What Is It?
- Think social stereotypes that influence thoughts, feelings, choices, & behavior – that is, Automatic, Unconscious, Short-cuts that can lead to gender, racial, ethnic, even sexual orientation being an unfortunate factor in corporate decision-making and behavior.
- They are just one of many cognitive biases that we humans can carry
- Unconscious bias training exposes these unconscious, automatic patterns of thinking, the effects, and seeks to eliminate their impact on personnel practices
- Such efforts are often compulsory and are typically part of a suite of “compliance training” modules
Overcoming Unconscious Bias in the Workplace
It starts with more traditional Unconscious Bias training to create awareness and challenge your beliefs by exposing the presence of unconscious, automatic, cognitive biases as it pertains to race, gender, ethnicity and orientation.
But then greatly enhances the likelihood of success by first raising self-awareness through uncovering, then confronting, your innate places comfort where you have a natural cognitive, affective, or behavioral bias. And then learning how your patterns help or frustrate you achieving your goals. As a result, you will discover your baseline comfort zones.
These increases in self-awareness are followed-up with skill-gap identification. Gaps that prevent you from better interactions with others at work. You’ll develop the insights needed, and uncover growth opportunities required, to modify your behavior when faced with interpersonal obstacles or challenges – either one-on-one or in a group.
And last, you will acquire the flex skills necessary to manage your natural tendencies in favor of less comfortable behavioral responses that will increase the likelihood you achieve your goals. This training can have a big impact on self-confidence, interpersonal communications, and the effects of unconscious bias.
Adding our 3-step FLEX TRAINING is more effective than delivering Unconscious Bias Training alone and can be done individually, as a team, or part of a larger workshop. And this program has broad impact well beyond addressing bias in the workplace, for example, these insights and skills are seminal leadership qualities and behaviors.
Project
Overcoming Unconscious Bias
Approach
Focus less on changing an individuals cognitions (which is important to attempt) and more on their behaviors (which can be addressed more directly)
What We Did
Individual assessment, training, and practice – both individually and in a group
Our 3-step Flex Method is superior to traditional unconscious bias training approaches
Rather than exposing people to their cognitive biases and hoping their attitudes will change, we give them the tools and understanding to appreciate how to manage their comfort zones. It is about how the world sees you (rightly or wrongly), not how you see you. Personality is in the eye of the beholder, or more simply said, your impact says more about you than your intent. You need adapt to the world, not expect the world to adapt to you!
