GUEST OPINION: Extraordinary stress and no fair degree of litigation has been expended in the ongoing crusade to stamp out bias wherever it may rear its ugly head. HR organisations instruct their members on how to spot variants such as classism and compassion bias in the wild.
Laws are passed to mandate the surveillance of technology-driven HR decisions for its appearance. And multi-million dollar settlements are found in favour of those who can successfully prove they have fallen victim to it.
In order to avoid the worst, we are told companies must aim for objectivity — a clear-eyed, broad-based framework to assess the human individual for their inherent worth and ability, free of any reductive filters of bigotry.
However, while there are malignant attitudes that should be guarded against, my own experience consulting with dozens of HR departments and teams small and big has shown me that attempting to erase inherent bias and subjectivity as factors within one’s organisation through hiring/promotion practices is not only futile, but self-defeating.
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Rather, corporations should embrace the biases and subjectivities within their teams and their candidates and learn how they can benefit the organisation when properly identified and utilised.
To do so, one must consider how a person’s biases and subjectivity shapes their humanity and fuels their capabilities, liabilities and importantly their purpose – what they really care about doing. While organisations place emphasis on the sorts of “hard skills,” such as mastery of computer languages and professional certifications, needed to grow their businesses, their ability to implement these skills effectively will often rest on human capabilities.
My own team has identified 31 of them, which include Solving Problems, Understanding Others’ Needs, Motivating Others and Handling Authority. By the way, the ones I just listed just so happen to be my capabilities; you can see the rest of them here, if you wish.
While giving a full autobiographical rundown of my life is beyond the scope of this commentary, I recognise that my entire life experience, complete with its setbacks, traumas, proclivities and inclinations, underpin my human capabilities.
My family lost its wealth while I was in high school, which forced me and my brother to take on responsibilities most boys don’t have in their early lives, while my own experience in college football and as a sailor preparing for the America’s Cup primed me to excel in team-based capabilities. These experiences shaped how I subjectively interpret group dynamics and my own strengths and weaknesses.
That’s not to say that biases ARE capabilities, but they do push individuals towards certain roles and away from other ones, as well as account for specific liabilities exhibited by a group at the same time.
We’ve seen this for ourselves when we measured the behavioural preferences of Year Ten school students. Across the board, they scored exceedingly low on behavioural preferences when given psychometric assessment.
Why? Because they have no life experience upon which to build any behavioural preferences. Those preferences are still being shaped by the successes and failures they will have, the cliques that make fun of them and the accolades they will receive in the classroom or on the field, and the stories they are told about themselves. Good or bad, true or false, they shape the grooves of an individual and a group’s ability imprint, and an organisation must understand how to work with that subjectivity in order to derive greater utility from their teams.
For instance, when my team assesses a given role at an organisation, we generally place it through three filters, all of which give valuable insights into the underpinning future hopes and strengths that are needed to deliver the human skills required for performance in that role.
First, we discuss it with the experts, such as a hiring manager, or several people in the organisation who know the role well, and we have them order the human skills they believe – based on their subjective and biased interpretation of their experiences, are needed to succeed in it.
Then we invite those who are currently performing well in the role to complete a capability assessment to identify their natural capability strengths and areas of friction, based on their biased and subjectively established behavioural preferences.
We have NEVER seen these assessments match up in any organisation, ever, and that’s because the subjectivities of the experts are geared towards aspirational goals for their business, rather than what powers it today.
So, we often tell these organisations, once they see this discrepancy for themselves: do you want to optimise your organisation, where you use more of what your high performers have in identifying candidates and evaluating the existing team? Or do you want to transform and steer the company in a new direction with fresh capabilities?
That is in no way saying one should assess the human performance requirements of an environment or the capabilities of a person in a biased and subjective manner. Quite the contrary. They must be measured with a scientific rigor and objectivity to show hiring managers how that subjectivity and bias, taken both in isolation as well as combined within a group dynamic, can be leveraged against the needs of one’s business.
No doubt, businesses are under intense pressure to bestow opportunities for their employees and job candidates in as egalitarian and as fair-minded a way as possible — that’s where objectivity must come in. But you’ll only ever be able to properly utilise your human resources when you’re taking them in fully, warts and all –and that means making room for the reality of subjectivity and bias.