Change starts from a look in the mirror

Last week I had the honour of speaking at a senior regional leadership offsite about diversity and inclusion of thought. Out of a two day offsite, this topic carried the most weight as it had the honour of owning a full one hour slot unlike the other business topics who only got 30 or 45 minutes attention.

The hour began with awareness of how our brains work, and the unconscious biases we all have, for good and bad.

After this, they got into groups to discuss what diversity and inclusion of thought meant for them and their organisation moving forward. Some very powerful insights came from these discussions and the breadth and depth of self-awareness as well as the lack thereof fascinated me – I guess that is why they wanted an external speaker to support them in thinking through this topic at their offsite.

At the end, they were invited to choose one action from a menu of 7 possibilities to put in practice once they got back to their countries and their jobs.

The menu of possible actions was the following:

1. Begin a self-awareness and self-management practice such as mindfulness to be able to surface the bias from unconscious to conscious and to manage your biases in the moment; not be subject to them, but see them as objects that can be observed then identified and changed if they don't work for us and the people and organisation around us.
2. Get a very diverse thinking accountability partner who will keep you honest, even though it is uncomfortable to be challenged.

When I was a regional marketing director for Tupperware, I had a very diverse thinking team member who disagreed with a lot of what I said and I knew she was coming from a space of good intention when she challenged…but wow, was she a thorn on my side!! But as leaders we need to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

3.    Make it public that you welcome diverse ideas by publically recognise people who do – it doesn’t mean you will take that idea as is, but use the challenges and new ideas to explore better possibilities than what originally was proposed.

I have felt in my own skin what a high powered person can experience when their and other people’s ideas are constantly ignored; I went from being defined as a “wild horse in Latin America who made a lot of significant changes without any instructions” to uttering these words: “just tell me what you want me to do and I will do it”: demotivation at its lowest. If you often hear these words from people who started as highly motivated in your team, take a good look in the mirror.

4.   Speak to your team about this topic and brainstorm together what can you, as a team, do to be inclusive towards people who bring a diverse way of thinking.

5.    Apply analytics, data and real criteria to spot patterns and beware of your bias when you are looking at these patterns in your organisation; when you have actual data about individuals, you're less likely to make assumptions.

6.   Take time to network and spend time with people who think differently than you do (it also fosters innovation and expands your thought process and ability to think out of the box).

7.    Carefully consider issues like hires and promotions, rather than making a decision because it "feels right”, make note of why you make these decisions, and seek guidance from others as necessary.

What was fascinating from this last exercise is that almost nobody chose number 1 or 2 for the immediate action they could take, a lot of them chose action number 4.

As Michael Jackson wrote in one of my favourite songs: If you want to make a change, you’ve got to start with the man (or woman) in the mirror” and that was what choices 1 and 2 were about, but interestingly very few leaders in that room chose those options. They chose an option that involved other people and partially delegated the responsibility of really looking at themselves in the mirror to the team as a whole - or could it be they were already so self aware they could move to the next step or are we so action oriented that taking the time to reflect seems like a waste of it?

What option would you choose, and what are you scared of seeing looking back at you in the mirror if you paused to look?