Skip to main content

Moral Leadership and Unconscious Bias

Have you ever seen something wrong... but you stayed silent about it?

Katie Shonk (2020) shares a personal story in a blog post about a good intentioned, but rather crass effort that they made to shut down a homophobic comment made at their wedding reception. Even though Shonk does not identify as gay, she took offense at this comment and made the decision to call out the comment as unacceptable. She wanted to be a good ally. When we hear people say things that are offensive or rude, it can be difficult to speak up, especially if we aren’t the ones that comment was about. When we do, it can be easy to come across as self-righteous and create more tension. So, what are we meant to do when we see biased or antisocial behavior? 


As a university employee I am required to complete standard HR training on a yearly basis. One of these training sessions is related to harassment prevention. Last year our training was revamped to include bystander intervention and a section on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. A strategy to help change attitudes around inappropriate conduct at work involves getting otherwise uninvolved parties, bystanders, to speak up when they see something wrong (Lee et al., 2019). I’ve seen my department enact a policy over the last year in an effort to address bias in student instructor selection. The University removed instructor names from the enrollment process so that students would not be able to look up often biased reviews on instructor rating websites and prevent students from avoiding instructors with foreign sounding names. The effort did not result in the desired outcomes, as there were workarounds that allowed students to still discover who their instructor was and switch sections based on their research. My biggest takeaway from these kinds of bystander intervention training is that doing or saying something (so long as it puts no one in harm's way) is better than staying quiet which can perpetuate harmful behavior. I can see my organization trying something out that didn’t quite work. I believe that the policy will be reversed, but this should not be seen as a failure, but rather the discovery that one particular effort to minimize bias did not do the trick. 


(image from: https://www.salon.com/2023/04/08/are-we-implicitly-biased-against-men-new-study-finds-a-positive-bias-towards-women/)

Values & Ethics in my Organization


It helps to understand my own values thoroughly in order to see how they align with my choice of work. I have a regular contemplative practice in my life that I use to help me identify my core values and to ensure that I am living in accordance with them (McGehee et al., 2017). Time and time again, I re-discover that connection to others, stewardship of the Earth, and learning & sharing knowledge, among other values guide my decision-making. My employer outlines their own stated values, mission, and vision on their website which include "collaboration... teamwork, ethical and responsible behavior... in a culturally diverse community that supports the unique needs of each individual," (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, 2023, para. 1). I get to see how these values play out in the “mundane and everyday practices” within my department (Grandy & Sliwa, 2015, p. 423). ERAU’s mission is in alignment with my own values of learning and sharing knowledge and connecting with others in a unique way. I spend every day of my work in conversation with the students I am assigned to support. I have a manageable caseload so that I can provide each student with personalized advice and really take the time to understand their situation, strengths, opportunities, and their motivations for pursuing higher education. Overall, I am happy with the employer that I work with as I feel that I can exercise my own personal values at work every day. 



References

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. (2023). Values, mission and vision. Values, Mission and Vision | Embry - Riddle Aeronautical University. https://erau.edu/leadership/president/values-mission-and-vision

Grandy, G., & Sliwa, M. (2015). Contemplative leadership: The possibilities for the ethics of Leadership Theory and Practice. Journal of Business Ethics, 143(3), 423–440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2802-2

Lee, S. Y., Hanson, M. D., & Cheung, H. K. (2019). Incorporating bystander intervention into sexual harassment training. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 12(01), 52–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2019.8

McGehee, P., Germer, C., & Neff, K. (2017). Core values in mindful self-compassion. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health, 279–293. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64924-5_11


Shonk, K. (2020, July 13). Moral Leadership and the Role of Unconscious Bias [web log]. Retrieved August 10, 2023, from https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/leadership-skills-daily/moral-leadership-and-the-role-of-unconscious-bias/
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I found the Standards in my Life

I had standards by which I lived my life before I could explicitly identify them. I found that not every choice I made brought me closer to the person I wanted to be. I make decisions every day that bring me joy, sadness, fulfillment, and yearning for more. In an effort to understand how I make these decisions, and to be more intentional, I recently started a journey to reflect on my own core values. I have made many moves in my life and I wanted to better understand how I can make decisions that align with my core values. To facilitate this introspection I asked myself the questions below. In reflecting on these questions I found patterns. Patterns of behaviors and ways of being that helped me understand how I have lived in and out of alignment with my core values. Now that I am aware of them, and have them written out, these are my standards for decision making. These are the ways of being that help ensure I am living the life I want to live. Questions I asked myself What am I doing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Role(s) in a Team

Teamwork is a common thread throughout life. Growing up with parents and a sibling, working at my first job at McDonald's, and my marriage and current household all provide me with an opportunity to practice teamwork. Most, if not all, of the engagements in my life involve interacting and cooperating with others, so this exploration into how teams form and are led is an interesting practice of reviewing literature and reflecting on how I engage in my day-to-date life. As a part of a team, I tend to take leadership roles quite naturally. Whetten & Cameron (2011) describe several roles of embers within a team: task-facilitating, relationship-building, and blocking roles. I believe that I have played each role at some point. I feel most at home when I play a task-facilitation role, but I also make time and space for relationship-building. Teamwork is all about getting individual contributors to work together toward a common goal, so ensuring that the relationships among team membe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Constraints on Creative Problem Solving

Creative problem-solving requires a great deal of flexibility, and acceptance of risk which can be difficult for businesses who are generally risk averse to embrace. Many constraints also exist in our individual thinking which limit our capacity to think and problem-solve creatively (Whetten & Cameron, 2016). In my own experience in the nonprofit and social service industries I have seen these constraints hold back otherwise successful individuals.  “Well, this is how we’ve always done it” I’m sure you’ve heard this common refrain from supervisors and teammates in the past. Generally, we hear this when someone questions an existing policy, procedure, or process. The inquiry is not personal, but this knee-jerk response is a clear indicator that the individuals are experiencing some conceptual blocks to creative problem solving. Complacency is a major impediment to thinking differently, in fact, complacency may mean that the people in question are not thinking at all. When we avo...
Post a Comment
Read more