Leading with Equity: Disrupting Unconscious Bias with Stacey A. Gordon

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Stacy, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you. Thank you for the invite. Happy to be here.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for accepting the invite. How would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Sure. I am Stacy Gordon and I have been working in the diversity, equity and inclusion space for a number of years now. And what I do is I consider myself an educator. I'm also a global speaker and so I don't like words like trainer. I always say that training is for puppies, so to keep that out of my vocabulary. But it does sneak in every now and then. But I'm really focused on working with companies around the globe on helping to create inclusive workplace cultures where everyone feels that they can belong. That seems simple. We should be able to do that. But as we have found, it is not that simple. And we have a lot of strategies and tools to really simplify it, make it easier, break it down. And one of those tools is my book addressing Unconscious Bias at work. You might have also seen one of my articles in my co authors, an article for the Harvard Business Review on storytelling and how that helps with inclusion. And so I'm really focused on inclusion and belonging as outcomes of the workplace.

I love this and I know that now with your team, you have some ongoing coursework that you are promoting too.

Yes. So we've created a course called Unconscious Inclusion. And really because we start with Unconscious Bias, you know, everyone may have seen my course on LinkedIn for unconscious bias, which actually has racked up more than a million unique learners. So that's awesome. But it's a place to start. And we think about what is unconscious bias. And what I really want people to focus on is not what unconscious bias is, but how we can live and include others without having to put so much effort into it. Because I don't know about you, but I don't want it to be work. So I want us to effortly include as easily as we effortly exclude. So the course is called Unconscious Inclusion because we want you to go through the stages of unconscious bias, conscious bias, conscious inclusion, and then unconscious inclusion. And so we actually created this 13 week course that helps you to keep going week by week by week. Because we find that when you spend your time in workshops, you show up and you're excited and you want to do the work, but then you leave and you go, huh, how do I execute? What does this look like? I need help. And then you just go back to doing what you were doing. And so that wonderful presentation that you sat through and got all excited about ends up really not being all that helpful.

Yep, makes a lot of sense. And I think before we get into the actual meat of this episode, it would be helpful for the audience to get an idea of your perspective on definitions. So when you think about the word bias and diversity inclusion, those type of terms, how are you defining them?

So again, try to keep things really simple. I think about unconscious bias and it's really just a way for us to quickly categorize people without having to think about it. Again, effortless exclusion. Obviously it comes from a place of the way our brains work. We are just programmed that way. So a lot of will happen is people will say, well, how if we're programmed that way, are we supposed to overcome this programming? And my answer to that is that we have to work at it, right? We do have to work at it. Until we've created new habits and new brain synapses and new ways of thinking and we retrain our brain. So that is really the focus, I think, for thinking about what is bias, but not necessarily staying there in that focus. Because we get a lot of people talking about, oh so negative. We don't want to talk about bias. The other thing I'll say is bias isn't necessarily negative, right? Because we all have these thoughts, we're socialized to show up in certain ways. And that's not our fault, right? That's just how we have been socialized. What is our fault is how we act upon those thoughts and the things that we think in our brains. So that's the point. And that's where we really focus in.

Yeah. Oh, this is great. And diversity and inclusion, your first thought on that?

Yeah, I think diversity is just a mix, right? Diversity is having difference. We want different ethnicities, we want different backgrounds, we want different thought processes. We want different genders, races, abilities. Diversity is just a mix of people. Inclusion is the action. So inclusion is actively going out of our way to bring people into our space. I always think about it. Easy way to picture it is when you were in high school and even if this wasn't you particularly, we've seen the movies, right? You walk into high school lunch and you're holding a little tray and you want to sit somewhere, what do you do? You scan around and you look and you're not going to go sit at the popular table and say, excuse me, make room. You're just not going to do that. You're going to sit someplace quiet by yourself. However, if you're at the table where everyone is sitting, it is very easy for you to say, hey, come on over, we kept a space for you. Or move over, let's make room. Right. That is a really simple, easy thing to do. It's two sides of the same coin. But a lot of times we focus in on the person holding the tray and saying, well, if they wanted to sit there, they should have said something. No one's doing that. Right. So inclusion is the action. The actor, the person who can do the including, has the responsibility really, to reach out and say, hey, come on over and join us.

I think that's a really, really great example. And I think there are sometimes somebody who might take that risk and say, hey, can I sit here? And people might point to that person and say, see, everybody could do it. But that's the exclusion that proves the rule. The fact that we could say, yeah, that one person did it. Okay, can you name a second person? It makes it a little bit tougher. So I like that perspective too, because it shows the power dynamic too. In those situations, the person who is already included, who feels comfortable in the space, that is bit of power that they have in that circumstance. And then you can share that by inviting people in, but it takes an actual action to do it. I think the passive be hope that other people would just join has been shown not to actually happen.

And the person doing that loses nothing. Right. You're not giving up any power. You're not losing anything by doing that. I think that's also a really poignant point there as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. And when we were chatting before Stacy, we talked about one of your frustrations when it comes to some of the difficult conversations that we have that holds people back from wholeheartedly engaging and connecting at a deeper level. Can you tell listeners about that?

I think we're all feeling this. When we show up, we meet someone new, we immediately make assumptions about who they are based upon what they say. So politics is a really easy one for everyone right now to think about. If I say, you know, the United States, I'm a Democrat, you immediately, anything that I say after that is going to color what I say. Because you're going to look at it through this lens of, oh, but you're a Democrat. And so you must think these things, you must believe these things, you must subscribe to these theories. Whereas it's like, no, not necessarily. You know, I. There's things about Republicans that I think, you know, there's certain policies that make sense, there's certain policies from Democrats that make sense. There's policies from other groups that make sense. Just because I said one thing doesn't then automatically put me into this box. But what happens is we get put into these boxes, and it makes it very difficult for us to claw our way out because we want to have more conversations. But a lot of times conversation gets shut down because people are making assumptions about things they think I've said or assume I'm going to say, even though I haven't said them yet.

Yes. I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about with bias, too. And when you think about bias, even the term bias can be politicized. But really, at the end of the day, all bias is. Is a psychological reality. This is what how our brain is designed in order to navigate the world, in order to make decisions. Sometimes it helps us to make good decisions. Okay, cool. I don't need to think twice about whether or not red means stop and green means go. Sometimes it leads us to make bad decisions that are based on problematic thought patterns or media narratives that aren't quite true. And then when you bring it into these conversations, just like you said, the labeling leads to these assumptions. And when we have these assumptions about people, even though the person might be talking to us and saying words, we're almost ignoring the words and using a little bit of confirmation bias and selecting the specific words that are narrative.

Absolutely. And even me using a politics example, right? Like, okay, I already know I've lost some people because they're going to go, oh, well, she's talking about politics. So if I use a different example and I Say, okay, I'm a stay at home mom, and then I tell you certain things about what I think and what I believe. Again, you're going to make assumptions about what I might think and what I might believe based upon your understanding of the things that you think a stay at home mom might say or believe. Or if I said I'm a homeschooling stay at home mom, you've now taken some additional things that you're putting on that why don't you want your children in school? Whether or not you agree with that, you are going to take that and again, make meaning out of it.

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So what happens is the person who's speaking sometimes is fighting against things they don't even know because of. Again, the beliefs that are coming out of your brain and your thought process that are being interwoven. It's exhausting. It's why right now it is, I think, very exhausting for people to have true and honest conversation because somebody says, you know, I want to join this conversation, but. And we think twice about, is it worth it? Am I, do I really want to say what I think about this? Because someone's going to take it the wrong way or make this assumption about me. And what makes it worse is another example I'll use is, so let's say you come into my office and I have a cross on my desk. You may make the assumption that I am a devout Christian. You may then again make some assumptions about that. And I was having this conversation with a group where I was facilitating some education around dei, and I used this example and I said, you know, you might then believe, like let's say you have a family member or let's say you yourself are gay. And you now say, okay, this person probably doesn't like me because they're a devout Christian. So now When I work, I don't want to invite them to the meeting because I don't want to get into this conflict with them, this perceived conflict that I have. So now I'm excluding them from meetings, and all this snowballs, right? These are the things that happen. And somebody said to me, came up to me after the meeting and said, you know, I think I've done that. She said, my daughter is a lesbian, and I have walked through and seen evidence of what I thought was devout Christian beliefs in somebody. And she said, I think I've gone down that rabbit hole. And I didn't realize I've done that till you just brought that up. And we think, oh, I would never. I. Of course not. But we really have to think about the boxes that we place people in and then how we treat them based on that.

This is so fascinating because everybody has identities, right? We have different layers. We have our racial identity, gender. We have our political beliefs, we have religious beliefs, we have hobbies, we have schools. All of these types of things. We have our professions. All of these things are different identities. And we realize that with certain parts of our identity, people have different levels of assumptions. I mean, as a lawyer, people have assumptions about me. Usually they come in the form of bad jokes, but some of them are true.

Until they need your services.

Exact. Exactly. Everybody's got jokes until they get arrested, right? So, yeah, that happens. And we don't want to live in a world where the only way that we can connect with people is to mute parts of our identity. That might be important to us. But how do we recognize this psychological tendency in ourselves and others and still lean in and have the conversations that we need to have?

I think we've got to get more curious. We've got to start asking questions. Because if we're making assumptions, we are making judgments based on these assumptions, which does not allow for conversation, right? Why am I going to have a conversation with you? If I've already sized you up, decided who you are, what you think and what you're about, then I don't need to talk to you, right? And that's a lot of what's happening right now. What I need to do is maybe look at you and say, okay, I believe this thing. I think this thing. Let me find out if it's true. Let me ask questions, right? Let's be curious. And so we've got to go into our conversations with curiosity and learning a little bit more and also asking ourselves, like, well, how did I come up with this? Is this a fact? Or is this based on an assumption? And so that's where we ourselves have to do some introspection. And we have to pause and think before we talk to people and reflect on conversations, even after we've spoken to them, especially when we're making decisions. So if you're in a place of decision making, especially if you're a leader, if you're about to hire, if you're about to fire, if you're about to promotion or an advancement or whatever it is you're about to do, you really got to ask yourself some of these questions. Raise that up before you start going through that process, because just that awareness is going to help you to be less biased in your decision making.

Agreed. I love this. Because again, let's circle back to the beginning and then come back to this point too. Because one of the biases against the term bias is that it only refers to protected classes of citizens. So race, gender, those type of things. But when it comes down to it, again, bias will impact all of us in different ways in all aspects of our life. And we have to recognize when they are at play. And for each individual person, sometimes there can be some shame associated with the recognition of a bias. Wow, I didn't realize that I had that. But we have to remember, biases don't make us bad, they make us human. But if you know you have a bias and you don't do anything about it, we might have a different conversation. But we have to recognize that your brain will operate in a biased way. And we have to be able to be aware of those biases so we can make better decisions, like you said. And when we think about the biases or beliefs that we have about people, we have to shift from these assumptions, which are thoughts that we believe to be true without further investigation, to hypotheses which are rebuttable assumptions. I mean, this is where my brain went, may or may not be true, but I'm still going to have this conversation with you to learn more about you. I think every conversation is a learning opportunity.

Absolutely.

You might be very surprised.

Yes. And I think that I always use this example too, because this is. Bias isn't bad, but the action can be right. So if we think about. And I've used this example because one of the consultants that I work with, we were on site at a client and getting ready to get our laptops connected to their system. We were having trouble and someone said, oh, we'll send over someone from IT to help you. And so this woman walks up to Us, she helps us, does her thing. And afterwards she looks at me and goes, did you. She goes, that was a female IT person. Right. She goes, did you have the same reaction that I did? And it was like, yeah, because she said, you know, someone from IT is going to come and help you. That we always think IT guy. And so when this woman walked up at first had this moment of, huh? Oh, right. It's nothing. It's just a tiny thing where you notice like, oh, yeah, I wasn't expecting this person. Now, did anything come of it? Of course not. Not a big deal. We had a conversation about it because of the work we do, and we really unpacked that and said, oh, look, we noticed. Right. But where this matters is, did we say, oh, no, I'm sorry, I need a man to get here? There's no way that a woman could be knowledgeable enough or qualified to help me. No, but have people done that? Absolutely. There's been many, many instances of doctors walking in to see a patient and the patient says, this black person. No way. I don't want them as my doctor. This woman, you think she's going to do surgery on me? I don't think so. Right. That has happened. Tattoos. You're covered in tattoos as a doctor, and they're like, oh, no, you can't possibly be qualified because I've got some ink on my arm. But that's the thing. So in our head, we might be thinking these things. We have the choice to go, huh? That actually doesn't matter. Let's move on. Or to be a not very nice person and discriminate against somebody and say, oh, no, I don't want your help.

See, and these examples are great because the solution is, like you said, introspection. But even simpler than that, it's the recognition that sometimes when we're at a decision point in our lives, we have to recognize that we have to slow down and pause. And I think a lot of times it's almost like, I don't want to create hesitant people here, but I think a lot of times we trust ourselves too much. Like, oh, everything's fine. I'm just going to float through life without giving it a second thought because everything's fine. And I think a lot of times in these interactions, it would be beneficial to slow down from time to time and just do a little check. Am I thinking through this through clearly? Because bias comes in many different forms. We talk about negative biases, but also positive biases. So if somebody looks like me, talks like me, sounds like me went to the same school, those type of things, same hobbies then, and they're trying to sell me something. I'm quicker to buy, and I might not need this thing. And so sometimes the biases that we have that lead us to feel too good might lead us to make bad decisions as well. And so, again, it just shows how the nuance that goes behind this. But when it comes to us in our difficult conversations and relationships in general, having bias in the back of our mind, just as a check, as a checkpoint that we should keep in mind, is going to be incredibly powerful when it comes to connection and decision making.

Absolutely. It's fascinating, though, as you get into this and the more that you think about it. And I'm not even a scientist, right? But this. I've talked to neuroscientists about this as well and their take on it. And for me, I'm like, okay, you went too deep. I'm like, stop. Too much. I don't know if any of you have read Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. I'm gonna admit I did not read the whole book. I couldn't. I read some of it. I have it on my shelf, and I read the synopsis, and I kind of might try to get through it, but that book is thick, and it's a lot in there. Right. But the idea is just that you either think fast or slow, and we really need to start slowing down when it comes to the really important decisions that we have to make. And too often, we do think fast when we should be thinking slow. But like you said earlier, red means stop. That's something where we need to think fast. That's automatic. Whether or not I'm going to fire this person, that's getting on my nerves in my department. I need to think a little more slowly about that one. Right. I might need to make sure that I have really good idea of what it is that I'm doing, that I have created metrics and expectations, and I've given this person an opportunity to correct the behavior and all of these different things that a lot of times we really do not do.

Agreed. And I also agree with you with your synopsis of Thinking fast and Slow, because I remember the first time I tried it, I made it 25% of the way through. I'm like, I cannot do this. Eventually, the second time, years later, I got it, but it's like 600 pages, and it has zero fluff. Just completely dense. So I am with you, but it's great. And Your synopsis was great because we have the system one and System two processing. System one is fast. It's automatic processing, where we just go, make the decision and go without putting any thought. System two, that's slower. It's deliberate thought. And when I think about my difficult conversations, one of the simple rules I follow based on that is if I feel myself really compelled to say something, like, something that doesn't come from my head, but I can feel it bubbling up my chest, I'm like, probably shouldn't say that thing. Let me slow it down a little bit. Let me think it through a little bit before I say something that I eventually regret. And it might be a yes or a no. I've regretted both of those in the past sometimes. So I think just that. Check. It helps us to be better negotiators, better communicators. And then when you think about it from the DEI perspective, the inclusion and belonging perspective, it helps us to be better colleagues, better friends, and better people as a whole. So the work that you're doing is so important, and I'm really glad that you took the time to chat with us today.

Yes, thank you. It's a passion, right? And part of it is just who I am. Like, I woke up black, right? There's nothing I can do about this. And the way that I myself am treated as a black female, I know that that is different from how others are treated. But I also know that as a white male, right, you get treated differently. There are places where, you know, this kind of goes into that privilege conversation, which is a whole other conversation. But we hear the word privilege, we think we're talking about this elite set of people. And it's not about that. It really is that we all have categories and context. And depending upon where we are in the social hierarchy at the time, within our timeline, too, depending upon our age, depending upon so many things, we all can have privilege, and sometimes we don't. And understanding that and realizing that as we ebb and flow through life, it's not about taking a category of people and saying, you're this and you're that. It's just about understanding that you might be this in this moment. That's going to change depending upon who we're talking to, when we're talking to them, what we're talking about, et cetera. So I think, really about being able to flex. And so much of what we have been taught, I think through capitalism especially, too, was like, there's this way to do the thing, and you do the thing. Like this, and you follow the rule and then it happens. And then if you do these things, you will have success. And I think that what we're seeing now is that there are many pathways to success. And just because this has been the arc for it doesn't make it the right way or the only way.

Absolutely. And I love your assessment of privilege and how it can change in different circumstances, because I think that's a nuance that's often lost in situations. Because it's not just an open and shut case. If you are this, then you have privilege. If you were to go to a Beyonce concert and there was another white guy there, you would have a little bit more privilege in that circumstance. Again, bringing it back to negotiation, having an understanding of the power dynamics at play is going to be really important. And then also remember that power is dynamic, not static. That's going to be really important. Sometimes you have leverage, sometimes you don't. And it changes with time and circumstance. So I think again, it's a really helpful overlay to keep in mind just as we assess any kind of conversation, any kind of interaction, because we have to understand the context which we're playing. And the more we understand that and the more nuance we can bring to it, the more effective we can be.

I think too, for any of our HR folks that are listening, I'm always a little stickler on the HR folks, like, okay, because I think there is a place where HR for many years got a bad rap for being too compliance focused and not strategic enough. And I argue that HR actually does need to be compliance focused and strategic. And I think what has happened is you talk about power dynamics. HR actually has the power to make the policy changes within an organization and they are failing to recognize the power that they hold. Because I think that if you recognize that DEI is important, then we actually have to change the way the various policies within an organization and how they are put into effect. And when that's not happening, the people who have the power to do that are HR folks. And I think if you don't recognize that and use it, then that's a complete waste of your strategic power. I think that's where the strategic power is going by the wayside. Because you can make those changes, definitely have the ability to do it. Because nothing ever changes in a workplace without somebody making you do it, without there being a form or a something. Right. Check off some accountability. And that is where that resides in hr. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity there because too many hr people say, oh, I'm not dei. Yeah, I bet you need to be.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, yeah, I think when it comes to those types of scenarios, when we're thinking strategically about how we can structurally improve organizations, you're right. Human resources, they have. They're positioned really well, really well to create those changes and position really well to get in the way of those types of changes as well. So I think that is a good call out there. And, Stacy, before you go, can you remind the listeners again about your book, your company, and how they can get in touch with you?

Yes. So my book is called Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work. You can find me@reworkwork.com that's R E work. People think sometimes it's we work. I'm like, no, rework. So the website is reworkwork.com and it's really because we believe that we need to rework a lot of different things about work. Right. There's a lot within the workplace that needs to change. And so our goal is to create inclusive workplace cultures. And if that's something that you want to do as well, you can look us up. You can find me on LinkedIn. Lots of courses on there as well. So LinkedIn is easy. I'm just. Stacy Gordon.

Love it. Stacey, thanks again for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

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