What percentage of your day, week or month are you working to help others succeed? Whether you lead 10 people or 10,000, to what degree do you find yourself coaching the same circumscribed group of individuals to fulfill their potential while others remain relatively unknown or overlooked? To what extent are you unconsciously placing a value judgement on who can and cannot add value, thereby unintentionally limiting the height of many of your colleagues’ “capability ceilings”?
We all have unconscious biases. These biases emerge when our brains make lightning quick judgments about situations and people – without us even knowing it. If our brains didn’t have an efficient way of categorizing the dizzying amount of information that we’re bombarded with on a daily basis, we would undoubtedly experience the equivalent of a cerebral meltdown almost hourly.
Instinctively, we categorize people and things based upon overt characteristics such as gender, skin color, age, accent, nationality, job title, etc. to improve the speed with which we make decisions. While there are some arguable advantages to this snap-quick filtering system, it also leads us to make faulty assumptions about how we need to show up as humans.
In the world of transforming organizations – helping enterprises make profound changes in their competitiveness, leadership and culture – I often encounter senior leaders who fall into a particularly toxic, unconscious bias trap. I call it the usual suspects bias. It’s the act of relying almost exclusively on the same small group of people to get things done because you know and trust their capabilities. These are the same individuals picked for each important initiative, assigned to all consequential task forces, and receiving a disproportionate number of promotions – and who, by the way, now have zero bandwidth for any additional responsibilities.
The way this bias manifests itself – the presenting symptom if you will – is in an incredibly overworked group of “high potentials” on the one hand, counterbalanced by an army of unusual suspects, employees craving, yearning to make a difference, but lacking the means to get noticed.
Consider the following examples:
One - A large hospital system identified the patient experience as a critical strategic priority for all of its hospitals, a particularly important focus in light of Medicare and Medicaid Services reimbursements being tied to patient satisfaction scores. A cross-functional team made up of physicians, administrators, nurses and patient care assistants was brought together to identify methods to decrease the average length of patient stays – a significant driver of both hospital costs and worsening patient care.
Guess who identified the most important innovation that led to millions in annualized savings? It was a patient care assistant. Not only was she the most junior person on the team, but also had the least amount of formal education.
Two - A global pharmaceutical/medical devices corporation was struggling to deliver a product on time due to demand that far outstripped their most optimistic forecasts. While further manufacturing capacity was being built, it simply wouldn’t be fast enough. We convened a cross-functional team from across the globe comprised of sales and marketing experts, supply chain, packaging, compliance and logistics professionals all focused on one singular goal – accelerate the cycle time from manufacturing to product delivery in 90 days or less.
As the team began to struggle with the question of how to shave days off their cycle time, a junior distribution professional from the U.S. shared a frustration. “When we pack and sterilize the pallets to be sent to Europe versus other parts of the world, it takes us at least double the time it does for other geographies. Why is that?” Almost immediately, his German counterpart deflected the unintentional criticism by saying, “And it takes us twice as long to unpack any of the product that we receive from the U.S.”
After about five minutes of discussion the group realized that they were complying with outdated policies that had long governed their global distribution practices. The most junior person on the team – our unusual suspect – identified a 10% improvement in cycle time in minutes. It was the first of many quick wins. Similar conversations unfolded throughout the team’s launch session and, just 90 days later, the team achieved a 35% improvement in overall cycle time, which far exceeded the senior leadership team’s expectations.
Third, and finally – A global IT organization was struggling to overcome decades of bureaucracy in service of becoming a nimbler strategic partner to their business. In addition to ossified ways of working and thinking, they were encumbered by a rigid, forced ranking system, which subscribed to a number of conventional metrics for measuring talent. A series of global teams were launched to tackle critical priorities like speed and innovation. One team member, rated in the bottom quintile of performance for years, realized an eight figure annualized cost savings for the business. His discovery was so eye-popping that the senior leadership team began questioning the reliability of their ranking system.
These are merely a few examples of unusual suspects contributing the most important thinking to the success of an initiative. These experiences should precipitate a number of questions for your organization:
Does your organization systematically celebrate these types of wins or new ways of working and thinking? How often does your organization reinforce the importance that everyone can and must contribute their ideas to stay competitive? Do your people feel comfortable experimenting with the status quo, even if it means falling down and scraping their knee, only to get back up and try again?
What can your organization do to immediately become more inclusive, more open to the idea that its next best ideas may come from individuals you least expect?
- Embrace the many versus the few: Remaining competitive requires more open minds, unique perspectives and experiences contributing to the success of our organizations – not less. Extricate the sole “innovation responsibilities” from the top of the house and distribute it to the entire organization, thus reinforcing its importance as a cultural imperative.
- Blinded initiative recruitment: To prevent unconscious biases from seeping into team selection, many of our clients have now instituted blind and double blinded selection processes when evaluating the best talent for an initiative. Instead of starting with the short list of “high potentials,” they instead craft sharp charter documents to describe the types of skills that are needed to contribute, and then pull together a selection team to evaluate anonymous applications based on their merits. Every senior leader we have worked with is both surprised and delighted by the outcome of this process.
- Cultivate the permission to contribute: Most organizations lack both the permission and coordinating mechanism to engage unusual suspects at scale. If the vast majority of your people are not regularly a part of cross-functional initiatives comprised of all levels and multiple roles, you are failing to tap into an incredible wealth of talent just sitting on the sidelines.
The Harvard Business Review reported that 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. That’s not an accident. And that's nowhere near enough.
