It’s Behavior, Not Bias: Building Relationships Across Bounds Is Due For A Rethink

A fresh approach to building inclusive cultures

Several years ago, I delivered a women’s leadership workshop at the Construction SuperConference, a massive industry event in Las Vegas. Stunned by the number of male participants who showed up, I asked what motivated them. Most noted that, given the shifting composition of the workforce, their companies needed to get better at attracting and retaining women if they were to remain competitive. 

Then one executive made a blunt request. “Please don’t waste your time telling us why we need to get better at engaging women,” he pleaded. “We get it. We just don’t know how to do it. We don’t have a clue.”

His comment supported my growing belief that the hows are precisely what’s been missing from our efforts to build more inclusive cultures. Most of the organizations I work with rarely get past the whys and the whats. They focus on attitudes and beliefs rather than on identifying practices or actions that might help people connect effectively and respectfully across common divides of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or sexuality.

The tendency to focus on beliefs is exemplified by unconscious bias training, which aims to help participants confront the deeply rooted assumptions that limit their ability to form relationships broadly. Such trainings may, and often do, surface insights, but they rarely offer participants a clear and actionable path forward. As Mike Kaufmann, former CEO of Cardinal Health Care, observed of his company’s experience with unconscious bias, “It was all aha moment. Without the now what?”

This approach can also backfire. Executive coach Lisa McLeod recalls an experience she had as the sales leader for a consumer products company. She says, “Our team– five white men, one African American male and me– was selected to participate in several unconscious bias sessions, which we were told would be effective only if we were willing to ‘get real.’ Well, a few of the white guys did. The session leader applauded their honesty, but once my black colleague and I heard how our white male colleagues really felt about working with women and black people, we could not unhear it. This made it hard to work well together, and soon afterward both he and I left the company.”

The focus on unconscious attitudes also overlooks the fundamental reality that people don’t respond to us based on our thoughts, but rather on what we do and what we say. And since it’s easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting, fixating on how we think is a recipe for staying stuck. 

I’d like to propose a fresh approach. It starts with giving individuals some tools for skillfully addressing the triggers most likely to undermine their ability to build strong relationships across perceived bounds.

These triggers include but are not limited to:
 

• Visibility - the resentment we feel when others are acknowledged for their contributions while we believe ours are ignored
• Competence and Confidence - the emotions stirred when those who are less competent are seen as more leaderlike because of their dazzling (and sometimes unearned) confidence 
• Communication - the inability to appreciate or learn from people with diverse speaking styles
• Fairness - the pain provoked when rewards, promotions, or jobs that we had hoped for go to someone we believe is less deserving
• Networks - the annoyance we feel when we’re excluded from groups we would like to be a part of, or believe would be helpful to our careers
• Humor - the irritation we feel with attempts at humor that seem inappropriate, or when others fail to laugh at our own attempts

Triggers are tricky because they lie outside our control. They’re environmental, stirred up by people, places, and situations. They provoke emotional responses that we often deal with by telling ourselves a story about the person or situation responsible for our response. 

For example:

• The men in this company can’t listen to women
• The women around here lack a sense of humor
• People of color often seem angry
• White people are so uptight

The problem with these narratives is that they short-circuit our ability to respond in ways that could offer a positive path forward. Because they’re designed to assuage our own feelings of resentment or anger at being triggered, they keep us stuck.  

I find that rewriting these narratives in a way that gives others the benefit of our goodwill serves as an effective way of spurring positive action.

For example:

• Maybe he echoed what I said in that meeting "because he was trying to support me" instead of "because he’s trying to poach my idea". I can give him a call, thank him for his support, and then suggest a way we can collaborate on developing it and presenting it to our leadership team.
• Maybe my co-leader was chosen to head our larger team because he has qualifications I’m unaware of. I’m going to ask him why he thinks he was chosen rather than just assuming it’s because he’s willing to play political games with the higher-ups
• It’s painful being shut out of the old boy’s network, but instead of resenting it, I’m going to try to learn from how they support one another’s careers and try to adapt that to our LGBTQ resource group

The key to using this method is finding a narrative that enables us to take action, while also enlisting as an ally someone we might otherwise have believed we had reason to feel aggrieved with.

The most common objection to rewriting a narrative derives from the fear that giving someone who may not actually deserve the benefit of our good will might make us a pushover. But it’s important to remember that we’re the ones who are rewriting our scripts. And that we’re doing so in order to serve our own interests by moving beyond a story that’s keeping us stuck. It’s also important to remember that we don’t necessarily even have to believe that our new story is true in order to act on it. It's simply an interpretation we are trying out in order to give ourselves a positive path forward.

Of course, I am not recommending this approach for situations where active harassment, racism or patterns of abuse exist. These require systemic rather than individual remedies. But for everyday triggers, rewriting the script can serve as a useful way to help us build more effective relationships with those we may perceive as different from ourselves. 

Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach. Sally’s book, Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace, offers practical ways to build more inclusive relationships, teams, and workplaces. Her previous book, How Women Rise, co-authored with legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women as they move forward in their careers.