Bias Impacts

The global business landscape is ever changing. Seasoned executives and business coaches, Kanthi Ford and Patrick Ricketts, share their professional experiences as well as simple, common-sense concepts that are fundamental to leading effectively in today’s workplace.

Subscribe with your favorite podcast player

Apple PodcastsAndroidRSS

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram.

Congratulations! You have just been promoted. You’ve been doing such a good job so we are going to promote you to the head of Human Resources. Your first job is to recruit some new employees because we have a lot of work to do and as you know we encourage diversity in all forms here at Newsgram Inc. so before you get started we need to have a conversation about bias.

Patrick Ricketts – My experience has been that people tend to recruit in their own image, people that have the same values as them and look like them as well and it’s how you influence people to look outside of that and bring people in with different perspectives.

That’s Patrick Rickets who along with Kanthi Ford wrote a book called Bias Impacts with the goal of helping current and future leaders discover new routes to future success.

Being biased is something we were born with. You and I were born in different places, we live in different communities and grow up having different experiences and our brains use that information to help us make decisions and form opinions and Kanthi says it’s perfectly normal.

Kanthi Ford – It’s a filtering mechanism. It’s something that protects us in a way. It’s just our brain is receiving hundreds and thousands of bits of information by the second so the only way we can survive as humans is to keep filtering things constantly.

As seasoned executives and business coaches, Kanthi Ford and Patrick Ricketts put this resource together to help professionals understand what’s going on inside their head so they can be more inclusive and less biased.

Kanthi Ford – It’s a brain function. So if you are human you have biases so understanding that and understanding that in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion is essential as a leader of any organization or indeed as a parent or somebod y in the community.

Did you get that last part? Their book is not just for employers but also for regular people in a community. Knowing how and why we choose to do the things we do is important.

Kanthi Ford – It’s about self-awareness. It’s very much about getting insights into how we show up and as part of the book isn chapter four we talk a lot about understanding the sort of biases we may have and to support this book we also run a workshop to get people, to get them insight into their personal behavior as a leader so that it holds a mirror up to their biases.

Reading a book alone at home is a safe place to think about these things so they offer some reflective questions that give you a chance to consider situations in a different light, and they also suggest actions that may help shift behaviors or better understand the perspectives of others.

Patrick Ricketts – And what we’ve found from people that have read the book and given us some feedback is their astoundadness of what they’ve actually found in terms of our real life experiences and that’s affected them in a quite profound way and they want to learn more.

As a society we have come a long way but Kanthi says our modern workplace environment is far from ideal.

Kanthi Ford – Many times I heard people say, “oh we’ve dealt with all that. We are a diverse organization but when you start to split companies up people are being more isolated. They’re working remotely. They’re not engaging with the wider group. You know, we’re social beings as humans. We want to be part of something and when all the remote and non-remote activity happens it makes people work in silos more so the bias becomes even more entrenched.

In the course of writing the book Kanthi and Patrick learned a few things about themselves in the process.

Kanthi Ford – Well we went on our own journey as well we discovered our own strengths and weaknesses as we traveled along and one of the things I’ve discovered since we’ve written the book, I’ve been quite nervous about sharing it. Simply because it’s personal, it’s my living experiences and I’ve spent a lifetime and a successful career pretending that it didn’t matter….it was all ok because I didn’t want to stick my head above the parapet.

Patrick Ricketts – Actually what I wrote is how much I’ve been bottling up. How much I haven’t shared with family members you know, just didn’t talk about it and how that has impacted on me in writing our book so it’s some really big serious heavy reflections. I’v discovered things about myself. My wife has discovered things about me and my experiences I never shared and to some extent it’s been quite liberating.

So there you have it, a great tool for self discovery and some simple, common-sense concepts that are fundamental to leading effectively in today’s workplace.

Kanthi Ford – Businesses are Missing a Trick because you need diversity. You need equity. You need people to feel part of something in order to generate motivation or make high performing businesses.

Bias Impacts is not just a guide to help leaders learn how to be more inclusive and less biased, it’s designed to help them lead through change and to get positive results. It’s about taking intentional action to manage differently and one way to do that is to embrace our differences.

Patrick Ricketts – Embrace our difference and see the benefits it can bring to them for themselves socially but also the benefit it brings to their business in terms of growth and integration to the communities in which they work.

So how do you feel now about your role as the Hiring Manager for Newsgram Inc? Are you ready to examine issues created by unconscious bias? Are you ready to explore the role of an empathic leader or to discuss internal cultures and ways to manage uncertainty? It’s a big job but you’re up to the task all you need to get started is a copy of the book Bias Impacts: How Culture and Diversity Affects the Leadership Journey by Kanthi Ford and Patrick Ricketts available now online at all the usual places. We put a link to Amazon in the show’s description.

Sloan Fremont recently spoke with Patrick and Kanthi on the Books on Air podcast. Check out this and other author interviews on your favorite streaming service. Here is a link to several. 

The post Bias Impacts appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.