ICYMI: Moving past diversity: RBC’s journey to rid its upper ranks of ‘unconscious bias’

Good interview with outgoing RBC CEO Gord Nixon and taking diversity and inclusion to the next level and making people aware of unconscious bias. Well worth reading:

Diversity is about mix. Inclusion is really putting that mix to work for you. This unconscious-bias work, when we started last year, we had (esteemed scholar and co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People) Dr. Mahzarin Binaji come and speak with our senior leadership team and other employees. We really felt it was the next frontier of this work — trying to get to the more subtle issues and the more politically incorrect or more difficult to speak about (because bias is not an easy thing to talk about). We are working to really get people to become self-aware. And I think along with that it’s also realizing that having a bias doesn’t make you a bad person. We all have them. What’s important is recognizing them and then looking for ways to actually mitigate those biases. We’re doing this in a number of different ways. One is just for individuals — influential individuals (people who make important decision in the company). We really had a lot of our senior people go through this awareness building. I hear leaders say, “I was putting together a team to be working with this important client and as I was looking at people I was going to select, I realized that I was actually looking for somebody like me.” That’s often what your natural bias is.

I think maybe to provide a very practical example. Sometimes you find people assuming that a woman with young children won’t accept a promotion that involves travel because you heard about some woman who did it. The answer there is, don’t assume that. Ask the woman if she is interested in being a candidate for a role that involves travel. Our assumptions and our biases get us there automatically. Or, you think, “This is a new immigrant and why is it relevant to understand how they do banking in a different country?”. Actually, it’s very relevant because we have new immigrants coming to this country and understanding how they do banking allows us to serve them better. So, those are the practical aspects, practical issues that we try to address when they actually happen by having good processes.

You need somebody else to be there and stop you and say, “Hey, I think we might have a bias here” and by making this a more common language in our organization — by talking about it and by having the sessions — it gives you permission to have those conversations and it just makes it easier to go there where sometimes you’re not sure or you don’t want to offend people. This just makes it part of how we do business.

Moving past diversity: RBC’s journey to rid its upper ranks of ‘unconscious bias’ | Financial Post.

The report, by RBC and EY, also well worth reading:

Outsmarting our brains: Overcoming hidden biases to harness diversity’s true potential