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The Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias by Pamela Fuller

What's this about?

The Leader’s guide to unconscious bias: How to reframe bias, cultivate connection, and create high-performing teams takes us on an explorative journey into better understanding the role unconscious bias plays in the workplace. A great place to start for leaders who are serious and curious about diving into unconscious bias and creating diverse and inclusive environments where team members can thrive, challenge themselves and grow together without being limited by the implicit biases tied to their identities that exist in the workplace.

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About The Author

Pamela Fuller is FranklinCovey’s thought leader on unconscious bias, lead architect of its organizational solution, and one of the firm’s top global sales leaders. Pamela served as an architect of FranklinCovey’s Unconscious Bias work session and has delivered that session as well as DEI strategy discussions to thousands of leaders across the globe. She is also responsible for helping clients customize and implement learning and organizational-development solutions to meet their strategic objectives across FranklinCovey’s full catalog of learning solutions.

(Bio from FranklinCovey)

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Themes

Implicit/Unconscious/Cognitive Bias, Business, Human Resources, DEI

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What We Liked

The book is practical and inspirational. Although there are no mapped out universal solutions to combat bias in the workplace, this book offers different perspectives and possible solutions so that the leaders and readers can identify which would work best for their teams and organizations. The book also provides a worksheet to put the theory into practice as we read through the chapters, which solidifies our learning but also helps us recognize and connect the themes described in the book to our lived experiences.

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What we remember: There are so many different types of bias that go beyond what we can see. Being human means that we are operating on one or more types of biases at any given time, whether it be in our decisions, our relationships or interactions with others. Being able to recognize them, question and challenge them, dissolve them and learn from them in order to improve ourselves and build more meaningful and honest connections with people requires grace, patience and open dialog.

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What this book is : a guide to developing abilities to better understand and be understood as you connect with others.

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What this book isn't :  a list of what to think, what you can or cannot say. This book does not police anyone’s language or push political correctness.

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Why Read This Book

If you were ever unsure whether empathy, curiosity, courage and authenticity were soft or hard skills, this book will show you how these HARD skills truly change the way people connect with each other. Biases are everywhere. Sometimes easy to spot and sometimes quite insidious. Sometimes completely innocuous, like preferring to work with or without music, and sometimes incredibly harmful, like preferring to work with a certain socioeconomic class of people. Learning to understand the straightforward and covert ways biases creep into our decision making as leaders is a very important step towards committing to dismantle injustice in our workplaces.

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Quick Quote

“The word Fit is something of a four letter word when it comes to bias. Often, leaders will say: “I can teach someone how to do the job, but I can’t teach them to work within our culture.” We don’t mean to discredit the idea completely, but the big broad bucket of fit, if we aren’t careful, is often more about likability than about competence.” - Part 2, Chapter 6: Deploy curiosity and empathy

“We must not put the burden of mitigating bias on its recipients.” - Part 3, Chapter 13: Courage to Be an Advocate

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Get the Gist

Need to have a taste before buying the book? Click here for a summary of 6 key ideas found in this book.

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How does it fare?

“I had a few aha moments about areas I can work on. One of those is working with neurodivergent people. I plan to look for more resources to help me find ways for teams and individuals to do their best work with fewer frustrations.”

- Sue Ann (Suna) Kendall, The Hermit’s Rest