“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” – Eldridge Cleaver
My motus operandi has been to surround myself with the best talent possible – irregardless of any other defining characteristic they may possess (country, race, sexual orientation, affinity for hot sauce). So I never paid attention to any talk about workplace diversity, believing that that was a counterbalance to sins of prior generations. I was “post-diversity” – we would source and hire the best, paying zero attention to anything else other than their merits.
Recently I watched Facebook’s internal training on managing unconscious bias. Rarely has any material made such an impact on my thought process.
As we look to the next stage of growth – my thinking needs to change. We just held our first internal training – centered around this material. To bring the point home, I was able to recall an exact situation where we inadvertently treated two candidates differently – and it was shocking to all of us.
There’s a lot more work we need to do in this area.
