Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact Show, Dr. Jim interviews Sejal Thakkar, an expert in unconscious bias and creating inclusive workplaces. They discuss the importance of tapping into the power of each individual on a team to build a high-performance team. Sejal shares her personal experiences with bias and discrimination and how they have shaped her career. She emphasizes the need for organizations to go beyond compliance-driven training and instead focus on customized training and coaching to create positive, safe, and respectful workplaces. They also discuss the impact of bias in various stages of the employee life cycle and the importance of diversity at all levels of an organization.

Key Takeaways:

• Tapping into the human stories of each team member is the path to sustained high performance.
• Unconscious bias affects everyone and is influenced by our cultures, surroundings, and experiences.
• Organizations should focus on customized training and coaching to address bias and create inclusive cultures.
• Diversity should be embraced at all levels of an organization, including decision-making bodies.
• Self-awareness, using tools like the Implicit Association Test, and seeking feedback from others can help individuals identify and mitigate their own biases.

Chapters:

00:01:00 Background on Sejal Thakkar and her mission to create respectful workplaces

00:06:00 The impact of bias on Sejal's career and her transition to entrepreneurship

00:10:00 The negative connotation of the word "bias" and the need for education

00:14:00 Bias in the employee life cycle and the need for prevention

00:18:00 Mitigating bias through learning and understanding

00:22:00 Moving from compliance to effective training

00:26:00 Importance of addressing bias before it escalates to illegal behavior

00:31:00 Creating structured and inclusive processes in organizations

00:36:00 Using the Implicit Association Test to uncover unconscious biases

00:39:00 People-first mentality for building high-performance teams

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Sejal Thakkar: linkedin.com/in/sejalthakkar

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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To building a high performance team. If you're not tapping into the power of each individual on your team, you'll have a lot of challenges in getting traction. Tapping into the human stories of each of your team members is the path to sustained high performance. That's the philosophy that centers Sejal Thakkar.

and drives us forward. So who is Sejal? So let me give you a little bit of background on Sejal. She's on a mission to educate and empower people and create a world where everyone is treated with dignity and respect. She's a former employment law attorney, a two time TEDx speaker, and the founder and chief civility officer at Train Extra.

Sejal. Welcome to the show.

Sejal Thakkar: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to talking about a very important topic to me today.

Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to the topic too, because it intersects in a lot of different areas that that I regularly talk about. I describe myself as a megaphone for DEIB and DEIB messengers and practitioners. So there's going to be an element of the conversation that I'm I'm going to be digging deep in.

But before we dive into the conversation, I know that I covered a fair bit of ground on your bio. But I think the first thing that would be helpful is for you to get our listeners up to speed on any of the things that we didn't talk about in your bio. That's going to lend some context to the conversation that we're going to have.

And this goes all the way back to the beginning, right? My parents are immigrants from India. They moved here in the seventies. And I grew up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in a suburb of Chicago. And my parents were as traditional as it comes, they barely spoke English when they came here.

And growing up. Was not as easy as I would have liked because at home, my parents were, we they were eating Indian food, they were wearing Indian clothes. It was like living back in India. And then outside the house, it was being in America and embracing the American culture. So I really had a duality of the Indian and American cultures at play as I was growing up.

My career and the work that I do now.

Dr. Jim: When you talk through some of the experiences that you had when you were growing up I immediately connected to it because I come from the same Indian background. When you're describing, speaking the native language at home and then English out in the world absorbed in the culture at home and then trying to integrate into the culture externally, all of that stuff connected.

The one question that I have about that experience that I'm curious about is I don't know if you experienced this in your upbringing, but. My immigrant upbringing was keep your head down, get good grades, blend in and try to assimilate. And that created some conflict where never really felt like I fit in the American crowd and I definitely didn't fit in the Indian crowd.

Sejal Thakkar: My experience was the same as yours. I and that's really in my second TEDx talk. That's really the topic I focused in on was feeling excluded growing up. And like you said, not feeling like you fit in or that you belong to either culture. And, just feeling like you're always letting everybody else down.

And you're trying to please everyone, but you're not making anyone happy, so that definitely resonates with me. I talk about this one incident in my first TEDx talk where, somebody had left a note on my locker door, and they said, go back to your country. And that's just one example of the bias that I was dealing in, but I'll bring that, I'll tie that into what we're talking about is when that happened and how my parents responded to that situation and how that made me feel even more left out.

You're just trying to navigate through the pain, through the isolation, through the exclusion on your own. And so that's why I really wanted to do the second talk was to highlight two things that, you know, even when we don't have the resources as children, especially children of immigrant. Parents and don't have those resources that there still is things that we can do, that we can take our control back and how I went about doing that.

But that situation of go back to your country, that was a turning point for me, because at this point now I've been dealing with this type of behavior for several years now of not feeling, it wasn't just a one time event, right? This was the one that finally was the one that put me over the edge, right?

It was really that we were not like everybody else in this town. And that was the main difference.

Dr. Jim: We could spend a lot of time swapping stories about weird stuff that happened. I came here during the when Indiana Jones had just recently and the Temple of Doom had recently hit the theaters. So I'm part of the feral Gen X generation. So we couldn't even bring up those sort of conversations to my parents because they were busy working.

And I was more or less raising my younger sister . Your point about the loneliness is pretty pretty interesting because I think A lot of immigrants can relate regardless of where the point of origin is. When I think about your trajectory is You are an employment, law attorney and then Period of time passed and you've, transitioned into these multiple entrepreneurial positions.

Sejal Thakkar: When I started off my litigation career, I was an employment law attorney. So I was representing leaders that were actually accused of harassment discrimination. So that was a big pivot, right? Because I think when you hear about my story and what I went through as a child, as a little girl the bias that I dealt with the prejudice, the discrimination, I think most people would probably expect that I would have been one representing victims.

And I actually ended up doing the opposite, right? And that, that's really something significant in part of my journey, because I got to see bias from a whole different perspective and realize that bias is not one dimensional, it's multidimensional and we're all basically vulnerable to it, susceptible to it and victims to it because of the, our, cultures, our surroundings, our workplaces, our religions and so on.

Had we gotten in as HR, Or as leaders in that organization and properly coach that person in the right way and gave them some education on why that was a microaggression, why that could be harmful to somebody else, then a lot of these lawsuits would have never ended up in court. And so I found myself.

But how do I flip that? I want to get involved before I want to be involved proactively so we can help create or help organizations create those cultures where those types of behaviors are less or that we can mitigate those types of behaviors from happening. So I started doing that. And so I'm still an employment law attorney.

I'm still licensed in California. But I started doing more of that on the side. And then when my son was born. I made a decision that I wanted to be at home with my son. And so I started my hustle part of my career at that point where I started working from home. I started teaching at some universities.

Dr. Jim: One of the things that I'd like to have you expand on. So [00:10:00] we've talked about, bias in general, the dimensions of bias that exists within the organization, you actually brought up microaggressions. And there's going to be probably not in this audience, but there's going to be some component of the audience that hears all this stuff.

And probably reacts to it in a pretty negative way and says something to the effect of, Oh, this is all just soft, grievance mongering stuff for people that are looking to get a shortcut to a payoff. Why is that flawed thinking when it comes to building a high performing team ?

Sejal Thakkar: You hit that sore point right there because bias, that word in and of itself is a buzzword,. The reality is that we all have unconscious biases,. People, places, or things. It could be a positive bias. It's just another word for preference, .

So we can't move the needle until people understand what bias is. And that, that really is what led to me doing my first TEDx talk, because I realized As I had learned about bias so late in my career, I learned about what unconscious bias was way late into my legal career, and that was really frustrating for me because I'm like, wait a second, I'm making all kinds of decisions, important decisions every day as an attorney that are impacting people's lives.

If you have a brain, you have bias, and that we have to work intentionally to recognize it in and of ourselves so we can grow beyond our preconditioning. And as I started doing this work, I realized, wait a second, there is a huge. Lack of awareness, education, and information out there on what it is and how it works.

And the more I did it, the more I realized that people just don't realize how it basically runs our lives and it impacts every single decision that we make. And it can lead to very harmful outcomes. Prejudice and hate, unless we start to recognize it within ourselves. And so it's one of those situations where it's we can't solve this problem until we start talking about it.

Dr. Jim: there's one particular aspect of it that you reference that I think it's really important to call out and you use the phrase conditioning. And when we look at conditioning in relationship to bias, whether it's conscious or unconscious, it's baked in to the American media ecosystem.

If you think about it. And I don't know if your experience is going to exactly align with mine, but there's from the time that we're growing up where we're given this narrative about what we're supposed to like, what we're not supposed to like, who's the good team, who's the bad team, what's the force for freedom and what's the force for tyranny and a lot of this stuff in the macro scale.

So I want to dig in a little bit further in this particular area. So you mentioned. Some, far end of the scale of how bias can show up and that's, hate and racism and all that sort of stuff, but it shows up in some pretty insidious ways when you think about the employee life cycle. Now, when you were going through your journey. You started asking yourself the question, why are we taking this to litigation? There's a lot of things that you could have done beforehand that prevented that from happening. So I'd like you to share with us some of the ways that bias exists in various areas of the employee life cycle, like talent traction or promotion and what people can do.

Sejal Thakkar: Just to get everybody on the same page, when we're talking about bias, it's the attitudes, it's the stereotypes that can impact. Our own understanding, our actions, our decisions,. It's not about whether you're a good person or a bad person.

So I want to make that very clear. It impacts everybody, no matter how well intentioned you are. We're all vulnerable to it. And really it's a product of these are snap judgments we make, because of the. The flood of information that's constantly coming at us so they've done a ton of research in this area and neuroscience has come a long way in the last decade,.

So we see somebody. We may not know anything about them, but we see them visually and our brain is already making all these judgments about that person because of what we see. And some of those things could be about the way the person's skin color is, their gender, their age, their race. It could be anything.

The kind of music you listen to, the kind of It doesn't even have to be your primary layers of diversity. It can literally be anything, your accent, how your hair is,. It could be anything at all. And so when you talk about how it can impact the employee life side, it impacts every single stage of the employee life cycle, and that's why it's so important to understand that.

So there are these quick, these judgments that we make about people based on our own limited life experiences that really at work can give certain people unearned advantages. And yet other people can get unearned disadvantages,. So I'll just give you one example, when we talk about the employee life cycle, we know that organizations that are, that care about diversity, which if you don't now, you're pretty, you're not going to last for long, .

But we understand the business case for diversity was made decades ago, . So organizations that recognize that they're. We're only as good as our employees. We spend a lot of time and resources on getting the most talented individuals in the door. But let's say now you haven't addressed bias in your interviewing process.

They may not give it enough weight, . They may assume that I'm not qualified for the job because they don't know where I'm from or whether I speak the language just based on my name. There's tons of research out here that says if you have a name, that's ethnic sounding. Or Can be associated with a certain race or ethnicity, you're less likely to get a call back or to get, have your resume even reviewed.

So we have to do that work, but also to look at it from an organizational standpoint, to go through and look at all your processes. Your procedures to make sure that you're identifying where those biases might live so that you can then put into play strategies. Now, since every organization is different, where I'm going with this, that there's no one size.

Every organization is going to have this bias. Now we know certain areas that are more vulnerable than others that we can start with, . But I think the other point I want to make too is yes, there's a lot of talk about diversity. And we want diversity, but I want to point out for people that are watching or listening to this, that one really good way of mitigating bias is to embrace diversity at every level of your organization, .

So I'm talking about background experiences and diversity of thought, . So you have to look at diversity from a broader perspective, not just your Primary layers of diversity. And when you do that, then you have people that think differently than each other, that are going to feel more comfortable challenging status quo.

So that's a really good way to start mitigating the biases that exist in your entire organization.

Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm I agree. There's a reason why I usually put myself on mute when the guest is speaking, because your point about embedding diversity at all levels of the organization, that is a critical point that I think a lot of organizations still get wrong.

So when you're looking at the issue of how do we get an organization that's diverse at all levels, it signals to that ground floor employee from an underrepresented community that, hey, there's someone like me at the highest levels of leadership. So I have space to be who I am. Versus somebody that is in the background, not trying to rock the boat too much.

So I think that's a really important thread to call out. Really great conversation so far. Sage. Oh, I think we've set the stage pretty well, but one of the things that, that I'm really curious about is.

Let's just be in compliance and get this out of the way. So we're not putting putting ourselves at risk. Why is that the wrong mindset to be in when you're looking at solving these problems?

And this report literally spelled out and became my business plan because it said. What we've been doing all this time has not worked. And the reason why it's worked is because it is for that compliance reason, . We need to take this beyond compliance. We need to provide people with generalized civility training.

There's tons of benefits, innovation, creativity enhanced decision making, employee engagement, less lawsuits, talent retentment, customers get are happier higher morale, . Higher psychological safety. There's lots of reasons why we want diversity, but there are challenges that come along with it, .

So we start. Stereotyping which can now make people feel excluded, make people feel left out because now they feel uncomfortable. And then pretty soon misunderstandings and conflicts can occur if we don't manage these issues that are popping up. A lot of what ends up happening is unconscious bias starts to creep in into this process when you have people that are different than each other.

Unless we understand what our own unconscious bias is, we can't mitigate it. So the problem with this compliance training is they don't understand. They don't go into detail about what unconscious bias is. What they do is they tell you what the law is. They tell you what the definitions are and they tell you what to do.

Tailored plan to address those nuanced issues that you can't just, you can't just cover in the check in the box training, . Because if you don't cover those issues, what's going to end up happening is you're going to have conflict. And that's where the lawsuits will start up, . So that report, again, it's an EEOC report.

And then when you start talking about compliance. Which really is, if you think about it, is requiring [00:26:00] organizations to do the bare minimum so that they meet the legal requirements. And again, I'm taking the exact opposite approach. I'm saying, let's not wait till it gets to be illegal behavior. Let's start addressing this earlier on.

So when somebody engages in a microaggression, or even if it's Some rude or insensitive behavior. Let's start putting people on notice in a Respectful professional way because the problem in these situations, especially when you're dealing with these nuanced bias Situations is first of all, the person doesn't realize They're engaging in behavior that's harmful.

So we can't go at it from the approach of tell HR about it and have them deal with it. This requires more of a coaching type of mindset. And so everybody needs to know how to do that, not just HR. So let's say for example, if you and I are working together, and you make a gender related comment. So this is, I'll just give you the example.

One of them automatically just said, Hey, Sejal can take notes for us. I don't know this person, . Why is this individual assuming that I could be that person to take notes? Because of gender stereotypes, . Women, typically, or maybe it was because I'm a minority. I don't really know why, . But I was put in that situation, and this isn't the first time that's happened to me, .

It's happened many times. Even in my legal career, I've had things, people saying, oh you don't look like a lawyer. Again, that's a stereotype. So lawyers are supposed to look a certain way, . There's certain norms of success that we're used to. So these are just examples. So now, because that person said that, of course it's stung, .

And let's say I don't, it's not my responsibility to say something to that person because I'm the one that just got harmed. It's literally the other three other two people that were in that meeting. It's one of their responsibilities to speak up and say, Hey, why are you asking her to take notes?

Why don't you take notes? Or here, I'll take notes this time. And somebody else could take notes next time. An example of how people just don't know how to speak up. I did have a conversation with that person offline because I care about that person and I wanted to let them know. So they don't do that to somebody else who might not be so kind in that situation.

Dr. Jim: there's something that you mentioned in those examples that I think we should flush out before we wind down the conversation. One was your comment that whenever you decide to go in and solve for these issues, an organizational leader shouldn't be looking at a cookie cutter plan or a templated plan.

When you look at line level managers, they're often the least trained out of the management tier within an organization. So when you think about mitigating issues of bias. Solving for better employee retention. Does it make the most sense to focus at the line level manager and then train them up? So you're actually building that leadership tier or do you advocate for a different approach,

This is a perfect example of an organization that I'm currently working with right now to help them. Create cultural strategies and processes. And so we were looking at, our processes and how we're hiring, how we're promoting, how we're going to be doing performance evaluations to make sure that these processes are based on clear criteria and objective metrics so that we can minimize that subjective judgment, .

So words matter and they could perpetuate stereotypes,. And then the other thing I'll point out is that now we have so much access to data,. So use your data to drive your metrics and benchmarks. So assess. Look at what the decisions that are being made to see if they're fair and objective.

And so the way I tell leaders is when you're making decisions, whether it's hiring or promoting or firing someone, you have to think about it from the perspective of if I've got Sejal as a lawyer questioning my decisions a month from now, three years from now, Can I justify my decision? Can I make it so that she'll know that I didn't make this based on my bias or my subjective judgment That i'm using it based on data that there's a structured and inclusive process that i'm relying on that is consistently applied Across the board, .

Cause not everybody, like you said, a lot of us were told to keep our head down, work hard and move up. So not everybody's going to be comfortable bringing it up in a meeting. Do we encourage that? Do we try to say, it's a safe environment. No matter how much you do that, sometimes people are just not going to be because of their personality or because of their upbringing.

So you want to make sure you have mechanisms that not only are there for if I want to get someone in trouble or disciplinary type, But there might be situations where I don't want to get someone in trouble, but I need this behavior addressed,. So you want to have mechanisms that are not just going to lead to some kind of discipline But they're going to lead to some kind of coaching.

They're not feeling safe to do that. The other thing I think that's very important that I want to make sure that we talk about here too, is start small, . It's, you can't, it's not like you can review every single process and policy that you have all at once. Pick the important ones, . So if you're talking about talent retention, let's start there and start working on that while you're looking at what are some of the other areas that you need to focus in on.

I think sometimes people get overwhelmed. And it becomes overwhelming Oh wait, we've been around for 20 years. What are you telling me? I got to go through every single, and that's not what we're saying, but look at situations where it's going to have the biggest impact and start there as you start to mitigate your bias within your organization.

Dr. Jim: Awesome stuff. Sage old. Weren't kidding when you said that we could probably talk about this for a while. And there is a lot of nuance and this is not a simple solution that that somebody can actually go and execute on.

Sejal Thakkar: The 1st step really is for all leaders and team members to really start thinking about making that commitment to where is my own hidden biases, . Make that commitment to learn about it. And so the first thing is one of the best practices that I like to share with people is self awareness.

Start noticing whenever you're having an extremely positive or negative reaction to somebody that you're interacting with at work, and to start to ask yourself why am I having this reaction to this person? And again, those strong reactions, whether it's positive or negative. So one of the things we see happening over and over again.

So that's the first step. The second thing is, there's a tool that I recommend everybody use. It's online. It's called the Implicit Association Test. It was an on, it was a tool that was created as a result of a collaboration from a lot of psychologists from Harvard, from University of Virginia. University of Washington.

And it really just helps you identify your hidden biases. What are your natural preferences because of what you've gone through, what you've lived through in your life. So it's a self awareness tool. And let me just tell you, you'll learn so much about your hidden biases. And the reason why doing this work is so important.

Now, standing here today, I'm out there advocating for diversity and inclusion, so that goes against. The very essence of what I'm out there talking about, but I still have that bias because of what I went through, I can't change what I went through, but I can be aware of it. So when I have that reaction, I can stop and say, wait a second, check that bias at the door.

So you'll learn so much about yourself when you take this online tool that you can start paying attention to and make sure you're not going to treat this person differently because of your hidden bias. And then the third tool I'll share with everybody that's listening is here's the thing about our unconscious bias,

So sit down and have a conversation with somebody that will tell you the truth and ask them and say, Hey, when I make important decisions about who to hire, who to promote, or make important decisions on who I interact with, do you think I'm biased in any way? And just be ready for what they'll tell you because they'll pick they're picking up on your biases, even though they're hidden from you.

So again, three tools to help you start doing that work, because until you know about what your biases are, we can't even get to the part of the conversation about how you're going to mitigate those biases.

Sejal Thakkar: I'm very active on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always putting out resources on this topic that can be helpful. And then the second place would be on my website, train extra. com. And it's T R a I N X, T R a. com.

Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out with us, Sejal. When I think about the conversation that we had, there's a lot of things that stand out, but there's a few things that I want to highlight that I think is going to be important for listeners to take away from the conversation. When I opened the show I referenced. The point that taking a compliance driven approach is probably the wrong path to building a high performance team. And here's what I mean by that. When you're looking at impacting any change, and especially change that involves deconstructing bias and building an organization that has embedded DEIB across the entire organization.

So you need to take a custom approach. When you're looking at executing this kind of change. The other thing that stands out about the things that you mentioned, Sejal, is that you emphasize the coaching first. Mindset and that's important to call out because when you take the compliance route compliance isn't too far away from punishment So if you're doing a compliance and punishment approach to organizational development You're not going to get a lot of people that are going to be living the mission that you want them to live So if you apply that coaching first mindset, you're going to have better connectivity between The stated mission and values of the organization and how the work is done and how successful you are Across these dimensions that [00:40:00] we're talking about.

I appreciate you sharing with us. For those of you who have been listening to the conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. If you liked where this went, make sure you reach out to say, Joe, leave us a review and then tune in next time where we'll have another great leader joining us to share with us the game changing insights that helped them build a high performing team.