How to Bust Bias at Work: Transcript

ADAM GRANT:
Hi WorkLifers, a quick warning that in this episode we discuss the murder of George Floyd.

TYECE WILKINS:
It wasn't until Saturday evening that I allowed the tears to flow. Sitting underneath a cotton candy pink sky. I put on Mali Music's Gonna be all right.
And try to let the music soothe me.

ADAM GRANT:
Tyece Wilkins is a diversity and inclusion senior advisor at BAE Systems, the aerospace and defense company. Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Tyece painstakingly wrote and sent this email to the 600 members of BAE’s Black employee resource group, which she led at the time.

TYECE WILKINS:
All I felt was a blend of defeat and despair I have recently thought about the Black men in my life. I’ve thought about my father, my partner, Jason Then I've thought about how the world does not seem to value these men How they could no sooner end up with a hashtag in front of their names portraits splashed across front pages for no other reason than being born with a little more melanin than others… It dawns on me how often the stories of Black women who experienced this same senseless violence are completely forgotten.

I share this today for no other reason than to tell you that I see you. I hear you. I stand with you. I mourn with you. I unite in our collective heartbreak. I share this today, not because I have answers, but because I too, I'm tossing and turning with questions I believe that our words have power. Our stories have strength. And our silence absolutely will not serve us

I recently read "A wound that is open, cannot heal." this metaphoric wound of ours is still wide open and bleeding, bright red. I want healing to take place However, America must first learn how to stop this hemorrhaging. So right now I feel as though I can only speak up, I can only cry out. I can only extend myself to you hoping and believing that a change is going to come.

ADAM GRANT:
It’s rare to see an email this raw, this vulnerable, at work. It took courage to write, and even more to send. Tyece’s email was a watershed moment at her company. What happened next illuminates how we can start making real progress in the fight against bias at work.

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show I’m taking you inside the minds of some fascinating people to rethink how we work, lead, and live.

TODAY — Part 2 of our exploration of anti-racism: the science of debiasing individuals and organizations.
Thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode.

One day, a colleague came to watch me teach a class, and pointed out that the first 7 students I called on were white men. I was stunned. I hadn’t even noticed.
Everyone has some form of bias. Some biases are conscious and intentional. But for many of us, biases hide below the surface. If I was inadvertently favoring white men, I was limiting the participation and development of women and students of color. Employers try to solve this problem with education.

Virtually all of the Fortune 500 companies offer some form of anti-bias training. You’ve probably been to one where you spend a couple hours in a workshop with an outside facilitator and then go back to your desk. Despite its popularity, hundreds of experiments suggest that bias training has generally failed. It doesn’t always do good, and it sometimes does harm.

In one study, after firms mandated anti-bias training, Black women and Asian-Americans got fewer promotions over the next five years. The researchers concluded that training is, quote: “likely the most expensive, and the least effective, diversity program around.”

Why? One major barrier to effective training is defensiveness: people don’t want to admit that they have biases. I’ve been there. “It’s not my fault that the first seven hands up were white men!”

Another obstacle is futility: people see bias as so pervasive that it’s hopeless to change it. “I can’t end prejudice alone--so why bother trying?”

A third challenge is uncertainty: even when people are motivated to take action, they often don’t know where to start-- or how to change.

But BAE has defied that pattern. They’ve been doing bias training for years. And as Tyece explains, it’s actually led to meaningful and lasting change.

TYECE WILKINS:
We've seen a 15% increase in those leaders, hiring women and people of color. So the hiring data immediately shows that once they've gone through this experience and they are more aware, more culturally competent, they are thinking about how do I build out a more diverse team? How do I become a more inclusive leader? we also see an 11% increase in their inclusive leadership skills. So it's not them saying, Hey, I'm a more inclusive leader. it's their direct reports. The people who work with them every day saying this person is more inclusive.

ADAM GRANT:
So what is BAE doing differently? They’re not only making employees aware of their biases, they’re also helping them change their behaviors.

TYECE WILKINS:
They develop a personal action plan of how they're going to. Um, advance diversity and inclusion, how they're going to be a change agent Um, and there's really a whole process even after they finish the program to hold them accountable to that plan.

ADAM GRANT:
Research shows these programs are actually most effective when they focus on behavior -- not just raising awareness and changing attitudes, but emphasizing what you can do. And the gold standard for sustainable behavior change is treating bias as a bad habit to break.

Bias is a bigger problem than most habits. It can lead to discrimination and even violence. But like habits, biases can be mindless. And the same way that you might work to break a smaller habit like biting your nails, you can replace your biased habits with new, healthier ones.

In one experiment, when STEM departments at a university were randomly assigned to go through habit training, hiring of women increased from 32 to 47 percent over the next 2 years.

In everyday life, we think about habits as the pairing of an external cue and a routine. The cue of alcohol at a party could activate a dangerous routine of driving home intoxicated. But you’ve probably learned to replace it with a safe routine of designating a driver or calling a cab.

With bias, it’s a little different. The cues are often internal and harder to spot, and the routines are more automatic.

Remember when Serena Williams smashed her racquet at the U.S. Open in 2018? If you thought “angry Black woman,” that’s a bad habit of stereotyping. The routine is that you’ve explained an individual behavior in terms of a group stereotype.

A first step toward breaking that habit is to recognize stereotypes and practice different responses. You might ask yourself whether you’d evaluate the same behavior differently if it was Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal. Would it still be a meltdown and a penalty, or would it be passion?

Getting rid of a bias isn’t likely to happen overnight — or over the course of a two-hour training. Change requires you to continually monitor what triggers your biases, and continually choose a new response. It’s an ongoing process.

BAE’s training focuses on this kind of habit change. One of the people who went through it is Matt Waesche, an HR Director.

MATT WAESCHE:
I've been working with BAE systems for over 12 years now. Prior to that, I was, active-duty Navy. you know, did that for 22 years.

ADAM GRANT:
If I had come to you, when, when you were in the Navy, Matt, and I'd say, "Hey, we're going to take you through some anti-racist training.” What would you have said?

MATT WAESCHE:
Probably would’ve been defensive… “Why do I have to do that? I'm not a racist… I don't have racist ideas. I don't have biases.”

ADAM GRANT:
The training is typically a three-day immersive experience-- or at least it was before COVID. It includes homework, group exercises, Q&As, and time for personal reflection.

MATT WAESCHE:
You start Monday night and you're traveling home by Thursday night and then Friday, you better take the day off because you're not going to be able to function cause you're overwhelmed and it took a better part of months to process.

What was most profound for me was understanding my privilege living in America as a white person, what that means and you know I grew up poor. I grew up with hardships and it’s not really about what you had, it's what you don't have to give up, when I leave the house or I'm getting pulled over by a police officer. I don't have to give up my, my psychological Safety or security. And people use the sense. I have a new lens on life, right? No, this was like taking my eyeballs out and were giving me a new set. You know This was completely transformational.

ADAM GRANT:
Once you recognize a biased habit, the next step is to make a plan for creating and maintaining a new habit. That helps to overcome a sense of futility and uncertainty. It also prevents you from falling into old routines.

I had a bad habit of calling on students who looked like me. To break that habit, I developed a new habit of pausing and paying more attention to including diverse voices. I also started reaching out to quieter students and encouraging them to speak up. And I asked my TAs to hold me accountable and call me out if I kept giving the floor to the usual suspects.

Like with any other habit, combating bias involves focused practice and repetition.

Along with working to recognize his own biases, Matt has formed a new habit of noticing others’ biases as well.

MATT WAESCHE:
I've been in situations where I'm traveling with a Black coworker and that person is senior to me and the person that we're meeting with comes to me as if I'm the boss I don't know if I would have noticed that before.

ADAM GRANT:
Instead of saying nothing, Matt made a routine to step in to introduce his Black coworker as the senior person in the room.

MATT WAESCHE:
Don't sit on the sidelines. um check your biases, learn what it means to be an ally What I learned is I'm no longer going to expect a Black coworker to teach me something I'm going to use my white maleness to teach other white males things.

TYECE WILKINS:
Those things can be very simple if you're in a meeting with your team and you may have an individual who hasn't spoken up, but you asked “what do you think?” it seems really small, but it that ultimately does help to cultivate that culture of inclusion and belonging ...

ADAM GRANT:
Another important ingredient in effective bias training is not about what it teaches — but about who’s in the room. Although almost every major company has bias training, shockingly few send their top executives to it. They’re too busy… besides, they’re not biased. Definitely not…

At BAE, Tyece’s email about the murder of George Floyd got an immediate response from leaders.

MATT WAESCHE:
You get something like that that comes across your work email and you read it and you read it again and you realize how it's affecting you , Emotionally, but also just when you know the person that's expressing it, and then you start thinking about other people's experiences and, um, I've just never seen anything like that ever in the workplace.
Everything that happened after that letter is probably the strongest body of work I've seen in my company in my 12 years. Period. Now my company does great things work in terms of, you know, building things and inventing things. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about workforce impact in raising the bar. That really inspired people to get involved, not just sit on the sidelines.

TYECE WILKINS:
One of the first people who responded to me is someone on our senior leadership team. She was going through her own process of thinking about what can I do to be a better leader, to make this a better company for employees, Black employees, recognizing that, that is not the reality for them right now.

ADAM GRANT:
When senior leaders are biased, managers lose faith that they can drive real progress. Psychologists find that even if managers are supportive of change, they still end up discriminating in hiring and promotions if they know those above them are prejudiced.
So BAE sent their top executives to bias training.

TYECE WILKINS:
We realized it was time to put our most senior leadership team through it to help them ultimately become more aware. More compassionate, more empathetic, and certainly better leaders in the process of that experience.

ADAM GRANT:
Changing the habits of senior leaders is not something that happens instantaneously. When it comes to bias training, research shows that longer sessions tend to have more impact-- they give people the space to discuss and reflect. So BAE’s leadership team spent about 24 hours in bias training over three days, just like their employees did.

TYECE WILKINS:
It's really attacking all of the ism, right. They look at race, they look at gender, they look at sexual orientation, those are our three pillars of the conversation that they’re having uh throughout

ADAM GRANT:
This time, members of BAE’s Black employee resource group also joined the training to share their experiences.

TYECE WILKINS:
These were not examples that were. Just hypothetical. These were people in the company that they lead telling them, these horrific things have happened to me here. So for them to have heard firsthand from Black employees in the company really just deepened their understanding of, the privilege . And really take responsibility for changing that in the company that I lead.

ADAM GRANT:
The transformation doesn’t end with training--it begins there. Breaking the bias habit requires ongoing efforts to understand the experiences of colleagues from marginalized groups.

In over 500 experiments, interacting with someone from a different group reduced prejudice in 94 percent of the cases. Part of the power of intergroup interaction is that it shifts attention away from our own egos and toward concern for those who have been disadvantaged.

One of my favorite examples is a recent study of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers at summer camp. Those who were assigned to the same bunk or discussion group were up to 15 times more likely to become friends. Respectful interaction became a new habit, and it helped them understand each other better.

At BAE, that understanding began with a virtual town hall.

TYECE WILKINS:
About two weeks after George Floyd died. we had 900 people on that call

ADAM GRANT:
You had 900 people voluntarily join a zoom discussion?

TYECE WILKINS:
Yes, we had 918 people join the event. we wanted to create a space where people could just share stories. We had people sharing stories around just driving while Black and being pulled over by the police. um our ERG program manager shared his experience as a, as a Black gay man in America And then we also had, a white woman, married to a Black man with two little Brown boys. as you would imagine, it was heart wrenching and real and so important to create that space. you know once we really opened it up, the stories just kept coming.

ADAM GRANT:
Think about how you felt when Tyece read her letter. When we hear people’s personal stories, we’re less likely to see them in terms of group stereotypes-- and more likely to see them as unique individuals.

TYECE WILKINS:
That's really the value of those events is that they bring people together in a way that just makes them feel connected and human, really.

ADAM GRANT:
Instead of having hypothetical examples, BAE put a face to the victims of discrimination. The town halls are now a regular event-- people show up not just to share, but to learn. They don't recoil in defensiveness. They dismantle their biases through empathy.

TOWN HALL CLIP:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our town hall today. Courage, commitment, and care sharing our journey toward racial equity. Very excited to have many of you on the phone with us here today. I know that this is a very busy time of year.

TYECE WILKINS:
The way we’re designing the town halls now it's been sort of an evolution of getting more vulnerable, more brave every time we do them. So let's share stories. Let's be honest, let's be human with each other.

So there have been really great examples of people who want to learn, want to be better allies. On the most recent town hall… we did have an employee who spoke up and said,

TOWN HALL CLIP:
I'm of course an ally I feel self-conscious sometimes when I walk around in my resist racism, shirt that people will think I’m just virtue signaling, As opposed to truly being an ally. And I, I just feel self-conscious about that.

TYECE WILKINS:
And it was amazing. The outpouring of just support that he received immediately from Black employees, from people saying, “we need you, we need you to be an ally Please wear the shirt.”

ADAM GRANT:
At BAE, the intergroup interaction hasn’t ended at town hall. Instead of just running one-off events and workshops, they have a series of initiatives to make anti-bias work an ongoing, lived experience.

They have a Courageous Conversations program where alums of the bias training discuss race and racial equity with employees from underrepresented groups.

They also have a Mentoring Program where they pair, say, a white manager with an employee of color.

TYECE WILKINS:
Not only mentoring that individual, but also receiving mentorship from that individual. So it’s really about reciprocal intercultural mentorship…

ADAM GRANT:
Having a mentor makes a difference. What you might not know is that being a mentor also changes leaders. Research reveals that as white men work to support and sponsor women and minorities, they start to shed some of their stereotypes, and championing diversity and inclusion then becomes a habit.

Having ongoing touchpoints is important for keeping the issues top-of-mind and creating momentum--and TYECE WILKINS is determined to maintain the momentum.

TYECE WILKINS:
So it's really about creating these intentional ways for them to stay involved in that work so that behavior can change

TYECE WILKINS:
The light is as bright as it can be right after the program and then that light starts to dim and if you don't find these ways to, to really put that dimmer at its full most brightest spot, then it's much harder to keep people engaged and it's much harder to have them change their behavior.

ADAM GRANT:
BAE also plans to make leaders accountable by building diversity and inclusion objectives into their performance reviews.

TYECE WILKINS:
That's the kind of thing that people can't just walk away from or say “okay you asked me to do this training and now I'm done,” because it's going to be built into how, how you are evaluated as a leader That's then saying to people, we are really holding you accountable for driving D&I in this organization. we certainly have to sort of hold their feet to the fire so that this does not really let up for them

ADAM GRANT:
To fight bias, we need to do more than change individual habits-- we need to transform organizational habits too. More on that after the break.

Ok, this is going to be a different kind of ad. I play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast-- cause they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we’re going inside the workplace at LinkedIn.

AD BREAK

ADAM GRANT:
It’s not just individuals who have bad bias habits. Organizations have them too -- collective patterns of discrimination that continue without questioning. They’re often passed on as norms or traditions. But if we can change organizational systems-- from how we hire to who we promote-- then we can change organizational habits. And this is a gateway to building more diverse and inclusive workplaces.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
When I get the question from organizations that are starting their Diversity initiative and they want to put together a diversity council One of my rules of thumb is that you need to have someone who has positional authority and access to resources.

ADAM GRANT:
Quinetta Roberson is an expert on diversity and inclusion.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
I am the John, A. Hannah distinguished professor of management and psychology at Michigan state university.

ADAM GRANT:
I feel like I should say go blue.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
No. Oh no, because you can, and then I'll say go green.

ADAM GRANT:
Quinetta shared some of her research in our previous episode on antiracism, and she’s found that it’s critical to make diversity and inclusion part of how you structure your company. Just as you wouldn’t expect marketing to magically improve without a marketing department, you shouldn’t expect progress on diversity and inclusion without a dedicated team.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
Because if you don't have someone who has the ear of Leadership you know doesn't have that seat at the table in order to drive change. What happens is that it becomes just a form of sponsorship. Someone still has to get approval from someone else in order to do something. But you can't put all of this on one person. It's really, uh, having the collective responsibility for it.

ADAM GRANT:
Sure enough, research shows that one of the strongest predictors of moving towards a more inclusive organization is creating formal roles to manage diversity. When companies appoint a chief diversity officer and other diversity managers, the representation of nearly every marginalized group in management increases over the next 5 years.

Changing an organization’s structure changes its composition--which can lead to a change in culture.

This is a first step for fighting systemic bias: create a management structure for diversity and inclusion, just like you would for any other function. It can’t be one person’s side gig. It needs to be the core responsibility of a whole team.

But there’s a catch. Being drafted into those diversity and inclusion roles isn’t necessarily good for the broader careers of underrepresented employees.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
There are minority employees who are being tasked to do the work. which of course, if employees are trying to just achieve, in their individual contributor roles. And now they're being asked to do this additional work, which is also the thankless work.

ADAM GRANT:
After the murder of George Floyd, Quinetta was dismayed to see the burden of diversity work being placed disportionately on Black employees.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
What happens in a lot of organizations is that employees are recognized for their demographic membership rather than some kind of unique knowledge or skill that they bring to the table. if people look at me and they're like, Oh, she's an African-American woman. She's going to help us talk to our African-American customers and talk to our alumni Then of course, that person gets marginalized in that's what their value is seen as.

ADAM GRANT:
It's such a shame okay, it's an extra burden now that you have to carry, but you're saying it's also like the organization is, is kind of delegating responsibility and saying, well, this isn't our problem. Um, you're Black. You can go fix the diversity issues.

QUINETTA ROBERSON:
Yeah. And the other thing is, So if I am Black being asked to do racial equity work, And it, achieves some kind of positive outcome are people like, “well, of course, cause that's your Black,” if it doesn't achieve the desired outcome, then people are like, Isn't this what you do? Can't you do this? it would mitigate the positive effect, but exacerbate the negative effect.

ADAM GRANT:
Dumping non-promotable tasks on marginalized groups is a bad organizational habit. But there are ways to mitigate this. To change the habit, you can audit who gets the strategic, visible projects and who’s stuck with the mundane, thankless tasks.

This is a second step for fighting systemic bias: allocate work equitably.

Consider the job of being an airport security screener. A study at TSA revealed that tasks were segregated by gender: women were systematically assigned tasks that used fewer skills and were more emotionally and physically exhausting.

Why? It turns out women were stuck doing most of the pat-downs. Meanwhile, men were free to rotate into different roles and learn a variety of skills.

As you discover these kinds of discrepancies, you can build a system for giving meaningful leadership development opportunities to underrepresented employees.

But you might also need to rethink who you envision as a leader in the first place.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
I recently accepted the position as senior associate Dean. If you walk outside my office, there is an immediate hallway. That hallway is lined with six pictures of previous deans, all six white men. If I had aspirations of being a Dean, what type of motivation would that be for me? I am a Black woman and I strongly identify with both my race and my gender.

ADAM GRANT:
Meet Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, a management professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Ashleigh started her career in accounting, but she’s now one of the world’s foremost experts on the intersection of leadership and diversity. She studies how stereotypes and bias influence who becomes a leader-- and who succeeds as a leader.

If you look at the Fortune 500 CEOs as recently as 2018, the number of women was about the same as the number of men named John. Racial minorities aren’t represented well either: Today only 6% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Asian, Latinx or Black.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
You got here because white men continued to hire white men. White men continued to promote white men, white men continue to support white men in these corporate structures.

ADAM GRANT:
These are bad organizational habits, and they have real implications. Research suggests that diversity at the bottom may not enhance inclusion-- or performance-- unless you have diversity at the top. And why is racial diversity so rare at the top?

One of Ashleigh’s first major research papers was on who we expect to lead. Previous studies had documented a male prototype in leadership—meaning when people thought of a leader, they imagined a man.

Ashleigh and her colleagues took this a big step further.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
We found that when reading about a leader or reading about a non-leader that our participants perceived the leader to be white, more so than they perceive the non-leader to be white.

ADAM GRANT:
So you say “leader,” I immediately picture a white person, not just a man.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
Adam this occurred regardless of the industry chosen, or the comparative, if you will, racial minority.

ADAM GRANT:
We evaluate leaders against a white standard. Ashleigh and her colleagues tried to make that effect go away by telling people that most of the leaders in that particular company or industry were not white. But it didn’t work.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
So base rates. we told them 20% of the leaders are white. [00:26:00] 80% are Black. 80% are Latinx. 80% are Asian. They still perceived the leader to be white, more so than non leaders.

ADAM GRANT:
So another question on the white standard is whether this applies also to people who are, non-white doing the evaluation.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
So we had an ample amount of individuals that were Black, Latin, X, and Asian, and, all of them still also had, this, this bias towards this white standard of leadership. So it was not moderated by the race of the participant.

ADAM GRANT:
So many of the leaders that I've read about, that I've seen, that I've been exposed to are white, but I also think that some of our, our leadership [00:27:00] archetypes are Black. I think about MLK. Nelson Mandela. Barack Obama

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
So you mentioned a few, right, but you could probably mention thousands of white male leaders. The schematic representation of our mind of what a leader is, is white. And it's because of what we have been exposed to over and over and over again.

ADAM GRANT:
Independent efforts to replicate this research are exploring whether a white standard of leadership has changed over time. Some of Ashleigh’s new experiments suggest that people may not be aware of their expectations for leaders to be white—and may expect employees at lower levels to be white too.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
We have to ask what this means for those individuals that don't have the characteristics of that prototype when they attempt to occupy these roles or when they’re occupying. If you walk into a meeting and you see a Black woman and you were expecting to see a white man, what does that then do to the dynamics?

ADAM GRANT:
What type of standard do we hold her to? And does she face different consequences if she succeeds or fails?

For another experiment, Ashleigh and her colleagues asked people to rate leaders in identical roles… varying whether they were described as male or female, white or Black, and running companies that were thriving or struggling.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
So the most positively evaluated individual we found in our research were white men who were [00:34:00] successful. it has to do with the notion of valence, white we're good. Man, we're good. Success, we're good.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
But we found that the counter was also the case, and that is Black women who failed, were evaluated the most negatively. Black, not good. Woman. Not good. Failure, not good.

ADAM GRANT:
These kinds of prototypes can prevent people of color from getting into leadership roles So it sounds like if I'm a white man and I fit the prototype of a leader and I succeed then I get a bonus for that. And if I'm a Black woman and I've failed to match both of those prototypes, I'm in big trouble if I don't succeed,

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
That would be an accurate way of describing our findings. The implications are exceptionally far reaching and exceptionally consequential.

ADAM GRANT:
What structural and cultural changes do we need in organizations so that women and people of color can finally advance into leadership?

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
So change necessitates a commitment. resources need to be added to those commitment. It necessitates the devotion to stay the course in the face of criticism. But the hardest part is to stay the course, you know, when those tomatoes are being thrown at you.

ADAM GRANT:
Habits are defined by consistency. Staying the course, even when there’s backlash. Which is a particular responsibility for those of us with racial and gender privileges. Research shows that as a white man, it’s easier for me to advocate for diversity and inclusion.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
I am going to be perceived as an advocate because my skin, and because my gender, are subordinated in nature. I'm going to be perceived as having an agenda. You, however, as a white man, you have no skin in the game, so therefore you're perceived to be more unbiased in your advocacy, which means that those individuals that might be more defensive in nature may be more apt to listen to you than me because, um, you, you don't have any skin in the game.

When whites engage in diversity initiatives, uh, there is no penalty um that means that it is less risky for you to take, um, that, to take on some of these, uh, these challenges.
And one consistency that we've seen in report after report, after report, after report, individuals leave these organizations because they don't feel supported. They don't see a way through it.

So it is fundamentally about support. not much is going to - to change just because you bring people in, it’s that you actually need to support them. But it looks like doing something different than what you have done before. The networks that you have access to try to make those connections. If the people around you look like you, you need to change that. If the persons that you go to lunch with, look like you, you also need to change that support looks like, um, endorsing and sponsoring and mentoring those that are different from you.

ADAM GRANT:
Support, mentorship, and habit change all have to be part of a larger, ongoing initiative.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
It has to be a multi-year commitment to these individuals, to diversity, to belonging, to inclusiveness. And it's going to cause these individuals that are in the decision-making roles to push past this comfort level and to be consistent.

ADAM GRANT:
What does a multi-year commitment to doing that, look like?

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
It has to be institutionalized So first you start by um educating. then you start to collect data. , you start analyzing that data. you see where in your, in the structure of your organization, there might be systemic biases that can, creep in then you say how can we address these? You prioritize. what type of change is it that I am looking [00:53:00] for? Do I want to change behavior? representation. change community presence Once you have that plan you're not finished that plan needs to be a multi-stage plan. you go and and you get buy-in from your constituencies. from all the stakeholders then you need to say, these are my metrics of success once you have done that, you implement your plan. You see what works, you see what doesn't work, and then you adjust and then you implement that different plan the next year.

ADAM GRANT:
Ashleigh says this type of work is a marathon--not a sprint. For Tyece Wilkins, the first mile of that marathon has been intense.

TYECE WILKINS:
It has been a whirlwind and a rollercoaster ever since the email that went out on June 1st… but I will say without question, the most transformative year of my entire career I don't yet know what the future holds for me in terms of my career or where I'm headed or where I'm going, but I do know that this year and, and the work that I did in partnership with so many other amazing people, um, really just It, transformed my life it really reaffirmed why I do this work, why it’s important to me.

TYECE WILKINS:
I think the email that I sent became the tipping point this sort of rallying cry To the organization of something here has to change.

ADAM GRANT:
The motivation for change may start from the bottom or the middle, but it’s up to those at the top to provide the authority-- and the accountability. Fighting bias and promoting inclusion has to be central to the work of the organization. It can’t be a passing fad; it has to be a way of life -- for all of us.
For Tyece, what’s making the change feel real is the response from senior executives.

TYECE WILKINS:
They'll say, Hey, I just heard you speak on the town hall and I just wanted to reach out I'm here for you. And it's those really personal interactions that, to me, say something here is different, right? Because there is no obligation to reach out to an employee when you're a leader and say any of that. all of those small exchanges. They're, they're micro, but they represent something that's much more macro to me, which is the change that’s happening.

TYECE WILKINS: However, I'm cautiously optimistic that I do want to see this be sustained it has to outlast some of the people who are even starting the work.

ADAM GRANT:
Next time, on WorkLife:

CAT:
For years, I knew that workers needed paid time off, but To have a group behind you, It makes a huge difference

ADAM GRANT:
Employee activism is on the rise, but how can people use their voices effectively-- and how can leaders manage all those voices?

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by JoAnn DeLuna. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.

Special thanks to our sponsors: LinkedIn, Logitech, Morgan Stanley, SAP and Verizon.

For their research on bias training, gratitude to the following researchers and their colleagues: Kate Bezrukova, Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, Michelle Duguid, Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Edward Chang and our team, and Trish Devine on bias as a habit. Also, Andrea Vial on gatekeepers; Thomas Pettigrew, Linda Tropp, and Shannon White on intergroup contact, Orlando Richard on racial diversity congruence, David Hekman, Stefanie Johnson, Danielle Gardner, and Anne-Marie Ryan on promoting diversity, and Ashleigh Rosette and her collaborators Robert Livingston, Ella Washington, Geoff Leonardelli, and the late, great Kathy Phillips.

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
I convinced my study group in my accounting program that instead of writing a paper on the latest financial accounting standard, we should do our paper on the representation of African-Americans in CPA firms. Adam, the representation of African-Americans in CPA firms was less than 2%.
And do you know what the representation of African-Americans in CPA firms is almost 30 years later? Less than 2%

ADAM GRANT:
What, what century is this? Really?

ASHLEIGH SHELBY ROSETTE:
Um, I can only report the numbers.
I'm still a CPA by the way. if this academic thing doesn't work out, you know, I can always go back to being a CPA.