UNCONSCIOUS BIAS TRAINING

Overview

In the past few years, unconscious bias training and diversity, equity, and inclusion training have grown as organizations recognize that their team members carry inherent biases and assumptions that can unintentionally inhibit their effectiveness and create systems of inequity and a lack of diversity in hiring, promotion, and decision-making.

Sadie offers customized training curricula to address unconscious bias in team members. The specific curriculum will be developed after a conversation about your team’s specific needs and outcomes. Sadie’s approach is to first engage participants in a broader conversation about mindsets and biases – this creates more openness and willingness in people to examine the impacts of their biases and reduces their discomfort and fear about addressing tricky topics. She also typically includes a conversation about your purpose and values - when people commit to a coherent and collaborative story of “this is us, who we are, what we stand for, and why we do what we do” they also tend to expend more effort to challenge and adjust their mindsets and behaviors.

Training curricula often include some or all of the following components:

· Experiential training in mindsets, biases, assumptions, and resulting behaviors

· Candid, facilitated conversations about how biases have created specific impacts at your organization and how to work toward resolving those

· Strategies and tools for challenging our biases – these tools can be applied immediately

· Strategies for developing a system to continuously reinforce awareness and reduce or eliminate future biased behavior

· Overview of how unconscious biases impact rates of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including the broader context and statistics

· Experiential approach to aligning purpose, values and behavior – often when we define our values and then look candidly at our behavior we make new commitments to acting on our principles

· Reinforcing team members’ commitment to adopting a mindset of continuous growth and learning

Approach Summary

We all have a way we see the world, with our biases, assumptions, and past experiences filtering the way we engage with other people, new information, change, and discomfort. Our mindsets help create and reinforce our values, habits, communication and leadership styles, and approaches to getting things done. Our mindsets create unintentional, unconscious patterns of thinking, feeling and behavior, which can lead to implicit biases toward other people. These can be expressed in various ways:

· How we judge others’ communication, work, and leadership styles

· Biases toward gender, ethnicity, and race, particularly in hiring, promotion, and inclusion practices

· Rationalizations and excuses for our behavior, often unconscious

· Stereotypes of gender roles and racial and ethnic group members, as well as other forms of bias such as ageism and ableism

· Biased evaluations of work performance

· Beliefs that we are open-minded and don’t exhibit biases (other people do, not us)