Lisa Orbé-Austin's Blog, page 5

Bias in Performance Review and How To Avoid It

Performance reviews are an important process for the development of your team. If used properly they can really set the tone for the upcoming period. If done haphazardly and sloppily, they can be a waste of time at best, and biased and detrimental, at worst.

I am sure that as a manager, your intention is to provide the best feedback and to develop your direct reports in ways that contribute to their ongoing growth in their current and future roles. So, in support of that, I am going to show you some ways of engaging the performance review that lead to bias, so that you can avoid them currently and in the future.

There is a growing body of research that indicates women experience substantial bias in the course of their performance reviews. Some of the research has revealed the following:

Women are 1.4x more likely to receive critical, subjective feedback than men.
 It is typically less constructive and more vague.
Their success is attributed to luck or long hours; not skill or ability
Men tend to be evaluated on potential, rather than solely performance
Men tend to overestimate ability and women tend to underestimate

If you read the recent HBR article on the overrepresentation of men in management, you can see the impact of these types of experiences in promotion and advancement.

It’s incredibly important to attend to this research when evaluating a female direct report. You should be conscious of providing concrete examples and coaching feedback that is clear around any areas where you have concern. You also need to watch how you may be giving men more latitude or overvaluing the actual content of their work. In order to eliminate this from your experience, you must first be conscious of ways that it may be occurring and then intervene.

There is also increasingly large amount of research literature discussing the impact of race and culture on reviews. Some of the literature has found:

Black employees receive lower reviews than White employees
Black professionals receive feedback around more specific concerns about interpersonal behavior especially aggressive and social skills issues in group and leadership contexts than their White counterparts
Asian and Latinx employees tend to receive more feedback on issues that are stylistic, cultural and concern language comprehension and articulation
Asian employees also received greater feedback around contributing in meetings
White evaluators tend to give White direct reports higher ratings
White evaluators tend to rate People of Color lower specifically on leadership and management qualities
Race effects are larger on subjective rather than objective criteria

It’s important to watch your cultural lens and understand when your cultural perspective is getting in the way of evaluating someone’s true skill and competence. It can be difficult to learn to value multiple cultural perspectives, and to see that hierarchical cultural preferences can be a blind spot to understanding that there are many ways to reach goals, add value, and contribute.

Additionally, there are other general ways that bias is more likely to enter into a performance review. Here are some of them:

Confirmatory Bias – When you rate someone in a manner that simply confirms your existing beliefs about them and you ignore any contrary information or data.
Shifting Standards – The bar that you set on specific criteria depends on the person that you are rating.
Halo/Horns Effect – When your rating is amplified based on your prior belief. It’s confirmatory bias on steroids.
Similarity Bias – When you rate someone more positively because they are similar to you in some way that you value
Primacy Effect – You rate someone based on something that occurred early on in knowing them (e.g., they made a colossal mistake in the first 90 days and you can’t get it out of your head, when you review them).
Recency Effect – A lot of managers are guilty of this one. It’s when you evaluate someone solely based on the most recent period and not the entire period of the review. (e.g., your report screws up a high stakes meeting weeks before their review, however, they did fantastic during the rest of the year. If you review, you focus on the meeting and miss everything else, then it’s recency effect bias).
Central Tendency Bias – When on scales, you rate most everyone in the middle of the scale.
Leniency Bias – It’s when you rate someone favorably even when they have notable room for improvement and it’s not noted.
Idiosyncratic Rater Bias – When managers rate others higher on skills they are not good at and rate others lower on skills that they perceive themselves to be very good at.
Self-Rater Bias – When an individual’s rating of themselves reflects more on their self-image or self-esteem than actual performance.

So, there’s a lot of opportunity for bias, what can you do about it? The research has pointed to several ways that you can improve the performance review process. The following strategies are useful:

Use consistent, objective criteria and stay away from open boxes – don’t allow for performance reviews not to have specific and operationalized criteria for evaluation, which can decrease subjective critique vulnerable to bias. Objective reviews that allow for examples and concrete consistent criteria across roles are your best bet.
Develop better questions – Both for evaluation and self-evaluation. They should really get at the skill or competency that you are trying to evaluate and ask for data and examples.
Have outside reviewers – Get outside reviews from laterals, your manager and/or your HR partner with specific focus on equity in the reviews

Here’s also another great resource on how to disrupt bias in the workplace.

Being conscious of equity and potential bias requires attention to the issues that I have laid out here, as well as an honest, open and vulnerable review of your process. Everyone is potentially susceptible to these forms of bias in performance reviews because of the culture that we live in (e.g., a woman manager can produce biases reviews of her female direct reports). It’s important to hold yourself accountable and to work on creating a process that attempts to eliminate bias in all forms.

For more information, check out this article for an in-depth review of the literature on race bias in advancement, promotion, and performance reviews.

The post Bias in Performance Review and How To Avoid It appeared first on Dynamic Transitions LLP.

The Impostor Syndrome Triggering Workplace

While your Impostor Syndrome can be triggered by a high profile assignment or a new accomplishment, particular work environments can serve as the breeding ground for Impostor Syndrome, and these workplaces can feel very difficult to leave. They are the Venus Flytraps of Impostor Syndrome work environments, ones which ensnare those with Impostor Syndrome.

Sometimes, it’s not the entire workplace culture, but a boss who draws you in to feeling a heightened sense of fraudulence. These managers can be usually one of two types: bosses who are withholding and very rarely praise performance because they feel like there are few instances were people deserve praise; and those who are prone to vast shifts in your evaluation, and go from high praise to vocal, and sometimes, public devaluation and humiliation. The first type of manager is often a perfectionist and feels that the high performers will rise to the top by expecting nothing less than the best at all times from his/her employees. The second type of manager is manipulative and unpredictable, and seeks control, at any moment, of his/her employees.

In either case, the value on external feedback for those with Impostor Syndrome makes both of these types of managers incredibly dangerous, because they nurture the need for overwork, perfectionism and serve as powerful reinforcers of the Impostor Cycle.

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Staying around these types of managers never lets you internalize positive feedback, or accomplishments, because that does not serve the manager’s style or agenda. The more insecure you are about your skills, accomplishments and ability to please them, the more control they have over your career, sense of professional self, ability to change, and your future.

Identifying these types of managers becomes critical in avoiding the potential trap of their poisonous management style. Here are some things to look out for:

When you are interviewing:

S/he can be withholding; doesn’t give you much and watching for your reaction and your desire for their approval.
When s/he talks about her team, you can see that s/he is the central hub of power and control and her team members are not that autonomous.
The team has stars, is competitive and not collaborative
There is limited opportunity for advancement and everyone is striving for the same minimal roles
The team looks beat down, exhausted

I always preach this reality: Remember, the interview process is dyadic and you should be doing a lot of analysis on your own about whether there is fit for you in these organizations and with these managers. Often, because of the lack of confidence of those with Impostor Syndrome and their difficulty in cataloging their accomplishments, the job search process can be very daunting. You can engage the process with the perspective that you should be lucky to get an opportunity and that you don’t have choices. This is something that should also be proactively combated so that you are engaging in a full search (i.e., interviewing multiple places, you have a network that is advocating on your behalf) which will enables you to have choices.

There are also types of organizational cultures that trigger Impostor Syndrome. These types of cultures can be even more difficult than dealing with a manager alone, who is reinforcing the Impostor Syndrome. This difficulty stems from the fact that everyone is potentially drinking the KoolAid, and pushing up against the cultural norms can be difficult, if not impossible, because the culture is engineered to develop a workforce that produces on its behalf without regard for its employees.

Some of the expectations that you will find in these organizational cultures are:

Constant availability; no ability to set boundaries; no value on nurturing your personal life
Weak performance review process, which allows for moving the goal posts and making it very difficult to have evidence for a promotion or get viable, useful feedback to constructively improve
Environments that don’t tolerate mistakes; where mistakes are highlighted to make a negative example of the person as a warning to others
The environment supports stars and scapegoats and there is little room for growth or changing people’s perceptions. However, even the stars on the inside are insecure because they know their status is tenuous and they could lose it if they make a visible error.
Cultures that support unhealthy competition and don’t know how to make team experiences productive and valuable for all

You may be in one of these cultures already and so it may be easier to assess because you are actively experiencing these things. When you are interviewing, it can be more difficult to determine these things. Do your due diligence. Check sites like Glassdoor for previous employees’ evaluations of the organization. Do informational interviews with people on the inside, and ask them about the culture or specific aspects of their experience (e.g., if you are interviewing someone who would be a lateral, you could ask: when you work on teams, what’s your experience when things go poorly? What is the process that the team goes through to evaluate the situation?)

Working on Impostor Syndrome does require examining and intervening on your own behavior and thoughts. In addition, it also can be helpful to understand when a manager or organization is benefitting from your Impostor Syndrome, and reinforcing it to leverage your insecurities for their benefit.

If you missed my newsletter on the origins of Impostor Syndrome and want a little background on it, check it out here.

The post The Impostor Syndrome Triggering Workplace appeared first on Dynamic Transitions LLP.

Career Ruts & Ways to Assess What They Mean?

It can be terrifying when you feel like you are stuck in your career. I know it may be hard to believe, but it is a completely normal and common experience. Most people that I speak with, who have this fear, believe that it must mean that they have to make a 180° complete transition to feel better, but that’s not always the case. There are a variety of questions that you may want to ask yourself if you are feeling like you are in a career rut.

First, when you are in a career rut, you tend to feel like:

You have trouble facing the workdays. The weekends feel so short and like you have to compact all your happiness into these days.
The nights feel short and all you can manage are activities that just bring you pure joy (e.g., binge watching your favorite shows, playing video games, surfing social media) although they are likely not doing much to get you out of the situation.
You feel bored at work and the day feels light years long. When the clock strikes 5 or whatever time your day ends, you can’t believe it’s finally here.
You struggle to think about what’s next in your career because getting through the day feels like the only thing you can manage.
You feel stuck in almost every sense of the word. It feels hard to stop continuing the monotony. It feels hard to consider anything new. It feels hard to break the painful cycle or to do anything besides what you are doing.

Before you go to the 180° transition place, let’s do a 360° view of your situation. So, first let’s look at the easier causes to solve.

Are you burned out? 

Are you not engaging in self-care? Do you not even have an understanding of what self-care is for you or a routine that you engage in?
Did you just come off a very intense period at work?
Have you been working at an extreme pace with little or no vacation time?

If you feel like you may be burned out, you want to work on this first. Consider bringing a routine into your life that takes care of your physical, mental, and reflective self-care.

Physical self-care has to do with taking care of the body. I think that we often forget how bad sitting for so many hours is for your health and how connected the mind and body are. Consider how engaged you are in exercising regularly. During this period, cardio activity can have the greatest effect on relieving you. The magic numbers are 30 minutes 3x per week of cardio, which has been shown in research to be as effective as an antidepressant. You also want to think about physical activities that are useful in releasing tension and stress in the body like massage, stretching, and yoga.

Mental self-care has to do with practices that involve engaging in active problem solving and attempts to understand issues that may be coming up and what to do with them. I would consider some of those activities to be therapy, coaching, talking with mentors, peers, and family. Places and people that allow you to ventilate what’s going on and serve to validate your feelings and help you consider what to do.

The last type of self-care that I typically talk about is reflective self-care. This type of self-care is about being present and in the moment and they can include experiences like meditation, religious practices, mindfulness activities, and gratitude exercises. The goal is to practice being present, aware and to appreciate the moment.

If you have these things in place or put them in place and after a while, you are still not feeling out of the rut, keep all of these practices in place, and now ask yourself the next set of questions.

Are you in the wrong organization?

Do you still like the substance of the work, but the environment is killing the joy for you?
Do you see other people doing similar technical things and feel a sense of curiosity, interest or envy about their experience?
Do you want some type of external reward (e.g., an increase in pay, better title, greater benefits) and this gets in the way from enjoying the work?
Do you feel like you are in a toxic work culture that prevents you from enjoying anything about the work?

If you feel the job could still excite you if you just were doing it somewhere else, you may want to consider finding a new organization. The key is to do some work around what you are looking for in the next work environment, so that you are clear about what you need next.

A simple and easy exercise to begin that process is to “The 30 Things Exercise.” In this exercise, you list 30 things that you want in the next job and 30 things that you don’t want. For example, one of the things that you might want is “greater flexibility and the ability to work from home” and one of the things that you don’t want is “a micromanaging boss.” The reason that there should be at least 30 things on each list is because it helps you to see themes amongst the responses, and to get an exhaustive list. This can be incredibly useful as you start to talk to your network as they will likely ask you what you are looking for in your next role or organization and you will be able to provide a very thoughtful response.

And lastly, the 180° questions:

Are you in the wrong career?

Do you not enjoy the substance of your work?
Is it hard for you to imagine liking any role that you can see in your industry, even when you consider roles that are 1-2 levels up?
Do you feel very disengaged in the work and feel a loss of meaning (i.e., do you not see the purpose of your work, do you feel like it doesn’t matter)?
Are other careers and/or interests that have career potential taking up more space in your life?

If you are in the wrong career and you need to make a significant pivot, it’s not uncommon. There is an often cited statistic that no one can every find the source for that says that in the US, individuals change career 5-7 times in a lifetime. As a career and executive coach, I can tell you if it isn’t happening this often, it is still happening a lot.

In addition, I am a strong believer that we need greater career education in our schools and universities. We often don’t get taught systematic and thoughtful ways to make career decisions and there is a significant body of literature more than 70 years old that has developed scientific systems and ways to think about career decision-making. I always say this and truly believe that our educational system does a horrific job teaching us how to make informed decisions about our career development and often gives us faulty and limited information about certain careers.

How many times do we hear things like – “you won’t make any money in education,” and “if you want career stability choose accounting?” These simplistic assertions are not true for everyone and there is so much more to making career decisions.  Stability and economic security often stand in the forefront of career decisions making, but you can be stable and secure in a variety of professions even ones you would never associate with these qualities.

In addition, many people fear that you if you make a career shift you have to start at the bottom and that’s often not true. If you have had a career already, there are always a variety of transferable skills that you can leverage. You just want to develop a cogent narrative around the shift and leverage the skills and experience you already have and the network you have been building.

It can be scary if you feel like you are in the final category, and you need to make a career change, but there are ways to scaffold the change and make it slowly in pieces. You don’t want to make your career decision based on these types of narrowing viewpoints. You want to make career choices based on a knowledge of your skills, abilities, interests, personality type, motivators, values, work environment preferences, etc. and careers that have a good fit with those things and therefore, you. There’s definitely no guarantee in any career that you will always stay happy in a chosen field, but the greater knowledge you have about yourself and the career opportunities that are possible, the greater your chance of making an informed and thoughtful decisions about what’s next for you.

The key if you are stuck in a career rut is to be curious, ask yourself questions, and work through the easier potential solutions first before you go to the ones that require greater change and transition. As my post-doc supervisor so ingeniously said to me during my last year of training, when you are thinking about a career change, DO SOMETHING. The inertia only begets more inertia.

When you have been in a career rut in the past, what have you done to get out of it?

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Work Martyrdom: How To Stop Self-Sacrificing for Others’ Professional Gain

Recently, several journalists have asked to interview me for articles on work martyrs. The phenomenon is likely as old as time, but currently it refers to the experience when you function in the workplace in a way that sacrifices yourself for the benefits of others – whether it’s other employees, your boss or clients, who you are sacrificing for doesn’t matter.

Here are some identifying characteristics for work martyrs:

You are the go-to person for when something goes wrong, someone has to stay late, or there is an emergency project
You notice that you are working longer hours than everyone else
You have trouble saying ‘no’ even to projects that are outside of your scope of work
You’ll fall on the sword if no else does because taking responsibility is important to you
You tend to feel like others cannot manage certain things, and as a result, you micromanage or do their work yourself

Sound familiar?

If you have been following my Impostor Syndrome posts, you’ll see a significant connection with work martyrs and Impostor Syndrome. I imagine that this new identification of work martyrs is really people with Impostor Syndrome in disguise.

Often, it can feel really hard to leave this behavior behind, and to try new, healthier behaviors in the workplace that set boundaries and reset expectations for yourself and others. If you have decided that you don’t want to continue in this role at work, then there are simple ways to begin to shed this martyr behavior.

First, find an accountability partner. Whether this person is from your workplace or outside doesn’t matter as much as whether this person will kindly, but firmly, hold you accountable to your goals and keep your confidence. While martyr behavior can place you in the role of star at work with certain bosses, with others it can put you in the position of Gal/Guy Friday and keep you cornered in ways that are perceived as practically ineligible for advancement or promotion.

Second, set some management goals for eliminating the martyring behaviors. For example, it can be as simple as taking a 60 hour work week to 55 hours. You are looking for it to be attainable and to be able to show you proof that it doesn’t change your status at work immediately. So much of the buried fear can be that if you stopped giving so much at work, you will lose your position or favor. If you take really small steps, you will likely realize that not much is changing in regard to perception. After you are successful with a small step, then you can start taking larger, more impactful steps like:

Learning to say ‘no’ to certain projects or involvement in activities, especially ones that are low stakes, are not part of your evaluation process, or take you off focusing on your priorities. They are done to obtain favor or please others, but you have to start asking yourself what’s the real impact for me.
Stop being people’s emergency go-to. When you are a work martyr, other people’s needs become your own. To break this, you have to learn not to take on other people’s feelings and to set boundaries. You can see and identify someone’s feelings without having to fix them or make them better.
Create limited bandwidth at work by having priorities and a plan to work on them, AND others things to do outside of work. If the time for which you have allotted for work can constantly be increased by taking up your personal time because you are not valuing it, then it makes it very hard to set limits. You have to care about and protect your personal time. This might mean that you have to work on creating routines for a personal life that you enjoy and hold sacred.
Take only the responsibility that is appropriate to your contribution. While taking responsibility for mistakes, errors, and issues is so incredibly important, when you take all the ownership, you deprive other people of that important experience and learning. You don’t protect them in anyway – except from growth. Now, it’s different if you are a manager and you are providing air cover for direct reports from senior leaders, but if you discover afterward that certain reports need to take responsibility, holding them accountable is part of your managerial responsibilities, especially if you want them to grow.
Stop micromanaging your direct reports. Often when you are so stretched for time because you engage in a lot of work martyring behaviors, it can feel very hard to appropriately manage and train direct reports, but as you start to create more time in your schedule, devote some of it to training so that you don’t feel like you need to take over reports’ projects, or that you can’t trust them with certain types of responsibilities into which they need to grow. You can also spend time on developmental coaching so that your reports become stronger and more autonomous.

Creating time for yourself in your work day by doing some of these tasks that I shared above can be helpful in spending more time on tasks related to being strategic in your role, within the organization, or with your long-term professional future. It’s important to note that if you try some of these things to reduce your role as a work martyr, and you get some blow back (i.e., senior leaders are unhappy) you really want to consider if this is a place where you can grow long-term. You need to be able to have the time to be a strategic level thinker to advance and to not be burdened by other people’s tactical work.

What have you done or noticed other people do to reduce the experience of being a work martyr?

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In-House Connect Talk on Impostor Syndrome and Leadership – July 8th @ 6:30pm EST

IG Live – Wednesday, May 27th @ 8:00pm EST

Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin will be giving a talk on Impostor Syndrome and how it affects in-house attorneys and their advancement into leadership. You can register for the event here: https://bit.ly/register-ihc

 

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Create & Cultivate IGLive Takeover on Wednesday, June 10th @ 12:30pm EST

IG Live – Wednesday, May 27th @ 8:00pm EST

Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin will be taking over Create & Cultivate’s account and doing an IGLive on Imposter Syndrome. I will discussing our framework for overcoming Impostor Syndrome. Bring your questions about our book: “Own Your Greatness: Overcome Impostor Syndrome, Beat Self-Doubt and Succeed in Life” and just general questions about Imposter Syndrome. Follow @createcultivate to watch and ask questions about imposter syndrome.

 

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Imposter Syndrome IGLive Q&A

IG Live – Wednesday, May 27th @ 8:00pm EST

Dr. Lisa & Richard Orbé-Austin will be hosting an Imposter Syndrome Q&A. Bring your questions about our book: “Own Your Greatness: Overcome Impostor Syndrome, Beat Self-Doubt and Succeed in Life” and just general questions about Imposter Syndrome. The IGLive will be posted in our IGTV if you missed it. Follow @drorbeaustin to watch and ask questions about imposter syndrome.

 

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Couch Conversations with Shawna Rose: Imposter Syndrome

IG Live – Wednesday, May 27th @ 8:00pm EST

Dr. Lisa Orbé-Austin will be discussing Imposter Syndrome with Shawna Rose. Follow @drorbeaustin to watch and ask questions about imposter syndrome.

 

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An Insider’s Guide to Job Search: An HR Perspective

IG Live – Tuesday, May 19th @ 9:30pm EST

Dr. Richard Orbé-Austin will be discussing insider tips about the job search process from a long time hiring manager and HR executive in healthcare, Roger Franco. Follow @drrichorbeaustin to watch and ask questions about your search process.

 

 

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Women of Color Empowerment Institute’s Hour of Power Breakfast

WOCEI Power Breakfast – Saturday, May 16th @ 8am EST

I will be speaking at the virtual breakfast and the subject of the talk is “How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome.” Impostor Syndrome is the phenomenon where high accomplished people struggle to internalize their accomplishments and as a result, experience fear that they are a fraud and overwork to compensate. CLICK HERE to register.

 

 

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