Avoiding ethical issues in mentoring relationships

Our time is marked not just by advancements in technology but also by societal expectations in the way we show respect, acceptance and dignity to others. It’s now so important that we display the highest level of ethics, especially when it comes to mentoring relationships.

Mentoring is a vital part of development. That’s because it allows participants to apply their learning into the workplace, change their behaviours and have a sounding board for organisational changes. In fact, this is why IML ANZ includes mentoring as a core element in leadership programs.

To aid the trustworthiness of any mentoring program, leaders and organisations must ensure that reliable structures are in place. This includes the following three components:

 

Robust screening process

Do your program participants undergo an application and screening process before they are matched with a mentor or mentee?

It’s also important to screen for the motivators of both parties. Are they genuinely seeking professional development? Of course, if the mentoring program is kept restricted to members of a professional body, such as IML ANZ’s program, it reduces the risk that ill-motivated people will join.

 

Clear parameters and expectations

Do you provide guidance around acceptable subject matters and realistic timeframes for the formal mentoring relationship? A well-structured program leaves little room for discussing inappropriate topics or showing disrespect for each participant’s time and resources.

Again, all of this has to come from a genuine desire to benefit both in the mentoring relationship

 

Third-party available for feedback or complaints

While no one wishes to hear of any incidents where inappropriate or unethical behaviour is displayed, it’s important to be ready to respond should it arise. An impartial party should be available to receive feedback and complaints. It’s never good if any participant feels they are helpless or won’t be heard if they complain.

Merits of reverse mentoring

When someone says mentoring we immediately picture the experienced and mature mentor alongside the eager and younger mentee. However, some companies have found that reverse mentoring, or putting the younger member of the pair in charge, has merits including fresh insights, better collaboration and breaking age-based barriers.

Traditional mentoring definitely has its benefits. It is a proven way to strengthen professional development and drive leadership success. For both the mentor an mentee, they gain a valuable contact within their professional network because the mentoring relationship, more often than not, continues well beyond the conclusion of the formal program.

Today, more of the younger generation move about from job to job and organisation to organisation. As they seek their next step up, if they see no personal connection between their aspirations and the goals of the organisation, they’ll move on. What that means is possibly valuable insights may be walking out the door, never truly fulfilling their potential within the context of your organisation.

That’s why reverse mentoring could be an effective tool in making your younger workforce feel a closer connection between their career and your organisation’s goals. Beyond retention, here are three additional merits of reverse mentoring:

 

Fresh insights

A different perspective can be invaluable for senior leaders. In a similar way to rotating a puzzle and seeing a different possible solution, so too can reversing mentoring roles provide a fresh look at existing challenges.

Sometimes leaders can get used to arguing up the food chain. With reverse mentoring, they are required to think of things differently, use different tactics in completing tasks and understand how to address a different audience.

 

Better collaboration

A new way of looking at things can prove to be useful when it comes to gaining a sense of cooperation too.

This generation of workers appreciate opportunities to participate beyond their role’s scope. What’s more, this generation of workers is all about gaining the opinions and ideas of their colleagues. So, access to the thoughts of one usually means gaining an idea of what those in that age-group think and feel.

 

Breaking barriers

Companies, such as PwC, have used reverse mentoring programs to support diversity and inclusion. This, in turn, promoted an environment where all employees feel their ideas are valued, not just those of the senior-level executives.

The result is a truly inclusive culture, where age isn’t a barrier for ideas to be heard and acknowledged.

It’s true, no matter what stage of your career you’re in, mentoring can support your development. Don’t shy away from reverse mentoring because everyone – no matter your age, experience or expertise, has something valuable to give and has room to improve.

Is coaching different from counselling?

The merits of effective coaching as part of a leader’s key skill set is undeniable. The ability to guide team members to achieve a higher-level whether that’s in their performance, productivity, knowledge or expertise takes deep understanding and lots of practice. But is the coach also expected to be a counsellor? Should a line be drawn between what constitutes coaching and counselling and if so, how can you tell if you’ve crossed it?

This isn’t a new debate, with some therapists claiming there is no difference between coaching and counselling, it’s just another label to describe the same activity. On the other hand, given the more involved nature of counselling, coaches may be hesitant to claim that they are performing the same practice. After all, counselling as a profession is more formally and heavily regulated.

To be effective in either, knowing what sets each apart is vital. Let’s unpack the similarities, differences and the importance of understanding what each practice entails.

 

Key similarities

Both practices are motivated from a place of care and concern. The goal is the same – improvement or development in some area of the coachee’s life.

Each practice also uses similar approaches and skills. In both forms the following activities feature heavily:

  • Personal communication (whether face-to-face or via phone)
  • Listening
  • Questioning
  • Creating a non-judgemental relationship
  • Uncovering deeper self-awareness

When it comes to workplace coaching the lines may not be as blurred. A coach may simply decide that they are only involved in matters within the context of the workplace. However,  the challenge for coaches is that no one is really capable of separating their ‘work-self’ from their ‘personal-self’.

 

Identified differences

Some of the common differentiators between coaching and counselling have been enumerated in the past. These include coaching’s concern with making future opportunities possible while counselling is limited to developing awareness of how past experiences impact current and future decisions.

Another key difference identified is that often, people who seek counselling do so with the aim of remedying an illness, dysfunction or pathological challenge whereas coachees are not necessarily characterised by these attributes.

There is also the distinction between coaching conversations being more structured versus the free-flowing and undefined counselling style.

 

When knowing the difference matters

When healing is required. In one study, the process of coaching helped participants identify the need for additional help in the form of counselling. If a coach identifies that there is a need to remedy or heal emotional challenges, it is worth considering whether counselling is required.

When a crossover is necessary. As part of effective coaching, it may be necessary for the coach to visit the coachees’ past experiences. Normally this is mainly for the purposes of helping the coachee to move forward with agreed goals. If unresolved past experiences hold a person back from progressing, the coach may need to crossover temporarily into the counsellor space – but only briefly.

When it is healthy to hold the coachee accountable. When a counsellor is required, it is often because the client is not in a state to reach goals and overcome hurdles on their own. This is when getting the difference right between coaching and counselling matters the most. In a coaching arrangement, the coachee is usually responsible for achieving the desired outcome, the coach is simply there to guide – not to provide the answers. There will inevitably be situations where a clinically-trained counsellor must take-over.

Reference: Semantics or substance?  Preliminary evidence in the debate between life coaching and counselling

Improving team performance through people analytics

We live in an era of data-driven insights, a time when new and innovative ways of collecting, analysing and organising information pique our interest on a regular basis.

In the modern workplace, a common HR practice is to use people analytics to answer critical questions about an organisation’s operational environment. Psychometric tools, in particular, can provide insights about team dynamics and when used properly, support the development of individual leadership capabilities that positively impact team performance and outputs.

But how do we extract maximum value from people analytics? Can psychometric feedback provide a roadmap for performance improvement and team effectiveness?

There is a clear need for people analytics to visibly and measurably linked to performance outcomes.

Diverse perspectives deliver

Diversity is a key element that enables effective teamwork. According to Team Management Systems Learning & Development Director, Chris Burton, “The power of a good team-based psychometric is in its ability to integrate into the operational environment and clearly illustrate the benefit that diverse perspectives deliver. To match the current environment, there is a growing need for teams to become ‘intelligent’, that is to exhibit inclusive, relational and context-aware traits. The capability to understand and harness diversity should be pre-requisite for modern leaders.”

Team awareness matters

As an example, it is easy to imagine the contribution of a colleague who is meticulous and detail-focused being under-appreciated in a fast-paced operational team. In an environment where the value added by this kind of activity is well understood, the same team member could be celebrated for their commitment to maintaining quality standards.

Prior to exploring a team’s different perspectives and approaches to work, it is important to establish a baseline for current team performance and identify other critical elements. For example, how do we describe the culture in our context, how effectively do we deal with change, and what are trust levels like?

This is where managers and HR practitioners have an opportunity to shift their thinking beyond team workshops being a one-off training event. Burton explains, “Sharing feedback from psychometric profiles is a good way of generating awareness that a colleague is more concrete or more abstract in their thinking, but if you don’t incorporate their insights to revise and improve your process, you’re missing an enormous opportunity. Understanding differences in a team is an important step, but it takes an additional, ongoing effort to include diverse contributions and maintain high performance”.

The Institute of Managers and Leaders Australia and New Zealand has a suite of diagnostic and evaluation tools developed to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your organisation. If you would like to like to know more about the range of People Analytics tools available, please call 1300 362 631 or email corporate@managersandleaders.com.au or visit managersandleaders.com.au/people-analytics.

Mind the gap

By Anthony O’Brien

The latest IML Gender Pay Report reveals that if you’re a female working in a C-Suite role, you could be earning as much as 15% less than your male colleagues.

The report presents findings based on an analysis of pay differentials from 2014-2018 between male and female full-time employees within the Australian workforce. The research considers different employment levels and job families ranging from administration to general management. The analysis uses IML’s National Salary Survey, updated in October 2018, and data collected from 460 organisations across Australia, covering more than 250 job roles.

The research doesn’t reflect casual or part-time workers, or maternity leave which explains differences between the IML report and the gaps reported by government organisations such as Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), according to report author, Sam Bell FIML, General Manager, Corporate Services and Research, IML. The full-time total remuneration gender pay gap based on WGEA data is 22.4%, meaning men working full time earn, on average, nearly $27,000 a year more than women working full time.

WHY THE GAP PERSISTS

According to the IML report, the C-Suite pay gap fell to 9.8% three years ago after a high of 14.7% in 2014. But over the past three years, the gender pay gap for C-Suite roles climbed steadily and is now approaching the levels of five years ago. Bell explains that isolating the reasons for the widening gap at the C-Suite level is challenging. “There are probably more female managers in lower-paying industries. However, our research measures like-against-like job levels and job families, so more female executives working in lower paid industries doesn’t explain the C-Suite gap thoroughly.

“That there is a 14.6% difference in like-against-like general manager salaries is certainly an eye-opening statistic that organisations need to review.”

Libby Lyons, Director of the WGEA, says, “The gender pay gap is a symptom of a broader issue. It reflects the fact that women’s work is traditionally undervalued, and women are often paid less than men.

“As a nation, we need to be talking about what is behind the gender pay gap – the barriers women face in the workplace that cause the gender pay gap.”

WHERE THE GAP IS CLOSING

If you’re seeking work in an industry with closer to equal pay, then look no further than information technology (4.6%) and engineering and science (4.8%). That said, in 2014 the IT pay gap slightly favoured women (-0.1%), and the difference was only 0.3% for females working in engineering and science. On the flipside, the salary gap for women in finance and accounting improved from 13.7% down to 7.1% over the past four years.

IT continuously rates well for women’s pay rates because it’s a result driven industry that typically doesn’t differentiate between male or female employees, notes Bell. “The salary gaps in finance and accounting have dropped because there is greater awareness of gender diversity issues in that profession because of CEOs such as former Westpac boss Gail Kelly.

“That industry was heavily male-dominated, but with high-profile CEOs like Kelly championing the issue and taking it head-on, the pay gap almost halved in the past four years.”

ADDRESSING THE GAP

Paul Jury, Managing Director of Australia for global HR executive search firm ChapmanCG, resolutely believes there should be no excuses for gender pay gaps. He elaborates, “Moreover, there’s plenty of research indicating that up to 70% of employers report they have policies in place to support gender equality.

“With the gender pay gap, it is all heading in the right direction, but the speed of improvement is still too slow.”

Personal biases can come into play particularly where objective measures of performance are deficient and create incidences of gender gaps in promotions and pay, reasons Jury. “For senior roles, some managers without access to objective data may tend to promote and reward people they like and whom they perceive are more like them.

“While unconscious bias is hard to rewire, more training, education, and awareness within an organisation can help to mitigate its impact on gender diversity, promotion and pay. This includes putting in place guidelines, along with checks and balances within a business to minimise the gender pay gap.”

Bell agrees more investment in educating managers about gender equality issues is required. “Educating managers who hire staff that pay gaps are not acceptable is a start,” he reasons. “And the fact that skills, experience, and qualifications should be paid for, irrespective of whether a recruit is male or female.”

From a leadership perspective, Bell believes an organisation should have a gender pay gap policy or statement in place that all managers “understand and take seriously”. WGEA research indicates that actions to correct like-for-like gender pay gaps are three times as effective in reducing overall pay inequities when combined with reporting to executives and boards. Bell says, “There’s a lot of large Australian companies that are certainly taking all these steps. All of them probably have a statement from a leadership level, whether it’s CEO down, saying that pay gaps won’t be tolerated.”

ACCOUNTABILITY COUNTS

Using market data such as IML’s National Salary Survey is another prudent step towards minding the pay gap says Bell. “Employers must understand what the market is paying for a C-Suite role or line manager and it shouldn’t matter whether someone is male or female.”

Another critical way to strengthen employer accountability would be to end pay secrecy, according to Alice Orchiston, an Associate Lecturer in Law at the University of Sydney. To this end the federal Australian Labor Party announced in September last year that, if elected, it will legislate for the introduction of publicly available company-specific gender pay gap data. In an opinion piece for academic journal The Conversation, Orchiston wrote: “If women discover they are earning less than their male counterparts for the same jobs, their legal avenues for pursuing equal pay are limited. It’s difficult to prove and costly to litigate.”

Orchiston continued, “Requiring employers to make their pay records publicly accessible or accessible to employees across the same organisation would create greater transparency and a basis for women to assess their pay, which in turn could facilitate negotiation or legal action.”

READ THE FULL REPORT

The IML 2018 Gender Pay Gap report can be purchased at managersandleaders.com.au/national-salary-survey

Why balance is better: for women and men

By Tori Cooke

To me, International Women’s Day is important because it recognises the full spectrum of women’s contribution to the world. In such diverse ways it brings ‘balance’ to the world in which we live, work and play. Part of bringing much needed balance is challenging structural conformity to male privilege. Diversity and inclusion makes so much sense when we consider what women have achieved historically – and it makes sense for men too.

 

Barriers: internal and external

Women’s achievements are rarely appreciated within the context of unequal access to higher education, employment and advancement opportunities. This means that overall, women are likely to work harder to overcome internal and external barriers to achieve success in the first place. Sometimes, the external barrier is, ‘the glass ceiling’ and unequal pay. It can also be that the structures are designed for a dominant paradigm that excludes the needs of women.

Then there are the internal barriers, the ‘soundtracks’ women are taught to play in their minds that prevent some women from believing they can achieve the full extent of their potential – leading to under achieving and high levels of stress. These are the ingrained social messages.

For some of us who grew up in lower middle class families, the soundtrack focused on working in a meaningless service job until you found your prince, got married and lived happily ever after. In my family, the women’s role was to take care of your husband, the home and the children.  Any employment was usually part time with your pay considered ‘pocket money’.

But listening to the men I work with, tells me too that these social messages can be stressful for some men to live up to. For example; the provider, the protector, the hero are socially constructed masculine roles that play a part in driving the need for financial and social success for men. The pressure of not living up to or not being able to participate in these roles can lead to a sense of listlessness and despair because access to the economic fortunes deemed socially acceptable and their associated status remain unachieved.

The key difference is these barriers do not impact on men’s access to opportunity or their thinking that they deserve opportunity to the same degree as women. 

The fact is, gendered forms of social status were enshrined in legislation. Women who sought to contribute in the same way to society were considered highly problematic, simply for challenging the social norms of the day with ideas of inclusiveness and equality.  The few men who shared and collaborated in raising a family were considered ‘not real men’.

But without these inspiring influencers, both men and women, we would not have the ongoing discussions, research and movement about the need for gender equity today.

Getting a university degree required overcoming barriers that most men do not have to experience because of what we now know and call structural male privilege. Having worked with victims of family violence and now also with the men who perpetrate abuse, it is clear to me that the attitudes and beliefs inherent in male privilege continue to heavily influence the drivers of violence against women. This violence is also a further barrier to women’s access to income equity and long term financial security. Conversely, these same issues become a cage that lock women into violent relationships.

It is a cycle that is all too often deadly.

 

Diversity and inclusion

This is why diversity and inclusion are important to me – to stop striving for this as an abiding social norm is simply dangerous. Violence against women is now a serious and widespread problem in Australia, with enormous individual and community impacts and social costs (Our Watch, 2019).  Recently, the National Community Attitude survey (NCAS, 2018) results indicate concerns that a substantial minority of Australians do not believe women’s reports of violence. Of even greater concern is the view that this large minority believe the problem of gender inequality is exaggerated (NCAS, 2018).

Women have made many significant contributions within their families, communities and across societies. While, these alone are praiseworthy, when you consider them in context of the many visible and invisible social barriers they had to overcome, I realise that it may take more than one International Women’s Day to fully appreciate their achievements.

For inclusivity to become a valued social norm we simply must address these barriers and work hard to challenge the ingrained ideas that have no relevance for the kind of futures our daughters and granddaughters will be living in the next 100 years.

I grew up at a time when it was a challenge to finish high school and have access to higher education. My grandmother’s words often echoed as motivation in my heart, “education will be your liberation” she used to say. I am the first woman in my family to finish high school and will be the first to complete a post-grad qualification. However, the cost at times of moving past limited ways of viewing women were at times, desperately hard.

Today women are more highly educated than men, yet still earn less.

International Women’s Day continues to tell the story of why ‘balance is better’, why our collaborative work to focus on better access and celebration of diversity is absolutely critical to society’s success and an enriched life for each one of us.

References:

Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety. (2018). Are we there yet? Australians’ attitudes towards violence against women & gender equality: Summary findings from the 2017 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) (Research to policy and practice, 03/2018). Sydney, NSW: ANROWS.

https://ncas.anrows.org.au/findings/

Our Watch. (2019). https://www.ourwatch.org.au/

Tori Cooke is currently the Practice Specialist Family Violence & Child Safety at Relationships Australia Victoria. She is a highly regarded conference presenter, senior clinical practitioner and specialist trainer in the field of family violence in Australia. She is a White Ribbon Advocate, a current member of the Victorian White Ribbon Committee and a current Board director for the Society for Professional Social Workers. Tori is a trainer and program designer of men’s behaviour change programs. Currently, she works with clinical teams in Relationships Australia Victoria to reduce violence against women and children.

The past, present and future of maternity leave

By Andrew Fenlon

As a society it’s really important for us to have a steady stream of ‘the next generation’ coming through. The alternative is a society which is steadily aging – and as a result contracting. Governments understand this and have given various incentives to assist in the cost of having children over time.

Currently, the largest financial burden relating to child birth and child caring is carried by women. It is estimated that women having children earn 20% less than the average. Conversely men having children, with their partner undertaking the primary caring for the children get a premium of 15% (not really sure why!) compared to the average.

There are some programs which aim to help women through maternity – such as paid maternity leave and the option for 10 ‘keeping in touch’ days. Unfortunately, these are often not enough – or lack promotion, awareness and consistency.

The position is made worse by some terrible employment practices such as:

  • Making pregnant women redundant either before or during maternity
  • Making the ‘keeping in touch’ days either unknown, difficult or impossible to use
  • Not holding the person’s role open for them so that they cannot return to their previous job
  • Not providing any return to work program for returning mothers
  • Not supporting flexible work – often by requiring a role to be filled 100% by one person working nine-to-five.
  • Upon returning to work should the woman request to do the role part time, often no one is hired to fill the other days, thus the woman does the entire role, in fewer days and is paid a pro-rata salary

Hopefully your organisation is better than this – but we see many instances of the above!

It is no surprise, then, that many women, once having children, do not return to their previous employer. They either look for part time work which might support their caring responsibilities, or they decide to set out on their own.

Caring doesn’t finish when the maternity period stops. Children need support and assistance for many years after being born (in fact many parents still have children living with them into their 20s!) This support includes regular care – but also the unexpected demands when a child is either sick or had an accident. In many instances (personal and professional) the assumption is that the mother will continue to cover the bulk of these duties.

The negative impacts on women because of this approach are significant:

  • They can lack confidence (because they have been out of the work environment for an extended period)
  • They can get caught in a ‘poverty trap’ – the net earnings are less than the cost of child care – so they stay at home or are in a ‘break-even’ scenario
  • They earn less – and this continues throughout the rest of their career
  • They are more likely to work in part time jobs that are below their capability
  • They are often overlooked for promotion into management roles
  • They accumulate less superannuation
  • There is an increased chance of homelessness in older age

Society suffers too. It is estimated that if women could be fully engaged in the workforce, then there would be a 20% increase in GDP. This is larger than any other single sector – it’s three times the size of mining!

As Australians, we need to reconsider where the burden of birth and child-caring lies. The main economic beneficiary is society (children grow up, consume and pay taxes!) – so society should bear more of the cost.

If we want to continue to have a vibrant country where the creation of the next generation of Australians is supported – we need to change things. Fortunately, there are examples from overseas and some forward-thinking organisations that we can use to help us.

A start could include:

  • Recognising that the financial burden of bringing up a child should not all fall on the shoulders of the mother. The father and society need to bear more of the effort and cost
  • Having more open-minded workplaces that allow men to look after their child. Removing the stigma around a man asking to be home with their child
  • Working to the point where child care is substantially funded by the public purse – just like childhood education
  • Providing realistic and enforceable (on the manager) options for the ‘10 keeping in touch days’ (which might well be part days to assist the mother with her caring duties)
  • Ensuring that men are supported by their organisations to be more available for their children – two weeks of paternity leave doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface
  • Ensuring women cannot be retrenched just because they become pregnant
  • Ensuring mothers have the right to a reasonable return to work plan (which might need to be over a period of years) to their previous job
  • Ensuring flexible working options are available to everyone as a default
  • Ensuring organisations offer management positions either as flexible roles or as job shares

I’m not saying that these changes will totally address the current maternity chasm, but if we can start to make these changes, we’ll all be better off!

Andrew Fenlon is the director and co-creator of Women into Leadership. He has over 20 years of international experience in public and private sector organisations. After doing some analyses on what was impacting women and their ability to become leaders, he saw a need to help women – organizationally and individually – thus Women into Leadership was born. As a brand of Fast Track Leadership, Women into Leadership has a range of programs that implement systemic and lasting change at an organizational level so more women can achieve leadership roles. It also provides leadership development programs for individuals.

My Brain made me do it – Exploring unconscious gender bias in the workplace

By Clare Edwards FIML

Let’s start with a brain teaser.

Two judo experts take a bow and the match begins. One is wearing a brown belt the other a black belt. After a long tussle, the black belter player has the most points and is declared the winner, even though during the entire contest no man threw the other to the ground.

How can this be?

Before you read on to the answer, if you haven’t figured it out yet, take a moment to think and reflect.

 

The answer – both judo experts were women.

When you first started reading this riddle what images came to mind? What was your brain making you think?

Let’s explore this a little further. Read the following roles to yourself and be conscious of the images that come to mind:

  • Surgeon
  • Nanny
  • Engineer
  • Midwife
  • Builder
  • Secretary

Despite all the above roles being equally open to both sexes, there’s a good chance your brain assigned a gender to them and you have just demonstrated unconscious gender bias. Why is this?

Before you start castigating yourself for reverting to ‘the obvious’, it’s OK, it just means that you’re human.

Our brains make shortcuts and associations to simplify our complex world where we are inundated with billions of bits of information. When it comes to gender, we have schemas, generalisations and stereotypes borne out of associations we made when growing up.

The reality is, if we have a brain, we are biased. Gender bias is only one of the 150+ biases we have, and it plays out extensively in the workplace both explicitly and implicitly.

Let’s explore some of our unconscious biases with implications in the workplace.

  • Similarity bias. The unconscious belief is “people like me are better than others”. Similarity bias, like many biases, has its roots in evolution where ‘same’ or ‘similar’ equalled safe and ‘different’ equalled possible danger. Our brains default to ‘foe before friend’ (Baumeister 2001) and so our decisions can be unconsciously influenced as we select people for employment, promotion or sidelining based on aspects of similarity such as education, location of upbringing, interests and of course gender.
  • Gender stereotype. Conditioning still exists at an unconscious level and this is further influenced by media portrayals of women as nurturing cooperative home-makers, and men as competitive, competent providers. So, when it comes to making a decision about a certain candidate for a senior role, for example, might this conditioning influence our choice? In one study (Moss-Racusin et al), a science faculty from a university rated the applications of a student who was randomly assigned a male or female name for the position of laboratory manager. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the female, despite identical resumes. They also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant.Symphony orchestras have traditionally been male-dominated until the introduction of blind auditions where a screen was placed between the audition candidate and the selection panel (women were also asked to remove heels that made a noise).  As a direct result, women are now 50% more likely to be selected for a final interview and membership of the orchestra.

What’s the lesson?

Awareness isn’t enough. Why? Because it is neurologically impossible for our brain to decide and, at the same time, be aware if that decision is biased or not.

However, we can implement systems and processes to mitigate gender bias in the workplace.

Reflection and disclosure. Be aware of our own biases when we reflect on decisions made and whether bias came into the process. This helps us to become more aware of our biases. If we courageously disclose them to others, we can achieve greater objectivity.

Transparency and challenge. Whilst it’s hard to see bias in ourselves, we can spot it in others. Once you are familiar with the key biases that impact work performance, aim to be more open in your meetings and create an environment of ‘permission to challenge’ on possible biases.

In BrainSmart’s ‘Getting to Grips with Unconscious Bias’ workshops, we use a model from the Neuroleadership Institute that simplifies and condenses our 150+ biases into five categories using an easy to remember acronym.

Diversity. When making decisions involving gender, it is important to have them reviewed and challenged by a diverse group of people ensuring the greatest degree of objectivity possible.

If you use selection panels consider a diversity of thinking, culture, personality and even people from a different part of the business.

Ask yourself, “If this person were of another gender, what, if any, difference would it make and why?”

Anonymity and neutrality. Because our biases are primarily unconscious, we may not be aware of how our words in job adverts and other communication influence readers. Applications like Textio can help highlight and neutralise our language. In addition, consider removing names from resumes before presenting it to decision-makers.

I work with medium to large organisations and whilst the overall gender balance of the employee base is fairly even, the executive leadership team or the board is another kettle of fish. It’s time to redress the balance don’t you think?

 

Make known the unconscious

Our unconscious biases directly affect not only who gets hired, developed and promoted, but also the ability of teams to perform at a high level, the effectiveness of decision-making and change, the health of an organisation’s culture and the relationship it has with its clients.

By taking steps to mitigate gender bias in the workplace we can move closer to an equal and diverse work environment that has proven to be more productive, engaging and enjoyable.

Let’s make the unconscious conscious.

Clare Edwards is the Principal of BrainSmart Consulting. She is also a speaker, facilitator and author. Clare worked in a team serving Europe, Africa and the Middle East, between them speaking 13 languages – highlighting for her the value of diversity in business. After moving on from her corporate career, she studied the Neuroscience of Leadership – how knowledge of our brains can help us to be more emotionally intelligent and effective leaders and managers.  Clare now consults with organisations from a variety of industry sectors internationally. She helps people effectively manage and lead themselves and others in complex and uncertain business environments.  

Respect your elders and give them a job

By Jane Caro

I am 61 years old. That probably means that I am more or less unemployable in terms of a traditional full-time job. Should my (so far very profitable) sole trader business fail and I put feelers out for employment, I doubt I’d get a nibble.

There’s no real logic behind this fact because I am at the absolute top of my game and I am not finished yet. I have the time, the experience and the maturity to really add value but, in a way, I suspect that is part of the problem. It would take a very confident manager to hire a person like me to work for them.

 

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

Like many skilled and experienced older workers, I am too easily perceived as a threat. There can still be a real awkwardness experienced by a younger manager about dealing with an older subordinate, almost as if it goes against nature.
It can work the other way too. Older workers, who have been there and done that, can be impatient with what younger colleagues see as a brilliant new idea but that they have seen done before, maybe many times before. I doubt there are any really new ideas, just new thinkers.

 

BLEAK OUTLOOK

For older workers who are not seeking management or senior positions, the outlook is just as bleak. The average age of ‘retirement’ for older women is 52 and 58 for men, yet the pension won’t kick in for people who are that age today until they are 67.

Given that the average woman retires with half the super of men (and most male super is also not enough to see them through old age) and a third retire with none at all, what on earth are they living on?

That is one reason I put ‘retirement’ in inverted commas. I suspect most of the people who leave the paid workforce forever in their 50s are not retiring to a life of luxury, cruising the world’s oceans, exotic cocktail in hand. I suspect they are being forced out of their jobs and are taking early ‘retirement’ reluctantly. No wonder the fastest growing group among the homeless are women over 55.

Some older workers are taking their redundancy payments and – if they have it – cash in lieu of long service leave and buying themselves a business. The number of older people I see running small franchises like lawn mowing companies, domestic cleaning services, ironing services and courier companies is revealing.

While many may enjoy their time in small business, I doubt it was their lifelong dream to do such work. For older workers who were employed in jobs that are demanding physically – plumbers, brickies, nurses, even childcare workers – their ageing bodies may simply not allow them to stay in their chosen profession.

 

TWO HINTS

Yet surely this is easily fixed? We have an ageing population – so we need to keep as many people in the workforce as we possibly can – and it doesn’t take much adjustment to do just that.

Hint 1: stop making older employees the first on the chopping block every time there’s a round of redundancies.

Hint 2: take the best qualified person for the job, even (maybe especially) if they are older.

We have young parents – both male and female – desperate to work less hours, and experienced, older workers often desperate to work more. How hard can it be to put those two together?

 

GREAT MANAGERS HIRE GREAT PEOPLE

Yes, managers must become more confident about hiring people with skills and experience that may exceed their own – but surely that is what defines the best managers? That they have the ability and confidence to hire great people and then get out of their way and let them do what they do best. And, yes, we might have to give physical workers occupations that are more sedentary.

But most of all we need to get over our prejudices about ageing and that older people are somehow lesser people – not as smart, agile or able to master new skills the way they once could. There is simply no actual evidence for that.

Business is very outspoken about diversity these days, particularly when it comes to making sure they have teams that include women, people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds or with different sexual orientation and gender identity, but the one group we still mostly shy away from are those who are older.

And, if you think about it, while all discrimination against a group of human beings is stupid, discrimination against someone simply because they have lived a little longer than you have is the dumbest form there is. After all, if you discriminate against older people, one day you may find you have been discriminating against your future self.

Jane Caro runs her own communications consultancy. She worked in the advertising industry for 30 years and is now an author, journalist, lecturer and media commentator.

This article appeared in December 2018’s Leadership Matters. Exclusive to IML ANZ Members, Leadership Matters is the region’s only specialist management and leadership magazine.

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