3 Ways to Identify & Overcome Unconscious Bias in Your Company

Before we can discuss how to overcome unconscious bias in your company, we need to understand what it is. Unconscious bias is created when we make assumptions about people inside of our business without asking “why” you are feeling this way. 

Let’s say for example you’re doing an interview with a potential new employee and during this interview, in your mind you’re thinking “oh we don’t really click, they’re not going to be a good fit within our company culture.”

We must ask “why is that?” and start peeling back the layers of the opinion. Where this assumption is coming from? Is it the way they’re dressing? Perhaps it’s different than how those you are used to inside of your company dress. Is it what they like to do in their free time? What is it that’s not in line with your company culture?

Another example of this is if you are the CEO of a business and you graduated from Cornell. When deciding your executive suites, you choose to hire everybody within graduates from Cornell. This shows a bias that people from this particular university are more intelligent, qualified, they all click together because they may have common interest, they understood the same “lingo,” from that university, ect. Often, traits that resemble our younger selves, even as if you were in high school when we experienced “clicks,” can appear in the work environments in the form of unconscious bias you might not even be aware of it