#5 - Biggest bias at Workplace
Bias waiting in silence, AI trends this week and more
Welcome to another week of ResidualHue. This week, I have two updates – Biggest bias at workplace in our startup culture topic and AI updates of this week.
The Biggest Bias at Workplace
As a manager, I have always wondered about the gap between the best performer in the team and the person perceived as the best performer by outside stakeholders. I have taken steps to ensure stakeholders recognise the critical contributions of everyone. This brings us to this week's topic: one of the strongest biases I have noticed in companies, the "quick thinking bias" or the "fast talker bias."
This bias favours individuals who can articulate their thoughts rapidly and respond quickly in conversations or decision-making processes. It may lead to undervaluing the contributions of individuals who require more time for thoughtful reflection or who express themselves at a slower pace.
Expressing and promoting your work is not inherently wrong. However, it's essential to back it up with your skills and effort. If someone is truly skilled and drives meaningful outcomes, it becomes crucial to find ways to effectively communicate their achievements. In this context, I want to emphasise the misconception of equating making "noise" with greatness.
Think about your last weekly review, product demo to executives, or leadership review meeting. During these moments, you have a short time to deliver condensed progress or strategy. Though the meeting constitutes only 5% of your work, it contributes more than 50% to how others perceive your work and impacts your career growth. Unfortunately, I have witnessed performance calibration discussions favour those who were the most vocal, articulate, and forceful in presentations, even if their work outcome was objectively weaker.
Fair or not, human nature unconsciously favours those who can communicate quickly and think on their feet. We subconsciously use this as a proxy for performance and intelligence. Consequently, extroverted individuals, fluent English speakers, those with speech and debate training, and those who can think and speak spontaneously receive preference. In my experience conducting about 500 interviews, I have seen many candidates rejected due to their lack of English proficiency, resulting in a perception of lacking in the thinking process.
I have known teammates who possess amazing insights but take time to process, ponder, and communicate. By the time they have something to say, the meeting agenda has moved on, resulting in others perceiving them as less intelligent or unopinionated. Though they were the most amazing engineers I have worked with, no one outside the team knows about it. It is the responsibility of both the leader and the engineer to figure out a way. It is not enough to add value if no one knows about it. As non-native English speakers, most of us usually think in our mother tongue and then translate it into English in our minds, which adds a delay. It took me a lot of reading, listening, and years of practice to think in English rather than in Tamil.
For better or worse, this imbalance is something we all have to grapple with in our diverse workplaces, particularly in India where English has become the de facto communication language. The question is, how can we overcome this invisible bias? It is important to recognise and challenge such biases to ensure fair and inclusive communication and decision-making. This bias is institutional against the individuals but the solution should be multi-fold which needs help from manager, colleagues and initiatives by the individual. Here are a few suggestions:
If you are the silent one, prepare to speak:
Speaking up is a skill that can be learned. With practice, you will gain confidence and surprise yourself with how effectively you can communicate.
Join organisations like Toastmasters, related groups to improve your communication skills and gain valuable feedback. Try reading novels, stories, and online articles which will improve your comprehension.
Set goals for speaking up in meetings and prepare comments ahead of time to feel ready to contribute.
Do writing. Start with writing your feedback. Once your peers understand your value add, they will reach out for your views in future.
Avoid the trap of imposter syndrome. This is very personal to me and I will write it as a full post in the coming weeks.
Leaders and Managers, optimise your process:
Encourage equal participation by going around the room and giving each person time to speak.
Emphasise the value of talking during one-on-one conversations and also inform the individual that you intend to call their name out in the future meetings forcing them to face the fear and be prepared.
Create a safe space within the team or organisation for people to express their thoughts and ideas.
Encourage sharing of pre-reading materials ahead of meetings so that people can come prepared with questions and comments to meetings. This is probably my best learning from my amazon days.
Already great at communication? Help your buddies:
Extend support to those who are less comfortable with communication. Give them airtime and prepare them for discussions.
Seek opinions from silent team members to gain valuable insight and strengthen relationships.
As a self-identified introvert, in recent years, I have found myself capable of making connections and thinking fast during meetings but it took years of practice, and I compensated for my language limitations through data insights. I always prepare for a meeting by going through a data dashboard relevant to that meeting. However, even now, if I need to speak in front of a public audience, I take 10 minutes to write down my thoughts and practice them before the talk. Sometimes, I still feel out of my depth, concerned about saying something wrong or irrelevant but now I know I can work on it and aim to do better the next time.
As leaders, we have the ability to make the playing field more equal, and as colleagues, we can vouch for our team members. If you're a natural introvert, take small steps today to make your voice heard and your perspective known.
The hidden bias toward extroverts in the workplace is not fair, but unfortunately, it exists in many places. Regardless of your role, you have the power to decide whether to ignore this bias or take action. The choice is yours.
On the work front, AI is making significant strides in accelerated development.
Interesting updates in AI
The pace of AI development can be intimidating. Whenever I look at an image now, I can't help but wonder if it was generated by a machine. Even prominent figures in AI are concerned about the rapid progress and have signed a letter pledging to work on responsible AI. You can read the letter here: link to the open letter.
Google has recently launched a suite of development tools as part of their Vertex AI product line, which provides strong support for generative AI. You can find more information about these tools and their features in the release notes. I've personally found their platform to be excellent and have started exploring it this week.
Interestingly, during the recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), there was barely any mention of generative AI throughout the entire presentation. Sometimes, what is not said can reveal a lot about a company's focus and direction.
In another development, Facebook's Multilingual Multi Speaker Speech (MMS) technology now supports over 1100 languages with a comparatively low error rate. This breakthrough has the potential to revolutionise speech technology. You can learn more about it in Facebook's official announcement: link to the announcement.
The world of AI is rapidly evolving, with both exciting advancements and important considerations for responsible development. As an experiment, we tried to create a chat indexed with all exciting startup related articles and created a chatbot. Do check it out at https://buddy.ensoview.com/startups
Stay tuned for more updates on these fascinating developments.