ways we
learn bias, you would think that experience would be the most reliable. After
all, we were there, we lived it, we know what
happened. Well, maybe and maybe not. We have to remember that any experience
with one individual or even ten individuals says nothing about other members of
that group. In addition, unless an experience is well-rounded and repeated, it
tells us little even about the person we actually encountered. That is because
the experience may not mean what we think it does.
One reason experiences can be
unreliable sources of a bias is that they are often distorted by the emotion we
bring to them; emotions that mean we can’t trust what our senses are telling
us. Most of the time, it is OK to trust our senses; if we didn’t, we’d be
wandering around wasting a lot of energy questioning every sight, sound, and
conversation. This trust is what is known as a “zero-order belief.” “Zero-order
beliefs” are those assumptions that are so fundamental to our thought process
that we don’t even think of them as beliefs—they are, to us, firm and
non-negotiable absolutes. Because we trust our senses so profoundly, we forget
that factors other than senses affect how we perceive a person or event. Fear,
guilt, anxiety, and myriad other emotions, for example, can cause us to think
that something happened differently than it did. The result?
A bias is created that is based on faulty information.
5. In the latter part of the book you educate the reader on clear
actions that can be taken to overcome bias on a personal level and in
the organizational environment. Some of these actions you term as gateway events. Please
tell us what gateway
events are?
Fortunately
-- or unfortunately depending on how you look at it -- workplaces are filled
with opportunities to engage in conversations about bias. These opportunities come in the form of
misunderstandings, accusations, and any other happening that involves discord
between or about people who are different from each other. Because these
incidents are capable of bringing about productive dialogue and serve as
gateways to greater understanding and reduced bias, I call them “Gateway
Events.” Gateway Events come in many guises. These are just a few:
* Perhaps you witness an act of bias
against a friend, acquaintance, or colleague or hear an inappropriate joke or
comment.
* Maybe someone
falsely accuses you of bias.
* Perhaps someone treats you in a way that
appears to reflect a biased attitude.
* Perhaps you say or
do something that inadvertently offends someone.
* Maybe you witness
someone else being falsely accused of bias.
* Perhaps you are confused and
uncomfortable because of the differences between yourself and someone else.
* Perhaps you say or do something involving diversity that you
immediately regret.
Regardless
of the nature of the Gateway Event, talking about sticky diversity issues is
not always comfortable and not every conversation ends with participants
collapsing into each other’s arms in a mutual paroxysm of new-found
understanding. The book provides the tools and skills to minimize the
discomfort and maximize the chance that we will, if not collapse into each
other’s arms, at least be able to walk through those gateways and meet on the
other side.
6. One
powerful point you emphasize in your chapter on verbal skills for diversity dialogue is to
"maintain high standards of communication". Help us to understand
what this is?
When
in the middle of a Gateway Event, especially if it is one that has caused us to
feel anger or hurt, it can be difficult to keep our dignity. We may be tempted
to sink to the other person’s level by hurling back a racial epithet, making
exaggerated charges of bias or discrimination, or resorting to shouting.
Behavior like this is always a mistake. In the book I mention the case of
Helen, who is a good example of how a nice person can be sucked into the verbal
mire by the bias around her:
Helen, who worked in a
male-dominated manufacturing environment, had had enough. Day after day, week
after week, she was exposed to a litany of comments such as “It must be that
time of the month,” or “She must not be getting enough.”
One day at a departmental
meeting, Helen’s male supervisor blew his top over a proposed change in
procedures. Helen decided to seize the opportunity to help her boss understand
how women feel when their emotions are dismissed as hormonal hallucinations and
responded by saying, "You know, Jack, you're
getting awfully emotional. I guess it must be that time of the month."
This approach might have been mildly
amusing if Helen and Jack had been two friends kibitzing at a dinner party or
football game. They were, however, in the workplace and that meant that the
comment was inappropriate at best and destructive at worst. In this case,
Helen’s disrespectful comment backfired. All it did was reinforce her
colleagues’ belief that women found such comments amusing. It also strengthened
their bias that women somehow deserve or want to be treated like second class
citizens. What it didn’t do was reduce the ill-treatment to which Helen was
subjected.
7.
Sondra, what is the next project you are working on and when can we look forward
to learning from it?
Our
current emphasis is on devising strategies that will allow the message
contained in Making Diversity Work to be as widely disseminated as
possible. I continue, of course, to
speak widely to audiences in a variety of industries on how they can minimize
their biases and thereby be more successful at business. In addition, there are several products under
consideration including interactive DVD, video, and
other support products. We also have
chocked our brand-new web site (www.Thiederman.com) full of free material that
will help move the cause of bias reduction forward. Stay tuned, lots of
exciting learning to come.
Thanks Sondra for helping us to
understand how we can defeat bias in the workplace!
To read a weLEAD book review of Making Diversity Work, please click here!
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