Recognizing How Bias Compounds at Leadership levels
Kids and parents are all sick so this week’s post is taken from my book, The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-suite as a Minority.
Affinity, Confirmation, and Negativity Biases
The three types of bias that stand out in terms of the highest impact on minorities trying to advance their career are affinity bias, confirmation bias, and negativity bias. These three combined create a self-fulfilling loop that promotes more of the in-group (e.g., white males with roughly 80 percent representation) and further excludes the out-group (e.g., non-white males or females).
Affinity bias is the very human tendency to trust and favor people whom you view as more similar, often based on common experiences, backgrounds, or interests. Affinity bias leads executives to give their “mini-me” more opportunities, less critical feedback, or more benefit of the doubt when it comes to mistakes.
It was in my first job out of college that I saw the affinity bias based on gender and race at play in the workplace at play in the workplace. I landed a business analyst role at McKinsey & Company, where I was the only person not from an Ivy League school to be accepted that year. Shortly after starting, I noticed that although half of my interviewers had been women, most of the partners at the firm were white men. Often, a white male partner would ask a white male associate to take on a part of the presentation and introduce them to the clients. They would go off and plan for future meetings, leaving the rest of the team to do follow-up work. Over time, I noticed that non-minority managers were more frequently given opportunities to work closely with senior clients. This is what affinity bias looks like.
The second is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. This means that when we receive new information that does not fit our current beliefs, rather than altering our beliefs to
incorporate the new information, we do the opposite. We alternate our interpretation of the information to fit our beliefs. This is why two very smart people looking at the same set of data or observing the same set of events can come to two very different conclusions. From a career perspective, this shows up in many different places. When hiring, a CEO may interpret interview results in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs (subject to affinity bias) about a candidate. During performance reviews, managers may subconsciously inflate the performance rating of those who are more like them or be more willing to overlook mistakes. In decision-making, leaders may prefer to hear and pay more attention to information or perspectives that match their own. It’s easy to see how this leads to a disadvantage for minorities, who are more likely to have a different perspective and a different approach than their (usually) white male leaders.
Third is negativity bias. This is where executives over-index on negative actions of people who are unlike them and more readily perceive a mistake as a repeat pattern. For example, I would receive feedback for being “intimidating” or “aggressive” if I spoke harshly in just one meeting, while my male peers were considered “persistent” and “confident” in similar scenarios. If I missed a launch date once, it was considered a pattern of missing
timelines; whereas, for my white male peer, it was viewed as an exception for someone who generally delivered on time. This tendency to over-index on negative action was the reason one small failure of the team would damage my performance review but not that of my white male peer.
Together, these three biases hold minorities and women back from competitive leadership roles. And the mechanism is often not overtly biased actions, but opportunities not given.
Bias Shows Up in Actions Not Taken
Sometimes bias is explicit and easy to recognize, but it also often presents itself in actions not taken or skills not taught. It may not be an action someone takes against you or something someone tells you directly. Rather, it shows up as opportunities given to someone else, an implicit discount on your work impact, or a lack of progress over time. Rarely will someone tell you that they gave an assignment to another person because he is a white male.
This makes the bias more difficult to identify for both the person with the bias and the recipient. Here is a small example: There’s a large group meeting, and the organizer, a white male, is trying to limit the number of attendees. He leaves a minority manager off the invite to “save her time.” At the same time, he invites another white male manager who is his friend and is a go-getter, because he knows his friend would appreciate being in the room. The minority manager will likely not notice that she was left out of the meeting. If she does notice, the organizer could easily explain it away by saying that they had to keep the invite list to the most relevant people. This decision of whom to invite took probably 10 seconds and didn’t even truly register in the organizer’s mind as a bias. However, these types of reflexive biases add up over a person’s career to meaningful differences in opportunity and rate of promotion.
Small Biases Compound
Schelling’s model of segregation, developed in 1971, analyzes the creation of racially segregated neighborhoods. It shows that trivial preferences for same-group people in a neighborhood lead in aggregate to segregation over time. For instance, if white people in a neighborhood prefer diversity with Black people at a 80% white, 20% black ratio, it will lead the neighborhood to be 100% white over time.
Similarly, small, often implicit biases can lead to an executive team that lacks any diversity. In most cases, no one is intentionally trying to hold minorities back. Most people hiring executives are simply looking for the best person for the role and the business.
However, the further you climb up the career ladder, the more competitive it becomes. At the director level and above, most of your peers are well-spoken, intelligent, and ambitious. This high level of competition means that tiny biases that were previously easy to ignore now have an outsized impact on who can break through and get promoted.
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To continue reading, check out my book on Amazon or borrow it at your nearest library.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
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It's quite sad that these biases are so prevalent, although they help explain why C-suite leadership remains predominantly male and white. Thank you for highlighting the impact!