Setting Yourselves Aside

Striving for fairness in judgement

I’ve long been an advocate for distributing the work of staff management as much as possible. This can create strong initial bonds between new team members and the existing team. Having the team make the final call who is able to join means that everyone has ‘skin in the game’ for making it work. This is good.

Unfortunately, getting more people involved also means that there are more opportunities for decision-making to be tainted by prejudice. This is true of any hiring process, and many organizations have adopted severe systemization in order to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Now, I don’t think the systemization approach really solves the problem, but that’s not what I want to focus on for the time being. No, I want to discuss the challenge that my recommended approach presents: how do I help my team get into the correct mindset, and minimize the effect of prejudice on hiring decisions? Indeed, what distinguishes inappropriate prejudice from appropriate judgement?

Well, that means clearly enumerating the criteria we hire for and criteria that we render inadmissible or inappropriate. This is not going to get into the legal requirements regarding these criteria per se, so don’t expect to be able to take these lists and work from them without further vetting — these are just here for working through the problem.

I prefer to work on teams that have high-contact collaboration — where actively working with a person for hours on end is the norm rather than the exception. So given that, my team might hire for:

• Having the skill-set currently required (using a few different measures)
• Being able to successfully collaborate (in particular, with this team)
• Willingness to follow the office rules, and where disagreement about rules comes up, be willing to work within the rules to enact change.

So basically — be able to do the work, play nice with others, and roll with it when you don’t get your way. It’s a nice short list that captures a lot — and honestly, even though the list is short it is still very hard to correctly select for those traits.

Given this list, the first self-tests for prejudicial thinking are:

• Am I really being fair in my assessment of their skills? How do I know?
• Am I seeing truly destructive collaborative failure? Or am I reacting to unrelated signals?
• Am I seeing similarities to other people from my past and projecting old conflicts onto this person?
• Is this person truly being dismissive of the office rules, or am I not familiar with that style of communication?
• Have I had a direct conversation with the candidate about my concerns to allow them to clarify misunderstandings, or am I passing judgement with weak evidence?

These should flow directly from the requirements above — they are a way for teammates to coach each other on doing their best and being as objective as possible. People are weak! It’s extraordinarily easy for us to remember our experiences from high school, and if we see new people we perceive to be from some ‘other tribe’ we seize up and bring that baggage with us. While it can be an entertaining source of comedy, this is still profoundly prejudiced! This is also why it is important to go the extra mile with empathy and understanding of people that are dissimilar from the existing team.

When you have trouble connecting with a co-worker, you have to be willing to spend the extra energy to find an ‘in’ to the relationship. And, so long as you’ve made your effort explicit, it is reasonable to expect the same in return.

That’s key to forging some of the strongest working relationships you’ll ever have. And, knowing sometimes friction is only the starting place, take that into consideration when weighing your instinctive responses to a candidate. Add “tolerances” to your collaborative requirements.

Testing for ‘cultural fit’ is important! You want to be sure candidates can collaborate the way your team demands. But the concept of ‘cultural fit’ can degrade, especially when what your company considers ‘the culture’ becomes more and more shallow. T-shirts and nerf-guns are not a work-culture. Cursing in the workplace, or having after-work drinks is not a work-culture. Having all the same politics, or all the same religion, or all the same piercings is not a work-culture. Unless your job is explicitly to promote those things, having everyone be the same in any dimension is a smell — a hint that something might not be quite right.

If you’re going to have a litmus test on any dimension, and sometimes they may be necessary, you owe it to yourselves and to candidates to be explicit. People need to know what they’re getting into.

Prejudice comes in many, many forms. As long as humans invent shortcuts to understand each other, it will be with us. So trust in truly agnostic tools, interrogate your impressions of people (positive and negative), and get more data from your teammates. Using your whole team increases the odds that you won’t get stuck on one person’s personal preferences, and leverages your pre-existing diversities.

Remember, prejudice keeps changing its form, but it is always with us. So be patient, be tolerant, and take risks. Sometimes they really, really pay off.

Originally published at http://robertfmurdock.github.io on July 24, 2020.
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay