In this post, you’ll learn how I’ve seen race analysis skills development yield better results than traditional unconscious bias training.

As the former founder and head of Google’s Center for Racial Equity and Systemic Transformation (CREST), I got the unusual opportunity to work at a scale and altitude unlike any other. Directly reporting to the then Chief Diversity Officer (2017-2019), my systemic change work was raised to the level of the entire ≈ 180-person organization and I set the global strategy for racial equity at Google (2018). My efforts at this altitude eventually affected all full-time employees in the 200,000-person company & cut across 16 verticals in HR.

Directly impacting 16,000 employees, I structured a multi-entry point strategy that engaged 75% of executives - and over 1000 employees in week one! Unexpected and gratifying to witness, organic demand allowed part of my portfolio to scale across 3 states & 15 offices by the second year. Demand frequently outpaced what the small team I led could deliver - we fielded requests from all of the world where Google has offices.

My proudest accomplishment? Directing company-wide process improvements & system overhauls for racial equity at the intersection of gender across the entire employee life-cycle. My favorite part of leading CREST was finding that the work resulted in measurable shifts in beliefs, behavior, and organizational culture.

Though previous stagnant results year-over-year proved to be tenacious obstacles, the change work I led in re-imagining HR processes produced unprecedented effects.

While the expected resistance to change proved vigilant, I created racial equity-driven interventions that garnered net promoter scores at percentages in the upper 90’s. 

I share these results because I didn’t take the unconscious bias training route. I equipped others with race analysis skills instead. 

<<Related: Don't forget to click here to download my free guide on how race moves through the operations of organizations. >>

Unconscious bias trainings without race analysis skill development hurt rather than help equity work

1. Unconscious bias trainings don’t include precise racial terminology, though they intend to solve problems of race in the workplace.

Instead, they focus on types of biases: affective: (horn/halo effects) and cognitive (recency bias, confirmation bias). Focusing on bias is an okay start, but how affective and cognitive biases get shaped by race goes unanswered or unexplored in many workplace unconscious bias trainings.

2. Unconscious bias trainings mistakenly anchor equity work solely on what’s unconscious vs. both conscious & unconscious. 

Conscious biases - biases people are aware of that affect their behaviors and decisions - open up a whole new can of worms. It invites people to consider their negative impact on others and whether their actions align with their egalitarian values, with legal implications. As such, the over-exposure to unconscious bias training without a balanced focus on conscious bias misconstrues how bias, on the whole, can work. To teach that unconscious bias is outside our control, and not mention conscious bias, tips the scale in favor of more stagnant DEI results year-over-year.

3. Unconscious bias trainings focus on mental shortcuts yet leave out the influence of widespread racial stereotypes as a type of shortcut

Have you attended an unconscious bias training that discusses how ubiquitous racial narratives get quickly cognitively accessed to fill in information gaps?

Automatic cognitive processes used to make decisions quickly are influenced by the automaticity of racial stereotypes that are activated and expected in interactions. They get shared in impressions, gut feelings, “feedback,” subjective performance assessments, and recommendations (or blocks to them) for opportunities without inquiry or checks for facts.

4. Unconscious bias training largely anchors equity work on a psychological phenomena in a person’s head.

That’s not the only place it dwells. There are other ways to locate race that attune to racial social systems, structures, and what I termed racial kinetics (race as a verb) (McAfee, 2014).

<<Related post: DEI falls short without race analysis. Why your DEI strategy needs it to be effective>> 

Race in the workplace: Use race analysis skills to grasp the racial anatomy of organizations and its kinesiology. 

With astute race analysis skills, you:

1. Explore why, in one organization, few progress in one racial group and many in other racial groups advance, with advancement occurring in ways disconnected from merit and work ethic

2. Analyze the texts, contexts, and subtexts of seemingly neutral organizational processes and

3. Detect: in what ways is race acknowledged, ignored, articulated, and interrogated? An inability to see race does not negate its presence. Not having a lived experience whereby one’s race gets made salient does not deny its existence either.

4. Discover what makes a process racial in light of the answers to the questions above

5. And excavate what the experiences of BIPOC, NBPOC, and white employees’ teach us about how race may function in the organization

Wondering where you can hone your race analysis skills to do this level of equity work? Enroll in my Equitecture® Coaching Collective.

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Research consistently finds that unconscious bias training does not yield the results race analysis bring. How?

A 2019 meta-analysis of more than 490 studies involving ≈ 80,000 people found that unconscious bias training does not change biased behavior (Forscher, et al., 2019).

A 2006 review of 700 companies found that after unconscious bias training, the likelihood that Black men and women would advance in organizations often decreased (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006).

 As part of my equity work, I attained better DEI results with race analysis skill development. Here are some examples of the results I facilitated.

Intra-racial interactions pre/post: After working with me, participants felt they could feel more steady in interactions with people within the same racial/ethnic group.

Inter-racial interactions pre/post: Managers increased the internal sense that they can reliably trust themselves when interacting across race and gender.

Racial consciousness: Participants increased their racial literacy using race analysis skills.

Self-efficacy in racial navigation: Participants worried less about their ability to interact and make racially equitable decisions.

Capacity to recover after a mistake: Participants developed more muscle to grapple with the fear of being called in. They increased their ability to get back up after a mistake or fall.

My high-impact results extended beyond shifting beliefs to shifting behavior, process, structure, and systems: 

• I facilitated a shift in organizational culture - beliefs shifted, behaviors shifted, the language shifted into it being okay to name race
• projects shifted with racial equity as a goal, not only equity
• structures of the team shifted
• structures in the broader 3000-person human resource (HR) department shifted
• language in the broader HR organization shifted to tolerate racial terminology
• implementation of HR processes shifted in ways that attend to how race moved through them
• outcomes by race in processes shifted

Impressed by these results? See yourself driving a similar high-impact transformation in your workplace? Apply to join The Equitecture® Coaching Collective.

So remember…unconscious bias training may not be the key lever to stack limited resources behind. Achieving equity is more likely when you equip people to use race analysis skills to discern the racial anatomy of organizations and its kinesiology.

Racial equity work is a pushing-humanity-forward kind of work. It changes things. It’s hard. And while we can do hard things, we can also create ways to distribute the difficult and heavy load. Let strong race analysis inform your organization’s racial strategy so it carries the load that’s too much to do alone.

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend. And, download these free guides and workbooks as gifts from me to you. 

Now you know how race analysis skills development outpace unconscious bias training, but what about using it to address racism at work? I’ve got How to use race analysis to tackle race in the workplace for you to read next to help you with that.

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you join my Equitecture® Coaching Collective, you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, join my Equitecture®️ Coaching Collective.