These titles and objectives are now, more than ever, firmly on the leadership agenda but for many companies, this is a new, unfamiliar and challenging topic.
We can support you by facilitating leadership team conversations: improving awareness of the challenges and helping you shape your response.
We can also provide training for the leadership team, people managers and HR team, to break through the jargon, improve awareness and move to action and accountability.
As Business Psychologists, we are experts in unconscious bias, behavioural change and difficult conversations. That’s the lens we bring to this, exploring what is happening in the brain when we make assumptions and treat people according to a stereotype or based on our personal experiences.
We take the research and literature on inclusion and make things simple, so that everyone has a shared understanding and can explore how to respond. We focus on action and holding ourselves and others accountable for improving culture and creating that sense of belonging that is both the right thing to do, and drives greater results.
Whilst our work in unconscious bias, more objective recruitment practice and interview skills training brings us into the world of improving diversity, we are not experts in the broader work of diversity data analysis or attracting and promoting a more diverse team. Which is actually pretty exciting, because we get the opportunity to partner with brilliant people who are experts in that field.
We recommend:
The work we are doing most often in this space is:
Inclusive leadership – building inclusion, psychological safety, equity and belonging into existing or new leadership development programmes. This avoids the classic issue of DEI being a standalone activity which does not bring about the cultural change required. Running inclusion through your management and leadership programmes as a critical thread, is a far more effective approach.
Objective recruitment – how to understand the role of unconscious bias in screening and interviewing and how to work to overcome this and make better hiring decisions.
DEI workshops – we can run events to introduce the topics of equity and inclusion, break through the jargon and help people reflect on what this means to them and how they can be better allies or advocates. Whilst these can work as standalone events to start a conversation, they will always need follow up, as per the challenge below…
Unconscious Bias training does not work?
You may well have read concerns about this training being ineffective and research showing that teaching bias can actually do more harm than good. That is all true. A standalone unconscious bias workshop will provide little benefit. Building awareness alone is not enough.
That is why all of our programmes are broader than unconscious bias alone, and why we will always recommend building this into a broader Inclusive Leadership Programme, which focuses on action and accountability.