Equality in career development.
Have you ever heard of a leaky pipeline? That signals a loss of talented employees from one level to another.
Employees fail to progress past a certain level. They either do not get promoted to the next level or exit the organization before receiving the opportunity to advance. Therefore, your investment in that employee, by training and mentoring them, does not yield benefits for your organization.
A leaky pipeline is most common for underrepresented or minority group employees. The solution is to invest in equal career development opportunities and provide adequate support for all employees.
Action 1: Bias-free performance reviews.
Performance reviews are processes in which a manager assesses and evaluates an employee’s performance at work. The goal is to give feedback on employees’ strengths, point out areas of improvement, and discuss future career goals and expectations.
A big responsibility lies in the manager or team leader taking the initiative, making time to conduct the assessment, and communicating their observations to the employee.
A downside of performance reviews is that they are human assessments, judgments made of others, which means unconscious biases significantly impact the outcome.
Common biases in performance reviews are:
- Recency bias: When the manager focuses on someone’s performance in the most recent period.
- Halo effect: When the manager lets their positive first impression affect their overall performance assessment.
- Horn effect: When a manager lets one negative quality or event impact their overall performance assessment.
- Centrality bias: A manager’s tendency to rate employees in the middle of a rating scale for most items.
- Affinity bias: When a manager assesses employees who are like them more favorably.
- Idiosyncratic rater bias: When a manager gives a more positive assessment of skills, they are not good at and is more critical of skills they are great at.
- Contrast bias: When a manager unconsciously compares an employee’s performance with that of other employees instead of the company performance standard.
- Identity biases: When a manager lets stereotypes about gender, ethnicity, age, and other identity traits positively or negatively impact their performance review.
- Examine current practices: Know where you start. Your current assessment practices might already have outstanding elements or serious pitfalls you need to avoid in your reworked evaluation standards.
- Develop an evaluation structure: Set requirements about frequency and create clear guidelines for managers to ensure a qualitative review. Such a standard can be a template with specific items to review, a scorecard, requirements for written motivations, and instructions to communicate feedback to employees.
- Train managers: Teach your managers skills to conduct a good and equal review. Train them to avoid unconscious bias while reviewing and to give structured, specific, well-motivated, and constructive feedback.
- Use data: Save employee performance data. That allows your HR department to detect and compare trends in performance management against your population’s demographic information. In the long term, this helps define barriers and continuous unequal development of specific employee groups.
- Define success: Define what successful job performance looks like for every employee. Do this in collaboration with each employee. Be specific in your definitions and always work towards a clear intended outcome.
- Use performance snapshots: Collect feedback from multiple points in time to avoid recency bias and the halo effect. Take structured and skills-based notes or use your organization’s evaluation template. That will help save all the information if you need to recall your judgment later.
An alternative to the annual performance review can be to use more regular check-ins.
- Be specific: Avoid judging an employee on generic qualities. Instead, be detailed in the tasks, skills, and behaviors you assess and always motivate why you give a specific score.
- Evaluate skills and competencies: use performance methods focusing on skills and behaviors rather than general traits. For example, creating BARS (Behaviorally Anchored Ratings Scales) for the essential skills for a job allow you to evaluate performance in a specific and skill-based way.
- Plan: Treat each employee equally. Plan the same time to review everyone and stick to your planning. Moving evaluations to the bottom of your to-do list is easy when something urgent comes up. However, keep in mind that postponing feedback could negatively impact employees’ performance.
Personalities play a significant role in performance reviews. To make sure these do not impact your performance review, we are including two extra tips for managers:
- Separate personality issues from skill sets for each team member.
Appraise personal style separately from skills. Be mindful that fewer behavior trends are accepted from employees from underrepresented groups.
- Level the playing field concerning self-promotion.
Some people may be reluctant to self-promote, while others use it vigorously. Stick to your evaluation criteria to limit the impact.
Action 2: DEI-focused succession planning.
Succession planning allows you to have the right people in the right place. It ensures the continuity of the business and helps you quickly define who to turn to when urgently looking for a leader with a specific set of skills.
With DEI high on the agenda, it makes sense to approach your leadership pipeline with a DEI focus. In addition, use succession planning to ensure you always have the necessary diversity at all levels of leadership.
When discussing diversity in the organization, specifically in leadership, diversity of gender and ethnicity are the first ones that come to mind. That is if diversity is discussed at all.
Have you ever heard someone say “Our leadership is plenty diverse. We have a woman and five different nationalities on the team. It is impossible to ignore the diversity of thought that brings.”? That is still a common approach to diversity, but it is not sufficient.
We challenge you to go further. Consider less visible types of diversity like sexual orientation, neurodiversity, or even age, and question the societal position of your leadership.
Use the following questions to reflect on your current leadership and your succession planning:
- How many leaders belong to the majority group in society and the organization?
- Are they in a privileged position in society?
- Do they know how to understand the challenges for underrepresented employees in this organization?
- How can we provide them with insights into the experiences of minority employees?
Going through these will shed new light on what diversity and diversity of thought mean for your leadership team.
- Measure & map.
Know where your leadership talent pipeline leaks. Check which employee groups do not advance into certain levels and which groups are entirely missing in leadership roles. Attracting diverse senior leaders might be one of your strategic goals.
- Create your list.
Set diversity targets or criteria for your succession planning. Are you looking for more women in leadership positions, more ethnic diversity, or leaders with a specific background?
The targets should align with your DEI Strategic Plan based on identified gaps in your organization’s DEI scan.
Leadership decisions are influenced by personal biases when selecting their list. Find tips on how to avoid bias in the Action above.
- Accelerate.
Speed up the formation and training of future leaders from underrepresented groups.
When an employee is on your succession planning radar, provide them with the necessary opportunities to develop their skills quickly. For example, consider job sharing (i.e., a flexible work arrangement in which two people work part-time schedules to complete the work one person would do in a single full-time job). And executive prep rotations to develop specific skills and gain insights most relevant to your organization. That can be a more efficient way of learning compared to generic leadership development courses.
These actions to accelerate your DEI-focused succession planning set you up for guaranteed diversity in your future leadership. And most importantly, for those employees who experienced developmental and promotional barriers in the past, this can be the kick-off to a career-changing leadership position.
Include an accountability check that stimulates leaders to hold each other accountable for the lack of diversity in their leadership pipeline.
Always ask them to motivate why there is no diversity and ask them to review their list if they cannot give a valid reason.
Action 3: Inclusive coaching.
It is a challenge for leaders to treat each team member equally, especially when supporting them in their development and coaching them to advance their careers.
As a leader and coach, be aware of your position.
Power: Most hierarchical organizations have a power imbalance between leaders and team members. However natural, be conscious of how hierarchy creates barriers. For example, is it more difficult for team members to approach you or for you to observe their work and coach them?
Privilege: Reflect on your privilege; the benefits or advantages linked to your identity and position in society and at work. When you belong to a majority group, your privilege can be a blind spot. Are you aware of the different experiences of minority team members? Do you challenge your privilege and actively support employees who experience exclusion or discrimination?
Personal norms and biases: Investigate your norms and possible biases rooted in your past experiences. They influence your expectations and the way you judge behaviors. For example, what does the ideal employee look like? How should they behave? With how much support should they be able to thrive?
List your possible blind spots and remind yourself of them regularly. That will help you to be more open-minded when coaching others.
- Take a holistic approach: Avoid a singular focus on the result (rational targets, numbers). Instead, focus equally on human aspects that surface in reaching goals (meaning, inspiration, creativity, emotions). As a result, you will notice the diversity in your team and discover its richness.
- Provide constructive feedback: When there is little time for feedback, leaders unconsciously focus on what goes wrong. Make sure you discuss strengths and development points equally with all team members.
- Always work towards solutions: Look for ways in which you can guarantee the necessary individual support for each team member. If you struggle to provide that support, discuss the barriers you experience together and think about how you can turn these around. It can be necessary to find them an additional mentor or coach that can relate to them more.
- Make time for underrepresented team members: Coaching high potentials or employees who perform below standard is a given. The gains of doing so are clear. What about employees who stand out less? Employees from underrepresented groups that perform well might and therefore get less attention. They miss out on valuable coaching that could help them tackle barriers and subtle discriminations at work. Define individual coaching needs and act accordingly.
Become a DEI expert.
This is a collection of articles that allows you to take a deep dive.
