Unconscious Bias Training That Actually Makes a Difference

Unconscious bias training is rapidly finding a place in training menus across the country and beyond.  The reasoning behind this trend is perfectly sound, grounded in a commitment to foster workplace environments that succeed in efforts to embrace the advantages of workforce diversity, including fostering increased creativity, improving decision-making, enhancing teamwork, achieving exemplary customer service and community relations, with improved financial performance.  However, as we shall see, this training all too often falls far short of its potential as an organizational intervention.

Why Unconscious Bias Training?

What is the purpose of unconscious bias training? We’ve come to understand that humans are enormously subject to unconscious bias in our thinking, attitudes, and resulting behaviors.  With the human brain encountering as much as 11 million bits of data per second, we reflexively rely on enormous data reduction and simplification tricks to simply function, moment to moment.  Sounds good, except, it turns out the non-conscious mental shortcuts we end up using in problem-solving and decision-making (often called heuristics) are greatly subject to bias, influenced by the worldview we are exposed to in our environment.  The attitudes, beliefs and storylines transmitted to us by family, schools, community, and media provide a template that we naturally employ in making sense of what we encounter in the world.

Those mental frameworks are socially inherited from prior generations, including the fears and biases about others that were prevalent in the past and are tied to the neurophysiological programming of our earliest species survival models.  Thus, we inherit data processing algorithms that are centuries, even millennia out of date.  It is no wonder, then, that we are apt to make split-second negative judgements about people who are different from us, without ever consciously considering our response or how we came to that conclusion.  This is unconscious bias in action, and it interferes directly with our interpersonal, leadership and organizational competence.

Why Does It Fall Short?

Faced with limited success in efforts to foster a successfully inclusive environment, many organizations have identified unconscious bias as a critical obstacle to successfully employing, retaining and utilizing a diverse workforce.  Trainings have rolled out that identify the mental processes underlying unconscious bias, how it shows up, the business and human impacts, and sources of attitudes that affect our judgements about others.  In addition, this training often leads participants in self-examination of the biases they may hold and the behaviors, from micro-aggressions to adverse employment decisions, that can ensue.   And then participants are sent back to work with advice on what not to do as a result of their bias – a sort of aversive model that can have unintended consequences, such as leading people to avoid having interactions with colleagues, so as to avoid making a mistake.

Unfortunately, we now know when we simply add conscious awareness of our bias to an existing base of unconscious attitudes, we can exacerbate the negative behavior we are aiming to reduce, particularly when we are activated to avoid doing the wrong thing.   It turns out that, when we don’t provide a set of strategies or practices that can be employed by individuals to intentionally overwrite the biased mental frames they are carrying, bias can, in fact, worsen.

 Unconscious Bias Training as Skill-Building

It is possible, however, to provide robust tools for reasserting control over our thinking and making active choices about what we allow to influence our attitudes, behaviors, and decisions.  Building on the same training platform, we can go beyond basic understanding of unconscious bias to provide very accessible personal practices that have demonstrated powerful bias-reduction and that stimulate inclusive behaviors and attitudes.  In the training space, these exercises translate into easily learned and practiced skills for enhanced self-awareness, for noting how bias intercedes in our thinking, and for building alternative storylines that first counteract, then overwrite the negative interpretations embedded in the bias.

Strategies that serve this purpose engage us in building a set of habits that help old biases fade and foster new, positive beliefs and attitudes.  These exercises undertake activities such as stereotype replacement, perspective-taking, courageous conversations, micro-affirmations, goals setting, and more.  Rather than focusing on aversion to bad behavior, all of these tactics are oriented toward increasing for clear thinking about our own mental processes, explicitly recognizing our capacity for personal and professional growth and committed action.   With practice, these skills can become second nature, a continuous, self-enhancing process that includes:

• recognizing bias in our thoughts,
• considering where the bias came from,
• examining data that contradicts those negative stories,
• deepening our insight and empathy for the experiences and challenges of others,
• engaging in honest, open-ended exploration of colleagues’ experiences,
• building new internal narratives based on attention to strengths and contributions, and
• setting goals for our own learning and inclusive behavior, tied to proactive changes in the workplace environment.

These are the goals of the most effective and impactful unconscious bias training, invigorating participants’ sense of positive possibilities and self-empowered learning in service to the organization’s vision of a truly inclusive workplace that brings out the best of every employee.

Leveraging for Culture Change

One further thought. Naturally, the highest return on this investment occurs when cohorts undertake this proactive learning together.  Because the model is non-judgmental, yet focused on action-oriented personal, professional, and team development, colleagues can enroll to help each other continue the journey of self-discovery in an atmosphere of cooperative learning tied to motivation for positive results.  This, in turn, enhances individual and group emotional intelligence, generates a new shared language for naming and depowering bias.  This fosters supportive accountability for inclusiveness and stimulates a collective commitment to examining and evolving work practices that rise above the bias of the past.

This is the good news.  Rather than “flavor of the week”, unconscious bias training can really work.  When focused on skills of rewriting mental scripts and growing new personal and professional competence, unconscious bias training can be a potent cornerstone of leadership development and organizational culture change.

Christopher (Kit) Tennis, Ph.D. & Anita L. Sanchez, Ph.D.