A Playbook for Disrupting Bias

1. DO YOUR OWN DIAGNOSTIC

• Field a survey among your employees, using ACE or your own criteria for assessing potential.

• Identify respondents whose assessments of their own potential are higher than the assessments from their managers.

2. UNDERSTAND WHAT THE DIAGNOSTIC IS TELLING YOU

• Examine talent cohorts of interest to your company (e.g. foreign nationals, African Americans, veterans) to learn where bias lurks.

• Conduct an inquiry to get the context for counterintuitive findings.

• Apply filters to test whether employees with sponsors, inclusive leaders and/or diverse division leaders are least likely to perceive ACE bias in your corporate context.

3. DISRUPT

Prioritize the roll-out of interventions based on the cohorts with the deepest needs.

Expand leadership archetypes

• Hire and promote candidates who embody difference.

• Codify and socialize company standards and expectations.

• Implement a ‘tone from the top’ that endorses a variety of acceptable approaches to leadership.

• Create role model videos and playbooks of executives in action, featuring a diversity of leadership styles and backgrounds.

Train managers to be inclusive leaders

• Introduce managers to the six behaviours that prompt everyone to contribute ideas and communicate openly with managers and colleagues.

• Ensure everyone gets heard: train managers in dialogue skills.

• Build accountability and incentives into annual performance reviews on the six inclusive leader behaviours.

Build a culture of sponsorship

• Educate and incentivize leaders to sponsor others.

• Educate rising stars on how to be stellar protégés.

• Create opportunities for diverse talent to show their leadership potential.

• Make leaders who sponsor diverse talent more visible.

4. RE-FIELD THE DIAGNOSTIC

Identify where your map has ‘cooled’, and where bias lingers. Disrupt again.