The Big Blind Spot: Unconscious Bias in Leadership

Leaders hate blind spots. But the truth is we all have unconscious biases. The problem is that, when you’re a senior leader, these biases have as much power as you do. Here’s how to recognize and check important biases in the workplace.

What is unconscious bias?

In general, bias is the prejudice in favor of or against a thing, person or group. When we talk about unconscious bias, it refers to the social biases we hold against people or groups that form outside of our own consciousness. These learned attitudes and stereotypes involuntarily impact how we act and think, which can have serious consequences in our relationships and work.

There’s more than on reason for why unconscious bias has become a hot topic recently. Aside from that havoc it can wreak over daily business decisions, unconscious bias is one of the biggest barriers to achieving a diverse and inclusive workforce. Over the past couple of years, diversity has become a non-negotiable, with employees and consumers alike demanding greater progress and transparency from companies. Companies who do not rise to those heightening expectations risk losing market share and their top talent.

In this article, we’ll go over the types of unconscious bias in the workplace and how you can identify them (so you can nip them in the butt!). Also check out our complimentary article for Overcoming Bias: The Path To Innovation.

Types of unconscious bias in the workplace

Bias based on gender, race, sexuality, and more

Unconscious biases based on age, gender, race, sexual preference, disability and even level of attractiveness are all present in the workplace.

Research published in Harvard Business Review found that white job applicants received 36% more callbacks than black applicants and 24% more callbacks than Latino applicants with identical resumes. Another study by Yale University found that a hiring team would say they valued education over experience when a male candidate had a stronger educational background - but then change their opinion to say experience was more important when the male candidate had more experience.

Unconscious biases can sneak into every encounter we have - from who we hire to how we treat someone. They can impact who gets promoted, how much they get paid, and who gets put into critical leadership positions. The key to reducing this type of bias is by ensuring you’re bringing in objective evidence into every decision so that leaders can focus more on people’s true talents rather than subjective opinions. Check out more strategies for this approach here.

Similar-To-Me Bias

This bias is based on our tendency to prefer people who look and think like us. We naturally gravitate towards things that are familiar or similar.

In the workplace, Similar-To-Me Bias can be responsible for unjust hiring or promotions. It can also breed intolerance towards certain people or ideas. For example, studies have shown that both men and women praise people of their own gender more often than those of a different gender. Hiring managers also tend to hire people of the same ethnicity and gender - sometimes under the guise of “cultural fit”.

Similar-To-Me bias can seem harmless at times, particularly when it helps create connections with people that you relate to. However over time it creates favoritism and unequal treatment for employees. It can cause leaders to unintentionally discriminate based on age, gender, ethnicity, and even personality traits - whichever traits are different than theirs. If leaders allow this bias to remain unchecked, they can easily find themselves surrounded by people that look and think the same. And there’s no faster way to kill your company’s ability to innovate and problem solve than with an “echo chamber” or cookie cutter team.

Recency bias

Recency bias is based on our tendency to place too much emphasis on the experiences that are the freshest in our memory.

Have you ever noticed that some people’s opinions seem to sway with whoever spoke to them last? Did you ever work with a leader who frequently changed business priorities or performance targets throughout the year? Or have you ever had an annual review wherein your manager only referenced things that happened in the past quarter?

This bias can affect many activities in the workplace - from performance reviews to which business ideas to pursue. In performance assessments, recency bias rewards people for momentary bursts of effort and penalizes people who have steady performance year round. It can even affect hiring, leading hiring manager to have more positive recollections of the people they interviewed last.

Proximity Bias

Proximity bias is when people who are physically closer to senior leaders receive heightened influence and more opportunities for advancement. This bias can also take place within teams themselves, with team members preferring teammates who they interact in-person with more often.

This bias is becoming much more prevalent as companies enter hybrid models of work, where some people spend most of their time in-office while others are partially or fully remote. In fact, in a recent survey of 10,000 white-color workers, 4 out of 10 executives ranked the potential inequities between remote and in-office workers as their #1 concern. Still, within that same survey, bosses were twice as likely to state they prefer working in-office at least 3 days a week and wanted their employees to be there too.

Many companies are trying to figure out ways to break down these silos.

"Some of it is, 'I see that person all the time so I'm going to call them into this meeting. And some of it is status indication. Like, the literal closer you are to the CEO, the more you are perceived to have power."

- Nicole Sanchez, founder and CEO at consulting firm Vaya, and former VP of social impact at GitHub

Some experts have said that the method closest to eliminating proximity bias is to be fully remote - but for many companies, this isn’t a viable option. That’s why leaders should remain conscious of where people are situated within the office, how remote people are treated on hybrid meetings, and who they spend the majority of their time with so that they can avoid perpetuating unequitable treatment.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms or supports our existing beliefs or values.

A famous example of this bias happened in the 1980s. The Coca-Cola Company was losing market share to Pepsi, right after Pepsi launched two huge marketing campaigns positioning itself as the young person’s drink. The executives were confident this market share loss was rooted in taste difference. They invested $4 Million to develop “New Coke” and conducted taste testing with 200,000 participants. The taste test showed that most people preferred New Coke to Pepsi. However, 10-12% of tasters expressed anger and dissatisfactionwith the new recipe. Furthermore, several participants who liked New Coke said they would still be unhappy if it replaced the original Coke altogether. These negative responses might have rang alarm bells for many brand managers - but the Coca-Cola executives paid more attention to the data that aligned with their original hypothesis. New Coke was launched shortly after.

The result? Sales dropped and Coca-Cola received 400,000 angry phone calls. Bad press erupted, people hoarded the original coke, and $30 million worth of New Coke was left unsold. The executives ignored the negative reviews in their studies as well as other influences, such as the impact of removing a product that had symbolic importance to people. Bottomline - confirmation bias in Coca-Cola’s leadership cost the company millions of dollars in development costs and millions more in market share loss.

Hiring managers also fall prey to confirmation bias. Imagine a hiring manager who had a good first impression of a candidate and wants to reassure themselves that this is the best candidate to hire. The manager might throw out softball questions so that the candidate will knock the answers out of the park. In contrast, if the hiring manager did not get the best first impression of a candidate, they may immediately start asking them harder or more negatively phrased questions to reaffirm their dislike of the candidate.

Why does this matter? Confirmation bias impairs our judgment and ability to have a standard way of interviewing. Research shows that confirmation bias amongst doctors and medical professionals made them significantly more likely to make a wrong diagnosis. When it comes to business strategy and building world-class teams, making the wrong hiring decisions can cost thousands if not millions of dollars.

How to overcome unconscious bias

In our next article we’ll be going through strategies you can leverage to overcome unconscious bias in the workplace.

However, the first step to every strategy is self-awareness. To help with this, we recommend that leaders take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) developed by Harvard. Their IAT portal provides optional tests for unconscious biases across gender, ethnicity, religion, age and more.

These tests measure attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. They can help unveil implicit beliefs that you didn’t know you had. For example, you may believe that women and men should be equally associated with scientific fields, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science.

Try one or two of the tests today (they’re not long!) and if you find value in them, consider sharing them with your teams.

Our take

Great leaders constantly look for ways to improve themselves and their contributions. A leader’s ability to apply critical thinking to decisions, foster diversity and objectively recognize high-performance talent is immeasurable in value. These are also the behaviors we hear candidates frequently reference when asked what they admire most in their best manager.

In simpler terms, great leaders recognize and check their blind spots. Sometimes that entails self reflection. In other times, it requires getting more perspectives in the room.

When it comes to hiring talent, unconscious bias is an enemy to success. All of the biases mentioned above impair logic and deter hiring managers from choosing the candidates who really have the skills, experience, and mindset to move a business forward.

At Ari Agency & Ari Executive, our teams are trained to be the objective voice in the room, helping companies discover and assess the true potential of every candidate. We’ve spent almost two decades find game-changing talent that elevates the performance and culture of teams. We specialize in the most in-demand talent across digital, marketing, design and innovation-focused functions including executive leaders. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you improve your talent acquisition strategies and find your next all-star.

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