Unconscious Bias, Untested Assumptions, and Unexpected Surprises
So, today, I am super delighted to set this little diary series of mine in motion. It’s essentially to give you, my friends and professional networks, a hands-on sense of the everyday life of a former “comfortable” employee who now “happily”, and sometimes, “sadly and painfully”, gets his hands pretty dirty in the trenches, frequently juggling a 100 balls in the air 7 days a week (from simple things like a generator running out of fuel amidst frequent power outages and fuel scarcity, to the office roof leaking helplessly in the middle of a heavy downpour directed your way by all the witches in your village, to the daily travails of constantly navigating highly “integrity-scarce” business jungles riddled with hungry tigers and greedy hyenas brazenly lurking around to pounce on any sitting duck!).
A note of caution early on, however: I will quite often, and rightly so, anonymize, fictionalize, or creatively shuffle some details to preserve confidentiality/privacy, but hopefully, still intrinsically preserve the tangibly inherent substance of the message (which is basically the main thrust of this series: to possibly help someone out there to glean one or two things that may potentially help them along the way professionally or while pivoting to their own business).
Having gotten the boring parts out of the way, let’s get the wheels spinning off the garage!
So, earlier this week, a new member of our team had flagged that they had noticed that colleagues weren’t using external keyboards, given that almost everyone was using an external monitor. I was somewhat surprised, and I had to swiftly leave the conference room to go round the various desks to definitively confirm that myself. As it turned out, albeit embarrassingly in the moment, he was absolutely bang on the money! Hmnnnnnnn. I frantically glanced at our IT/tech focal points in the meeting; time literally froze for what had seemed like eternity…
Should we get keyboards across board for everyone? “Yes, of course”; “no, I am fine as-is”. Okay. Next. Should we get wired or wireless keyboards? “Yes, wired for me”; “wireless please!”. Noted. Next. What color of keyboards? The room was divided. With or without number lock? Again, divided. What’s more, I also heard things like: “I only want one if its surface is flat so typing doesn’t get clunky”. Okay. Okay. I got it! After all, democracy isn’t always the best solution to every political situation. This should be simple: I should just work with one IT focal point and get this killed and buried so we could all move on to serious work. Easy-peasy, or so I had thought.
Let’s say my IT guy’s name is Irorobeje. Funnily enough, Irorobeje himself preferred the wired keyboards and tried buying me over on them; I undoubtedly wanted wireless. Period. He wanted the version with number lock; I didn’t see a problem with the smaller ones without it. He wanted no other color aside black; ah! Finally! Agreeing on the color was like the subtle relief you get when your partner, a die-hard fan of home-made, firewood-tasty-like, owambe-party-like, sweet jollof rice and fried croaker fish, happily joins you to eat fried rice and “it’s-chicken-but-it-doesn’t-look-like-chicken” chicken at your favorite cheap, fast-food restaurant when you are dead broke and there is only a single digit number preceding the comma (,) in your bank balance. But we needed to get over 10 keyboards. So, which ones should we go for??????
So, we returned them to get all wireless ones. But there was yet another problem: the vendor had only white keyboards left in stock. Between Irorobeje and me, it was a deal breaker. A white keyboard? NO WAY! Yuk yuk. Anyway, we reluctantly, and even grudgingly, agreed for 7 white ones to be supplied. “Who would agree to use the white keyboards?”, I kept wondering. A thought came to my head: “why not try selling the whites as though they were sweeter than the now-very-popular-hot Market Square bread?” So, I went to the open office and took the white keyboards to the ladies. I had barely uttered a word. The moment they sighted the white keyboards, all I heard was: “oh my God. This is beautiful. This is lovely. Wow. Please, can I swap my black for this white?” This lifeeeeee is beautifullllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. The ladies took the whites. The dudes took the blacks. Problem solved.
We eventually settled for 5 wired ones with number lock and 5 wireless ones without number lock so everyone could make a choice eventually (and hopefully, too! Wink wink). ALL BLACK, of course (no other color was up for discussion here). Astonishingly, when the keyboards arrived in the office, almost everyone fell in love with the nimble, sleek wireless ones (including those who had almost figuratively sworn there must be a cold day in hell before they could use one!). What’s more, those were without number lock even; they didn’t even mention that at all at this point. Now, we had a new problem: we had 5 wired ones nobody wanted.
"This Lifeeeeeee is Beautiful"
Back in my office, I sat there momentarily just pondering over how this very little thing had thrown up many distilled insights and lessons about the dynamics of a highly diverse workplace, even in a very small organization such as ours. Later, as I was going out to use the convenience, one of the ladies said: “Isaac, thank you very much. I just love this keyboard so much. It has made working for me so much fun!”. Wow. Wow. Wow. The same staff was the loudest voice in the room against a keyboard the day before!
Moral of the Story:
Unconscious bias is real. As leaders particularly, we need to not only be mindful of it, we should be MORE intentional about illuminating those blind spots and cobwebs when making certain assumptions or making decisions. Prejudice is the number one enemy of objectivity. Don’t confidently believe you know what your employees or colleagues truly need (or want) because, interestingly at times, even they themselves may not truly know until…the real choices are in front of them! And letting them make the choice themselves, at times (with emphasis here, please), can save you a lot of…(feel free to fil the blank!)
Follow me on LinkedIn @Isaac Audu-Usman to read my future diary series
IAU
“Enterim le purie quantum…”
"This Lifeeeeeee is Beautiful"
Back in my office, I sat there momentarily just pondering over how this very little thing had thrown up many distilled insights and lessons about the dynamics of a highly diverse workplace, even in a very small organization such as ours. Later, as I was going out to use the convenience, one of the ladies said: “Isaac, thank you very much. I just love this keyboard so much. It has made working for me so much fun!”. Wow. Wow. Wow. The same staff was the loudest voice in the room against a keyboard the day before!