Unbias With Stacey Gordon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments
Unconscious bias stops you from seeing someone qualified enough to do the job. John Livesay’s guest in this episode is Stacey Gordon, author of UNBIAS: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work. Stacey discusses with John how experiencing exclusion as a black female herself inspired her to write this book. People often hire people who look like them. We have a misguided notion that whatever we have done is the best way to do it. We dislike difference and change. Listen to this episode to discover how we can work our way to diversity and inclusion. Tune in and be unbiased!
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Listen to the podcast here
Unbias With Stacey Gordon
Our guest on the show is Stacey Gordon, the author of UNBIAS. She said people recruit for differences but hire for sameness. Find out what she means. She also said a coworker is not a relationship, it’s a label and that real leaders do, in fact, see color. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Stacey Gordon, who is leading the intersection of diversity, inclusion and workplace culture. In her role as an Executive Advisor and Diversity Strategist, Stacey coaches and counsels executive leaders on these strategies while offering a no-nonsense approach to education for the broader employee population. She’s the creator of the number one resume course at LinkedIn Learning and an Unconscious Bias course which has consistently been the second-highest viewed course on the platform. It is translated into at least four languages and featured by LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Virgin America, which is now Alaska Airlines. Stacey, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John.
I see that you also teach at Pepperdine, where you got your MBA. My friend, Claudio Ludovisi, has been in the Marketing Department attracting people like you to come to take their MBA. It’s certainly a beautiful campus and a beautiful place. You have a book out called UNBIAS: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work.
UNBIAS: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work
It was released, and we are still promoting and talking about it and spending a lot of time focusing on the tenets of the book.
Before we dive into the book, let’s do a little background on your story of origin. You can take us back to childhood, school or wherever you want to start your story.
I always say, “Where do I start on this journey?” There are so many places I could go with it. I’d like to talk a little bit about the fact that the work that I do, I think my background, my childhood helped me prepare for this, which I did not know. Because I have always been the odd person out and it makes it very easy for me to relate to others, to be comfortable talking to different types of people and inserting myself in things even when I probably wasn’t invited or I wasn’t expected to show up. It’s like, “I’m here.”
Did you grow up in Southern California?
No. I grew up in London and then my family moved to Brooklyn, New York.
What was it about that place that made you feel like you didn’t fit in?
I did not fit in London because I was always one of the only black kids in my school. It was pretty tough for a little while there. I had friends that stopped talking to me because their parents told them that they couldn’t play with me anymore because I was black. I had kids that would hurl stuff at me and also, I remember being in that era too, where there’s a lot of very large Indian and Pakistani population. A lot of the cornerstones over there are owned by individuals who were Indian or Pakistani. There was a lot of hate crime, stores being burned down, swastikas being put up on the walls and a lot of riots and things going on. I was a kid and I don’t remember exactly what was happening, but I remember being scared.
One of the whole premises of childhood is to try and feel safe and I’m sure that was hard on your parents if they felt like you didn’t feel safe.
It was probably why we moved to Brooklyn. My mom’s family lives in Brooklyn and everyone there was black, so we’ll all get along. It’s like, “Not really,” because now I’m a black kid with a British accent in Brooklyn.
You still stand out. How did you decide you wanted to come to the West Coast, go to Pepperdine and focus on this particular niche? Obviously, you have lots of choices of what to do with your degree.
I spent a lot of time in New York City. It was expensive and again, being a person of color, it was like, “Do I want to stay in Brooklyn? At the time, we had a lot of crime and a lot of things going on. Is this where I want to grow up and raise a family eventually?” I lived in Manhattan for a couple of years. We couldn’t afford to continue to do that and realized that we had to leave in order to try to be able to make our dollars stretch, which is how we ended up on the West Coast and eventually in the LA area. We have been here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.
That’s funny when you cross that mark. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago for the first 21 years and then I remember passing 21 years in California before moving here to Austin and I was like, “I’ve been in California longer than I was in my childhood.” Let’s dive into the book and your website is Rework Work. That’s intriguing to me. Tell me how did you come up with that story.
[bctt tweet=”Coworker is not a relationship; it is a label. People recruit for difference but hire for sameness. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love the title and the name of our company. It came out of frustration as a lot of things sometimes do. I was working as a recruiter. I was running a recruiting company and at the time, I was operating under the Gordon Group. That was the name of my company. I was talking about that the usual, client work and the things that were going on. I was so frustrated. I said, “We need to rework recruiting, onboarding, training, advancement, and everything. We need to rework work.” I thought, “I like that. I wonder if anyone’s using that.” No one was using it. I did a trademark search and did the whole thing. It was like, “Wow.”
I’ve spoken to a lot of recruitment firms for their annual meetings, whether they’re Korn Ferry or another company, they all have to compete to sell themselves to get hired by a big company to find their next C-Suite level people. That was an interesting journey to look at their business model and how similar it is to other companies like architects. They have practice areas where people specialize in a special kind of thing.
A lot of recruitment firms are trying to get diversity within their own company, as well as offer diverse choices to companies that are hiring. The thing I keep hearing, and I want to get your opinion on this, is there’s not a lot of choices out there that fit that criteria. Has that always been the case? Do you see it changing if that is the case? For example, in the venture capital world, there are very few women, let alone women of color. If they want to fix it but don’t have people that have the skills to hire to fix it, how do you advise them?
They have the skills. There are very few women in the venture capital world because we won’t hire women in the venture capital world. They exist. I have to keep telling people like, “We’re not tooth fairies or the unicorns. We do exist.” The problem is that unconscious bias stops you from seeing me as somebody who was qualified enough to do the job when honestly, I’m probably twice as qualified as half the people there to do the job and I’m being real. There are people who are absolutely positively qualified to do it, but they are not seen as qualified as such. If we use the example of one of the women who is now going to be representing America in track, a black woman. She got blue hair. I’ve seen different pictures with different-colored hair. She’s got tattoos all over her. She is queer and got long nails. Here we are. We’re celebrating her. She’s going to represent the United States.
Unbias: Unconscious bias stops you from seeing someone qualified enough to do the job.
If that woman showed up at your job and said that she wanted to be hired, you would usher her out. She wouldn’t even get her foot in the front door. Here we are celebrating this person for being able to do the job she’s tasked to do regardless of how she looks. We have to realize that always we have been able to do the job, but because of how we look, we have not been seen as able to do the job. We have been turned away. We have been discriminated against, ignored and passed over. It is time for that to change.
One of the things you talk about is unconscious bias. It’s one thing if someone says, “I want to work with people that look and sound like me.” That’s obviously conscious bias.
Conscious bias is discrimination.
It’s one thing for people to know they’re doing it and maybe own up to it internally or whatever, but the problem from my perspective is there’s a lot of people who are unaware. That’s what your expertise is that it’s not biased, it’s unconscious bias. I’ve seen this when I was selling advertising at Condé Nast and I had worked at different magazines. I’m like, “All the women here are brunettes,” or at another place, “All the women here are blonde.” It was on some weird level, people are hiring people who looked like them and that’s within the same race. I can only imagine and I think that was an unconscious choice. The blondes wanted to hire blondes and vice versa.
We have a misguided notion that whatever we have done is the best way to do it. Others who do it the way that we do it, we like them. We don’t like difference and change. We recruit for difference, and then we onboard for sameness.
People hire for difference, is that what you’re saying?
We recruit for difference and we onboard for sameness or hire for sameness.
You’re saying, “I want to look at a lot of different kinds of people,” but at the end of the day, you hire someone who’s like everybody else in the company.
The thing is though, we go out there and we say, “We want diversity and difference,” but when you hire that person and you bring them in, you then say, “Do it the way it’s always been done.”
You need to fit into our culture. Don’t be yourself basically.
It’s like, “Why did you bother to go out and look for diversity in the first place?” When they don’t fit in the box that you want them to fit in, then you fire them or you say, “They weren’t a good fit. It didn’t work out.” The other thing is this notion that because there are fewer people that they’re not as qualified and that is so far from the truth. Every time I hear someone say, “I’d love to hire a woman in tech, but I don’t want to lower the bar.” I’m going to be honest. I want to punch them in the nose because that is so insulting. There are so many people who have not been given the opportunity and I get it all the time.
People say, “I treat everyone fairly. We hire people for skills.” That’s absolute BS because when you have your friend, Mark, who you’ve been hanging out with for months or years, that person gets the benefit of information and mentoring from you and learning the ropes informally. When it is time to promote, he’s ready because you’ve been grooming this person, but everyone else, you don’t talk to them. You don’t invite them to lunch, hang out with them on the weekends, golf with them and provide them with the same level of access.
One of the things you talk about is you help employee resource groups. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how that works?
[bctt tweet=”Conscious bias is discrimination.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Employee resource groups, you have an employee business group, business resource group, they used to be called affinity groups. A lot of companies now are creating them if they don’t already have them. There has been some controversy with that, too. It’s like, “Why are we separating? Why do we need to have a women’s group, black group, LGBTQ group, and Asian group?” The reason is that we have to focus on what are the systemic problems within the company that are affecting that so that we can all work towards fixing them. It’s not a group that is only for black people to join, it is a group that is focused on what is preventing black people from being promoted within your company. It’s not a group for only the gay people to join. It’s a group that everyone gets to participate in to look at what might be some of the barriers and some of the obstacles that we have created that would be problematic in this workplace.
It wasn’t that long ago. I would say even in the ’80s, they were looking for people who had families to promote because they’re like, “We like to have a guy who’s got a wife and maybe a kid or two, so they’ve got all this responsibility, mortgage, and child support to pay that they’re not going to take any risk and leave the company or start their own thing.” That’s our world. If you were single regardless of your gender preference or race, that alone used to ixnay you if you weren’t married. The list was so long of what was expected. Now that we’ve identified it clearly, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone reading, except maybe the depth of it might be a little eye-opening hopefully, but how do you help companies solve this problem?
The way that we do it is by exactly what you said. There’s a laundry list. There’s no point looking at the laundry list of things that we need to fix. It’s not about the individual laundry list of demographics and issues. If you’re single, you get discriminated against for this reason. If you have a baby, you’re discriminated against for that reason. You’re tall, short, blonde, fat, ugly, white, or whatever. As humans, we are always going to find reasons to exclude people. It is in our DNA.
The job is to know that and to counteract it. We have to be aware. That is the first step in the book. It’s awareness. We’ve got to be aware. We have to open ourselves up, be educated, and realize that this is a problem. We all do it and be open to realizing that this is what we all do, so then when we make decisions, we can remind ourselves that, “I need to make this decision and not make one that is going to be based on my gut feel, fit, or anything that I can’t quantify. Instead, I’m not only about to make a decision. I need to make sure that I’m going to make this decision based on facts and actual data that I have at my fingertips.”
So many people pride themselves on making gut decisions on the hiring and you’re saying, that’s probably going to tap into some unconscious bias. The other thing you talk about is leaders lead teams who trust and I’d love to hear how you help leaders build trust.
One of the ways that leaders build trust is by being open and being authentic, even getting to know people. We show up to work every day and we believe that we have a relationship with somebody because they’re a coworker. A coworker is not a relationship status, it is a label. We think that it’s okay. I’ll use this example because this used to drive me nuts. When I was pregnant, people would walk up to me and they would touch my belly without my permission. We’ve now come to realize that’s probably a little skeevy. We probably shouldn’t be touching people regardless of the fact that they’re pregnant. I used to complain about it and people would say, but they want to participate in the joy of you bringing a child into the world. “You, sir, are a stranger. I don’t care.”
It’s not about you. It’s not about what you want.
It’s the same thing. We want to get into these tough conversations. We want to have difficult conversations about race, sex, politics, etc., but I don’t know you. We haven’t created a relationship. Before you can dive in, we have to create a relationship. I need to get to know a little bit about you. I don’t need to know your intimate, deepest, darkest secrets, but I do need to know who you are as a person. I do need to know that you give a crap about me as a person. Once I know that, then we can start to develop some trust, then we can start to have some of these difficult conversations. Instead, we want to pull together a bunch of strangers, throw them in a room, and say, “Let’s have this conversation.” It’s like, “Whoa, Nelly! I’m not ready.”
Unbias: We have to focus on the systemic problems within the company affecting that group so we can fix them.
Until trust is built, then it’s someone’s sense of entitlement that allows them to touch a stranger’s belly without their permission. There are actual statistics taking females alone, let alone any other diversity, that female CEOs tend to outproduce men in the roles and yet, excuse predominantly male. There’s actual data, if I’m correct, that backs up that companies that have more diverse people working there have more diverse ideas and therefore, it can even be a competitive advantage than a company that does not. Is that accurate?
The statistics they are out there. If you look at Deloitte, McKinsey, and Catalyst, there are tons of statistics around the benefits of having a diverse workforce. The piece that’s missing though, is we also have to remember that we have to be inclusive because when you have a diverse workforce without inclusion, you have tokenism. We’re got putting people of color into positions strictly for window dressing.
We had a client and their job was to go out and do the sales pitch to get the work. They would make sure that they brought a woman and/or a person of color on that pitching team, but then those two people didn’t get to participate in the actual work. They didn’t get the opportunity to work on the project. Their face got to be on the project, on the documents and everything that went out. They got to be part of the pitching team, but they didn’t get to actually have the benefit of working on that project. That is tokenism. That is using somebody’s likeness to get ahead and that is not something that we want to be doing. That’s diversity with no inclusion.
You also talk about leaders’ need to not build trust, but listen. Obviously, if someone has, “I don’t like strangers touching my belly when I’m pregnant or anytime,” I’ve experienced this as an openly gay man where people say insensitive jokes and you feel like, “Should I say something? Who do I say it to?” If I say something, they’re like, “For God’s sake. Just get a sense of humor. Don’t be so sensitive.” Do you see that happening a lot around all kinds of things?
There are two things about that. One is, there is the sense that, “No one’s got a sense of humor anymore. We can’t joke anymore. Everyone’s so sensitive.” My response to that is we’ve always had to watch our mouths. We have parents. There are people in our lives who we respect and when we respect those people, we take into account their sensitivities and we pay attention to that. If my mother does not want me to curse, but I happen to curse like a sailor when I’m with my friends, when I get home, I find a way to somehow stop the F-bombs from coming out of my mouth. If I go to church and I talk to my pastor, I’m going to find a way to talk to that person and be respectful. Why is it that if you know that somebody doesn’t want to hear this specific joke or doesn’t think that’s funny that you want to be able to say, “No, it’s my right to be able to be an a-hole,” which is fully what it boils down to? You don’t respect that person enough to be sensitive to how they would like to be treated.
The final thing I want to talk to you about and you talk about it in your book, UNBIAS, is leaders see color. I think, again, an unconscious comment that white people can say to people of color is, “I don’t see color.” They think it’s a good thing to say and it sounds like you’re saying it’s not.
It’s absolutely not because it’s a lie. When we talk about building trust, how can I trust anything that comes out of your mouth when you start with something that is false on its face? You see color. You see that I’m black. This is not something that you do not see. You are not blind. It’s the first thing you see about me. You may even notice that before you notice that I’m female. When you say that, it puts everything else that you say into question because you start with something that is an absolute lie. What you should say is what you were trying to say instead, which is that I treat people the same regardless of color, ethnicity, or gender and then my question to that would be, “Do you? Let’s look into that.” The reason you won’t say that is because I can counter with that question and you would have to answer it, and that will be tough for you to have to do.
[bctt tweet=”When we respect people, we take into account their sensitivities, and we pay attention to that. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Or even look at. It’s easier to gloss over it. I’ve never heard anyone frame it that way that it’s a lie and therefore, everything else is not based on truth. No relationship, work or personal without that foundation of truth is a house of cards. Any last thoughts or quotes you want to leave us with before we tell people how to reach you? Obviously, the book again, UNBIAS: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work.
I want to say thank you. Our goal is to reach as many people as possible. However, we can do that, whether it’s purchasing the book, for your companies, for your company leaders, sending it to a friend, watching the Unconscious Bias course on LinkedIn Online Learning and all of those different things. What I’m seeing is that people are impacted positively and are realizing that they need to make a change. That honestly is the beginning and that’s what we need. We’ve got to start somewhere.
Let’s start with increasing our awareness. Stacey, thank you so much. Congratulations on all your success and I’m going to be cheering you on every step of the way as I watch you continue to grow.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Stacey Gordon
- UNBIAS: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work
- Unconscious Bias – LinkedIn Learning
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Tags: color, diversity, inclusion, Rework work, unconscious bias, workplace culture