00:03:14.040I want to inject it directly into my veins.
00:03:16.020You know, and my colleague at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, Arthur Brooks, who is writes on happiness and he's a happiness expert.
00:03:22.980And he has a great book out on it, too.
00:03:24.280He said something really insightful on LinkedIn the other day, which is bad things are real in the world.
00:03:29.280There's a lot of sadness, a lot of tragedy, a lot of anguish.
00:03:53.480I think, frankly, wherever we can find little rays of joy and whenever we can amplify them, the better.
00:03:58.560But anyway, let me tell you what I think the ray of joy is in this moment.
00:04:01.520In the last several years in particular, there's been unprecedented amount of money going towards diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what we call corporate DEI.
00:04:10.880unprecedented number of conversations, amount of attention, amount of talk, and it hasn't yielded
00:04:17.820real results. Why? Because a lot of the things that we'd spent that money and time doing were
00:04:24.760practices that evidence suggests do not work. Things like unconscious bias training and diversity
00:04:31.940training, which have actually been studied for decades and have not really been shown to result
00:04:37.060in behavior change. Those of us who do research in the space have been trying to tell companies
00:04:41.620for years to stop the training and channel their energies and resources toward other things,
00:04:48.040but that message hasn't broken through. So I think we needed a reset. I think we needed a shake up
00:04:54.800to say, hey, let's critically evaluate what we've been doing. It hasn't moved the needle as much as
00:05:00.820we need it to. There's all these other practices out there that have actually been shown to be
00:05:05.660effective, let's pivot over to those. And I think we're in a great moment of opportunity to make
00:05:11.560that pivot and start making progress even faster than we ever have before. So back up for me just
00:05:17.940a little bit. What does the science say about why those things don't work? It's a great question.
00:05:26.820Humans are inherently biased. When I say biased, what I mean is that our unconscious,
00:05:33.320the unconscious part of our brain, which by definition, we're not aware of because it's
00:05:38.240unconscious, right? It has to see enormous amounts of information every nanosecond. And in order to
00:05:43.380process that information and generate decisions, our unconscious brain is frequently resorting to
00:05:49.720patterns or shortcuts or heuristics. And that's what we call unconscious bias. Research shows that
00:05:56.900that's really deeply baked into human brains because it's a fundamental facet of how human
00:06:01.200brains operate. So awareness raising, training, workshops, they're just not going to be able to
00:06:08.400reprogram humans. At least in light of today's knowledge, we haven't been able to yet identify
00:06:14.140a training or intervention that would be able to de-bias humans. However, what we can de-bias,
00:06:23.420and there's a lot of evidence to show how to do this, often very simply and effectively,
00:06:26.880is we can de-bias the processes and systems that we humans have surrounded ourselves with.
00:06:33.720Things like the practices we use to hire others, the processes whereby we evaluate performance,
00:06:40.340the pictures that we choose to put up on the walls of our meeting rooms or on our company's website
00:06:45.780and what they communicate about our company culture.
00:06:48.920Those are actually much simpler behaviors and processes to change,
00:06:54.380and they turn out to have a huge influence on what we humans do.
00:06:59.320So if we want to actually see results,
00:07:01.500we have to start shifting from trying to fix individuals through the systems.
00:08:00.380I feel like you would be treated kinder if you just took a sabbatical and traveled around the world than if you took a break to have a baby.
00:08:08.880You know, that's an interesting study that we should learn.
00:08:12.120I'm not sure we know that, but we should study that.
00:08:20.560But, you know, what we do know is, as a whole, employers tend to penalize employees or job candidates that have career gaps for any reason.
00:08:29.740That's also kind of interesting because there's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that employees with career gaps are in any way less competent, capable or committed.
00:08:39.300And yet it's just empirically true that they are at a disadvantage when applying to jobs.
00:08:44.200So in the study in the UK, the researchers said, okay, let's try to just redesign the resume format ever so slightly.
00:08:51.480You'll list your experience, and now instead of the specific dates associated, you'll just list the amount of time.
00:09:30.420And at the end of the day, this was a tiny, essentially costless tweak to the design format of a resume.
00:09:36.700Wow. I love that. So easy. So simple. So easy. But how do we spread the word around about that? I mean, I think that's always my thing. I love some of these ideas of systemic change, but how do we actually get people to implement them?
00:09:54.360Mm-mm. That's the other benefit, I would say, of system change, is when you change a policy or a process, you just change the one thing. You don't have to change the hundreds or thousands of individual employees and their hundreds or thousands of individual minds that are involved with executing that policy.
00:10:17.040um so i'll give you an example and you know this can this can be top down or bottom up
00:10:23.020in my first job out of college in a prior life i actually was a management consultant for three
00:10:27.520years and just six months into my time in the company i got roped into intern recruiting so i
00:10:34.140was the most junior person on the team zero power but they said siri you can interview our intern
00:10:38.560candidates if i had known then what i know now about the best ways to conduct interviews in the
00:10:45.320most objective and fair way, let me tell you, I would have done them totally differently.
00:10:49.380So I think you're right. There is an element of we need to spread the word about what are
00:10:54.860the effective and evidence-based practices so that people know what's good to do and what's
00:11:00.080not good to do. And that was one of my main motivations with my co-author Iris Burnett
00:11:03.880to write our recent book, because we wanted to provide people with that roadmap, that manual of
00:11:09.020like, you're wondering what to do? Here it is. It's right in here in this one book.
00:11:13.700But I also want to talk about how to change systems because we often feel like, oh, they
00:11:20.260You have to be the CEO or the head of HR in order to make any kind of difference.
00:11:24.960And the reality is, yes, that's one way, top down.
00:11:28.300But the other way systems can change is from the bottom up.
00:11:31.980So if I had known then what I had known now, I would have pre-selected the questions that
00:11:38.120I was going to ask all my intern candidates.
00:11:40.320And I would have asked all of the candidates the same set of questions in the same order.
00:11:45.500And when I was grading those candidates, I would have compared the answers horizontally, meaning I would have looked at the first question and said, OK, I interviewed these four people.
00:11:53.860How would I rate their answer to that question one?
00:11:55.880Then I would have moved on to question two and so forth.
00:11:58.500And then what I could have also done is shared this with my colleagues and said, hey, I read some of this interesting research that suggests that we actually want to find the best people.
00:12:07.480and make sure that we don't, you know, bias doesn't infiltrate the process, here's how we
00:12:12.840should do it. So I'm going to conduct my interviews the following way, and maybe you might want to
00:12:17.660give it a try too. And that's the way systems can change from the bottom up. Even if you're the most
00:12:23.280junior person in the organization with zero formal power, you can be a role model. You can both spread
00:12:29.420awareness, but more importantly, you can model the behaviors that you think other people should
00:12:34.500be following. And there's beautiful examples all around the world of organizations that have
00:12:39.000changed dramatically this way, with just one person starting to do their own work differently.
00:12:47.160That's what I want to get into after a quick break. One person. What can one person do
00:12:53.380to make an actual change if they're not, say, the CEO or a board member of a company?
00:13:04.500and we're back a lot of the people that are listening right now feel like they don't have
00:13:21.060power um maybe in their organization in their community but they want to do something what can
00:13:28.620one person do if they're not the person in charge to try to put, to try to make a workplace more
00:13:35.040fair? It's the best question, Joe. I love this question. Let me give you a couple of ideas.
00:13:41.040The first is called norm entrepreneurship. Norms are the shared, but often unspoken
00:13:48.640understandings of what kind of behavior is acceptable and expected in a given context.
00:13:54.340So when you start a new job, right, you go through onboarding, HR gives you a manual about all the formal policies and vacation time and time reporting and so forth.
00:14:03.540But what that manual doesn't tell you is things like, do meetings start on time here?
00:14:09.380Is it okay to multitask in in-person or virtual meetings?
00:14:13.740If you disagree with something that a more senior person says, whether that's in a meeting or over email, is it okay to challenge them?
00:14:21.080Is it okay to challenge them in front of other people?
00:14:23.440Or should you bring up your concerns one-on-one afterwards, right?
00:14:27.920Are interruptions tolerated in meetings?
00:14:31.700Does the most senior person always have to sit at the head of the table?
00:14:36.040These kinds of things, the meat of how does work actually get done around here, that tends to never be written down.
00:14:43.660And yet, if you think back to the last time you started a new job in an unfamiliar organization, probably by the end of the first week, you'd picked up all this stuff because you were observing what other people were doing.
00:14:57.420And you were taking cues about, well, I got to be on time and this is the big dog, you know, got to suck up to that one or whatever it is.
00:15:04.880So we humans are incredibly attuned to norms.
00:15:12.400So this is where norm entrepreneurship, where the idea that each of us can be a norm entrepreneur who seeks to change norms and make the norms better, that's what each of us can do.
00:15:26.540So let's go back to this example, for example, of interruptions in meetings.
00:15:31.240Next time somebody interrupts another person in a meeting, you can interrupt the interrupter and say,
00:15:37.720excuse me, Jack, I look forward to hearing to what you have to say, but could we please have
00:15:41.880Joe finish her point first? And maybe you do that once or twice. And then maybe another colleague
00:15:48.980emboldened by you also does it once or twice. And now all of a sudden, the norm is shifting
00:15:55.680to where interruptions are no longer tolerated. And while the original interrupters probably still
00:16:02.740love to interrupt others and they think they should be speaking all the time, now they know
00:16:07.300that they might get called out if they do it.
00:16:10.400And one thing we humans really don't like is getting called out by other people for
00:16:37.300I love that. I love that. And I think that norm shifting can often be scary. And, you know, sometimes, especially as women, we need permission to be able to do that. We need to be told, no, this is something that's okay. This is something that you should be doing. Maybe I'm totally wrong in thinking that. Have you noticed that in any of your studies?
00:16:58.200There is quite a bit of research showing that, for example, in performance evaluations, women tend to rate themselves lower than equally competent men, or that when it comes to advancement opportunities like promotions, where you need to kind of actively raise your hand and say, please, I'd like to apply for this promotion, or please consider me, that women empirically are sometimes less likely to put themselves forward.
00:17:27.280Some of this comes from women accurately anticipating the social backlash that they are likely to
00:17:34.040encounter in these types of situations, because, you know, per societal stereotypes, women are not0.89
00:17:40.280always expected to be as self-promoting and agentic and kind of pounding the table on their
00:17:46.580own behalf, whereas that kind of behavior is tolerated and even expected from men. I think
00:17:53.240these types of scenarios bring up that interesting questions of, okay, if that's the issue, if that's
00:17:59.000the challenge that we're dealing with, what is the most effective solution? So one solution that's
00:18:05.420certainly very popular is to fix the women and say, hey, you should be self-nominating more.1.00
00:18:11.200Go for it. Lean in. Be brave. Take the opportunities. So if this is the challenge that we have on our1.00
00:18:19.140hands, then the question becomes, what's the best solution, right? How do we actually fix this
00:18:25.040problem? Well, one very popular approach is to try to fix the limit and say, oh, you're less likely
00:18:32.120to apply for a promotion, you self-rate more conservatively, so just be bolder, just be more
00:18:37.240assertive, just go for it and lean in. That also kind of has an implicitly baked-in assumption,
00:18:46.040which is that whatever men are doing is the optimal so just because men self-promote more
00:18:52.300that's somehow what we all should be doing and by the way i don't necessarily think that's true
00:18:56.460no one has scientifically established what's the perfect level of let's say willingness to
00:19:01.780self-promote so for that reason i personally as a researcher i'm much more in favor of the approach
00:19:09.560where we say, let's fix the systems that are biased against women and creating an unlevel0.55
00:19:16.060playing field in the first place. So when it comes to performance evaluations, are these self-ratings0.99
00:19:21.580even necessary? Do we need to have employees rating themselves at all? Or if we do, can we
00:19:27.100at least make sure that those ratings are not shared with managers before they make up their
00:19:31.580own minds? Because now if they've got, you know, two direct reports, a man who gave himself a 10
00:19:36.120out of 10 and a woman who gave herself a six out of 10, all of the things aside, the woman is going
00:19:42.640to be disadvantaged because the manager looks at that rating and says, hey, wait a second, what's
00:19:46.060going on here? Why is she only giving herself a six out of 10? So that's a systemic solution to0.97
00:19:52.340that performance evaluation problem. When it comes to promotions, there's many companies that have
00:19:57.080tried another very promising systemic solution, which is moving from an opt-in promotion, where
00:20:02.800you again have to raise your hand and actively apply to an opt-out promotion system where the
00:20:08.840organization automatically considers people for promotion after a certain amount of time
00:20:15.700in role. So you look at each role and say, okay, oh, analysts, after two years as an analyst,
00:20:20.820we're automatically going to consider you for promotion to associate. And that levels the
00:20:26.260playing field for everyone and makes the process more fair.
00:35:50.340And yeah, I think that we can all do our parts in this.
00:35:54.580It doesn't have to be in the workplace because things that are happening outside of the workplace will inevitably then trickle over into the workplace.
00:36:08.340This is how we change stereotypes over time is we need to see more women as leaders, as scientists, as politicians.
00:36:16.120We need to see more men being the, quote-unquote, primary parent or being a teacher in kindergarten or being a nurse, right?
00:36:25.720This is how we break down those ancient, outdated expectations about what men are, quote-unquote, supposed to do or what women are, quote-unquote, supposed to be like.