Interrupting Unconscious Bias for Supervisors

Course Description:

Unconscious bias (also known as implicit bias) can hurt morale, productivity, and innovation when it happens among employees. When it sneaks into critical workplace personnel and management decisions, it can be costly for your company in terms of lawsuits and discrimination charges. This course will benefit all managers, supervisors, and workplace leaders who are tasked with recruiting, hiring, and evaluating performance. Building on the concepts and strategies presented in “Recognizing and Overcoming Unconscious Bias,” this course offers strategies for eliminating unconscious bias from personnel decisions and how to recognize and counteract microaggressions that often stem from unconscious bias. After completing this course, supervisors should be able to identify their own unconscious biases and “interrupt” them when making critical personnel management decisions.

Why “Interrupting Unconscious Bias for Supervisors” Matters:

Helping supervisors and managers learn how to address their unconscious biases can improve their objectivity and fair decision making, improving their effectiveness as leaders and their interactions with employees.  That can result in a more diverse, talent-rich workplace, and a work environment where people feel valued.

Key Points:

• By virtue of their positions, managers’ and supervisors’ decisions and actions directly affect employees and the organization.
• Unconscious biases interfere with objective decision-making.
• To ensure the best possible working environment, managers and supervisors need to identify their unconscious biases to make fair and objective decisions.
• Making it a point to identify your own unconscious biases will help you recognize situations where they’re likely to come into play or interfere, enabling you to use strategies to interrupt them.
• The conscious use of micro-affirmations effectively blocks negative microbehaviors that result from unconscious biases.
• Interrupting unconscious bias enables you to take a clear look at personnel management issues and move forward in a way that will build trust and create the opportunity for better communication, collaboration, and innovation.