Skills Library

Managing Diversity 

What this looks like:

  • Creates a team culture of psychological safety where employees can fully contribute, be their authentic selves, and feel a sense of belonging

  • Maintains fairness and consistency when hiring, promoting, and measuring performance

  • Acknowledges biases and different views of reality based on our privileges and how we can use them to become better allies 

  • Understands how gender and racial biases manifest in the workplace and take actions to counteract those impacts

On-the-job practice

  • Provide diversity and sensitivity training sessions. Your company’s processes are only as good as the people, so make sure the people making the processes are aware of their conscious and unconscious biases first. Did you know Feed Learning offers virtual and interactive diversity training? 

    • Try this: Enroll your team in a Mitigating Unconscious Bias by Feed Learning to explore how our subconscious mind affects the decisions we make every day. In the course, you’ll learn about the system of oppression and actions we can take to break the perpetual cycle of -isms, explore how microaggressions and biases manifest in the workplace, and what we can do with our privileges to build allies.

  • Use your privileges to help others. Understand that everyone has privileges in some way, shape, or form, and as a manager, you have privilege because you have the authority to make team decisions. Take advantage of your position and model positive behaviors.

    • Try this: Use language that indicates your awareness of your group identity for the privilege you have. Don’t say: “I understand how you feel.” Try saying: “As a white male, this has been my experience…”

    • Try this: Speak up and use your privileges to help those who don’t have them. If you see someone speaking over a person: Try saying: “[Name of interrupter], would you hold your comment for a second so I can hear what [Name of interrupted] has to say?”

    • Try this: Champion someone from an underrepresented community to support career growth. Note: There is a difference between sponsorship and mentorship. Sponsoring is being actively involved in aiding someone’s career progression. Mentoring is providing advice.

  • Interrupt bias in meetings. When you become more conscious of it, you’ll notice that biases manifest in the workplace more often than you think.

    • Try this: Set ground rules and norms. Share an agenda before the meeting. Start every meeting with rules ground rules, e.g., gender-neutral greetings, make it okay to point out interruptions, call on each person to allow them to talk versus asking, “Does anyone have anything to add?” 

    • Try this: Assign administrative work. Do not ask for volunteers to do office chores or administrative work because it will most likely be a female who volunteers. Instead, assign people the tasks, i.e., notetaking, party planning, decorating, etc.

    • Try this: Hold others accountable for their decisions to ensure it’s not a biased reason. Try asking: “Can you help me understand your reasoning behind that decision to…”

  • Respond to microaggressions.

    • Try this: Call out the statement, not the person. To prevent the feeling of attacks and aggression, use your words effectively. Don’t say: “You are racist.” Try saying: “The comment you said was offensive to me because...”

    • Try this: Focus on the impact, not the intent. If you offended someone by accidentally taking part in a microaggression, apologize. Don’t say: “I didn’t mean to offend you.” Try saying: “I am sorry for the impact my comment made on you. It was offensive, and I apologize.” You can also add: "Can you help me understand why it was offensive? I want to learn so I don't make the same mistake again."

    • Try this: Audit your office and surroundings. Take a look around the office to see any biases in naming conventions or pictures in the office or company website, i.e., conference room names, restroom names, images of employees on the company website, presentations, and brochures.

  • Standardize your hiring process. When interviewing people, you want to standardize all processes to compare apples to apples.

    • Try this: Create a success profile by identifying the top 5 competencies needed for the role you’re hiring for. To help you out, think of the top 3 key players on your team. What skills do all of these key players have in common? e.g., strong communication skills, analytical thinking skills, conflict resolution skills, etc. 

    • Try this: Creating standard interview guides that have competency-based interview questions. Use the same interview questions for all candidates so that you can compare apples to apples. 

    • Try this: Create an interview team and assign specific competencies and interview questions each interviewer will ask each candidate.

    • Try this: Create an interview scorecard that allows each interviewer to grade the candidates’ responses and interview performance against the identified competencies and expected qualifications.

    • Try this: Enroll your team in the Behavioral-Based Interviewing training course by Feed Learning to learn how to standardize your interview process and mitigate unconscious bias throughout the hiring process.

  • Establish and enforce expectations. It's challenging to manage and implement diversity practices (or any practice) when there wasn’t a clear expectation to do so. 

    • Try this: Check your employee handbook to see if your organization has clear non-discrimination, zero-tolerance, and anti-harassment policies. If not, inform your HR team. 

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