“I think that identity piece is very strong because that’s when you can really start to see where the bias is everywhere, and again, it requires you to bring your brain to work. In every interaction that you have, you need to assume that there’s bias present. And then for me, it’s about just having a check to say, well, is it a positive or a negative bias?.”
Dan Simpson, HR Director, Siemens Energy
Dan Simpson (Siemens Energy) joins our very own Rebecca Hourston to talk about bias in the workplace and what organisations can do to overcome this.
Listen on to this exciting episode to learn more about:
- Factors that shape our bias
- When bias can appear in an organisation
- How we can identify bias within ourselves
- What it looks like to be an ally in the workplace
- How to best support someone in your organisation that is being targeted by bias
Watch the interview
Or read on for the transcript
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, hello everybody. I’m Rebecca Hourston and I’m hosting today’s podcast episode. I’m also the head of Women’s Leadership Programs at Talking Talent, and I am totally delighted to be today with Dan Simpson, from Siemens Energy. We go back quite a long way having been working together over the years, and I’m just really excited to have you along to talk about our topic today, which is about beating bias/myths. And for us at Talking Talent, when we saw that theme of the International Women’s Day this year that probably most of you will be familiar with which was “Break the Bias” that hashtag that they were holding. We felt like this is a topic that deserves to continue to be talked about. We need to continue talking about this. It’s not just something that’s done as a one-off for International Women’s Day. So, keeping the thread of that going let’s just jump in and get started. Dan, do you want to introduce yourself, tell us what you do.
Dan Simpson: Thank you, Beks and it’s a great privilege to be talking to you again today. I always enjoy our conversations down the years. So, hello everyone, my name is Dan Simpson. I am the HR Director in the UK and Ireland for Siemens Energy. I also have another job. I directly support our Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer Maria Ferraro with our inclusion and diversity strategy. Globally I’m the secretary to our Global I and D Council and I’m the lead of our Governance and Partnerships squad.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, quite a CV there, Dan, and I know that Siemens Energy, I mean Siemens itself being a really famous brand, but I guess most of us have encountered Siemens Energy being in fact, a new company, a relatively new company that has happened in its own right. I know that it’s yeah, a real growth time and an interesting period for you in that market.
Dan Simpson: Yes, it is Beks. I joke with friends that I’m part of a 170-year-old startup because energy is in many regards Siemens home turf and it’s actually my home turf. So, a lot of my career in Siemens has been in the energy sector and the energy businesses since I was the head of HR for our wind power business when we started it here in the UK. I spent many happy years as part of the energy sector in all of its guises and we took the decision as a company, as indeed many companies like us are now doing to separate ourselves because the conglomerate bonus is now a conglomerate discount, and many conglomerates are struggling to actually tell their shareholders how they’re making money and how they’re adding value.
So, we took the decision to go into three parts. We have our healthcare business, which is now a standalone. We have our Siemens business, which is where our digital factory and the mobility, the trains businesses are and now we’ve got our energy business and we are the major player in energy transition, which is very topical, but very complicated because as we always say to people, it is a transition. It’s not a switch on and off, and we are going to have to live with fossil fuels for a while longer while we make the economic case for things like green hydrogen and actually turning renewables into a profitable, viable, long-term operation, which is still a challenge.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: I mean, it’s not my area of course, of expertise but it’s such an interesting topical kind of thing that the world needs. So, it must be a really interesting market to be in.
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: I’m interested as well, I suppose, the kind of industry, the kind of sector that you work in being more male dominated historically with coming today to think about bias in its different forms and how that shows up and how people can belong in the workplace. The other thing that makes me think is you just talked about this 170-year-old startup. I love that, but how we establish cultures whether that’s a new culture, an old workplace culture, but wherever we’re coming from, how we keep growing, how we keep going forwards and overcoming some of those biases that might be holding us back. So, what the heck is bias? What are we actually talking about here in your view?
Dan Simpson: Do you need a technical definition Beks, or will my definition do?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: I want the Dan special.
Dan Simpson: Well, I’ve got an interesting relationship with bias because for me, when I first learned about bias, it was very negative in connotation, and indeed many people do associate it with negativity. But actually, one of my early learnings about bias was that it can be positive as well as negative and a tendency or a prejudice towards something can be helpful. So, for example, many people have a prejudice toward healthy eating which isn’t a bad thing because healthy eating will mean less people needing long-term healthcare in the future and that’s better for us all. So, having a bias for whole foods over processed foods isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And the question is it depends where you got your programming from. Were you brought up in an environment where you were surrounded by lots of healthy cooking information about food, positive food choices, or were you surrounded in an environment where you were given lots of negative connotations around food and food choices and its outcome?
So, bias it’s a tendency, it’s a prejudice, it’s an affiliation towards something or someone. And of course, organizationally bias has been most often associated with a negative connotation or in the blind spot. So, if I see you Beks as a female candidate in front of me, on an interview panel I might have a bias against you because I might be thinking to myself, well, if I give Beks this job, is she going to be in the office five days a week? Does she have caring responsibilities? And I’ll be getting that from somewhere, I don’t know, but it’s just there. Something’s asking me those questions almost before I’ve got there and that was, of course, one of the other learnings I had about bias was that bias is natural and it’s healthy in some regards because it’s your brain sifting through the data.
Now our brain sifts through something like 11 million data points a day. And when you think about that and if you weren’t having some shortcuts in there, you’d probably go clinically insane. So, you need to have something which enables you to spot patterns and your brain loves being right. So, a brain pattern recognition that gets you to A to B quicker, super, that’s absolutely great. We do it every day when we’re driving cars or we are going to work or we’re going about our daily routines or seeing a particular sign. All of those things, our biases that are programmed into you, and your brain doesn’t have to worry about them. It can focus on the other topic. So, that’s where I am with bias.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: That’s so interesting. I’m sitting here thinking about what’s the relationship to then bias and habit. because what you’re saying there about the positive side of bias and what it actually enables us to do…
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: …and how we can group, I guess, in the workplace, how we maybe use that to make shortcuts, to make decisions and that there’s a positive take on that, about the habits that we fall into as well.
Dan Simpson: Well, if we had an inclusion bias within organizations, that would be positive.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: If our whole bias was to root out micro-inequities and instead have micro affirmations, that would be a good bias. I recently was very fortunate to spend some time with one of the partners at McKinsey and she did one of the implicit association tests, otherwise known as the IATs.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah. So, the Harvard ones…
Dan Simpson: The Harvard ones.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: …that you can Google. If you Google the Harvard IAT, you can get those. Yes.
Dan Simpson: And now this lady is an extremely bright and capable neurosurgeon anyway. She’s one of the McKinsey types that’s got three or four doctorates in various disciplines. So, for her to suddenly discover that she had a bias against women was horrifying. Where did that come from? And I would like to come back a little bit to the science around some of this as well because I’ve over the years become slightly more healthily skeptical about it. But what she always did then was she took a note with her. She wrote herself a little note. She took a little note to the meeting. Whenever there was a meeting to talk about a promotion or a development step and she would always say to herself, why not a woman? Just that little nudge was enough to stop the thinking.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Oh, so we’re bringing nudges into how we can shift out of bias.
Dan Simpson: Yes, I believe so. I think people still wear quite a lot of them. I think the Apple watch has taken over the Fitbit for a phase. But I remember going to a conference once and hearing somebody describe unconscious bias training, for example, as a nudge. It’s one of those things like the little wearable device that says, how many steps have we done today or what’s your calorie count today, et cetera? If you get that nudge, you might be more inclined to do something about it. Then to your point about habit, once you start being nudged often enough, the habit then starts to build, and then with the habit, you can form new neural pathways.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I’m coming back to the International Women’s Day slogan actually “Break the Bias” and I completely get why that was conceived, but almost you are offering a different perspective on this to me which it’s not just break any old bias. It feels like what you’re saying is that there are some biases to your point about, oh gosh, if we could have a bias towards inclusion, wouldn’t that be a great place to get to?
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, in fact, I’m kind of smiling because I’m thinking almost, we’ve got a bias against bias.
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Poor bias.
Dan Simpson: Poor bias. Yeah. And I think that’s the problem Beks because if you look at what’s happened as a result of unconscious bias training, a multimillion Euro pound dollar industry just emerged…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: …around unconscious bias training and its promise is to recode you in essence and here’s a slightly different perspective on it. Most people are aware of their biases and they’re proud of them and most people are aware of their thinking. I’m not just giving you any old…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Do you really think that like most people are actually aware of that?
Dan Simpson: I know a really cool psychologist called Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. He wrote the book “Why do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?” And What to do About it.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: Tomas is brilliant. Search him up on YouTube, Ted, he’s got some brilliant talks out there. The clinical psychology and the correlation between people’s biases and knowing or unknowing them is very small. So, this notion that telling people about their biases helps them unpack them. There’s no correlation between them at all. Most people are very good at hiding their biases that most people wouldn’t dream. I’m using averages here now. Most people wouldn’t dream of coming to work and telling you about their biases because they know that could be damaging because again, most people are very good at self-deception.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: I think that’s where the science behind unconscious bias, for me it’s not clear because unless you are prepared to act on the habit of the nudge in order to challenge yourself, really, for a lot of people, what you do is you just tell them what they already know. And if you come from a deep-rooted place where that view has been formed over many, many years in your childhood and beyond actually unconscious bias training can cause your bias to become stronger.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Oh, it kind of gives more fuel to the fire in a way, even if you might present…
Dan Simpson: Indeed.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: …to the outside world, that it was not. So, I think what you are linking is it’s about, well, so many things. It’s not just about awareness. Awareness does proceed action, but there requires action.
Dan Simpson: Yes, and practice deliberate practice.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Simpson: I mean, I once– sorry Beks because I’ve got loads…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: No, no go for it.
Dan Simpson: I got to hear Marshall talk in London. Marshall Goldsmith is one of the world’s top executive coaches and everyone will know of his book because it’s a phrase they will have heard but might not have been attributed to him “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” and he shared this story with us. When he wrote that book, his expectation was it would be number one in the best seller charts for non-nonfiction and when he called his publicist and asked if he was number one? They said, no, Marshall, you’re not, you’re number two or three. He said, well, who was number one? He said a dieting book. And then he did a bit of research and he checked in every year of American publishing history from recorded sales there’s been a dieting book in the American non-fiction top 10. You would therefore conclude, would you not that America was the thinnest nation on earth.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Well, or that they were most in need of a diet book perhaps, but yes.
Dan Simpson: And for me, it was a case of, unless you act on what the information is, and Tomas says the same thing. We all know that in order to lose weight. It says here you can’t lose weight. In order to lose weight, you’ve got to eat a bit less, drink a bit less exercise a little bit more. They’re all quite hard things to do consistently. The easiest thing to do is to reach for the next glass of wine, the next sweet thing, and relax and put your feet up because you deserve it.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: What about the diet book?
Dan Simpson: What about the diet book? As humans, we are very good at self-deception. We are very good at self-deception, and I think that’s where some of the bias training bumps up against the reality of what most people, what your average person coming into the office… There will be some that are highly emotionally intelligent, just like there’ll be some people that run Ironman races, but for the majority who don’t run Ironman races, this is hard work that requires you to bring your brain to work.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah. So, we’re talking about individuals, and I wonder kind of, if we shift it to the organizational level. Where are organizations deceiving themselves when it comes to bias? What do we think maybe that we’ve got handled but we don’t?
Dan Simpson: When I think about that question my initial thoughts were centering around what I would consider to be the human resources life cycle. I’m an HR professional so I see a life cycle around onboarding and then people get promoted and they get developed and they get paid and eventually they exit. We all do in an organization. I started to think, do you know what? It happens everywhere, doesn’t it? It happens in meetings. It happens in conferences. It happens at the coffee bar. It happens in the corridor. There are biases everywhere that we’ve all got in groups and outgroups, like likes like if that makes sense. The thing for organizations is of course that if you get too much group think, which is a bias in an organization because it’s good to be along with other people.
Again, I like Trevor Phillips. I read the Times and he always writes a very good column in the Times, most weeks. I remember Trevor Phillips did a program about Leicester, and at the time Leicester was considered to be the most diverse city in Britain and it was during the working day of nine till five. But actually, then at the end of the day, what you found was self-segregation was happening where the Indian and Pakistani communities would go one direction, the white British community would go another direction. Humans self-segregate, we’re tribal and that happens in organizations and organizations are great places to get tribal. You can get tribal in your function. You can get tribal in HR. You can get tribal in supply chain. You can get tribal in your vertical if you’re a big organization like mine. We are Siemens Energy but are we or are we grid technologies? Are we gas services? Are we a transformational industry? Are we service? In fact, are we geography? Are we Lincoln? Are we Warwick?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: Are we Newcastle?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: There are layers of identity here.
Dan Simpson: Absolutely, and I think that identity piece is very strong because that’s when you can really start to see where the bias is everywhere, and again, it requires you to bring your brain to work. In every interaction that you have, you need to assume that there’s bias present. And then for me, it’s about just having a check to say, well, is it a positive or a negative bias? Because actually, like you said, poor or biased. It is what we make it isn’t it. It can be one or the other. So, having a check with yourself whether or not the bias is positive or negative like with Julia at McKinsey who says, she brings a note in to say, why not a woman.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: Or the person that can’t stop selling and does actually end up selling the wrong stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if the computer screen turned off after that next sale, so they had a moment to go is that the right thing for me to be doing?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Actually, building on what you’re just saying, and I’m sitting here thinking, well, we could actually wrongly assess that. We could say, yeah, this is a positive bias, because I want this kind of person on my team.
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Or this is the profile that I need to hire in next. This is the way we want to expand. This is how we want to develop our team culture and so there’s something to me about perspective and seeking that from others.
Dan Simpson: I mean, we’ve got a gender target. So, if you look at many big companies now, they’re judged by their record on sustainability, environmental, societal, or governance goals and a lot of funds will invest in a company based upon their ESG record.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: And so, what do they do to show evidence of willing into the market? Most organizations have a gender target and gender targets have got a long history behind them. Some people see them as the devil incarnate. I take the view that they’re a bit like democracy, but probably the worst form of government except everything else that’s been tried from time to time so you need to focus minds. So, a gender target by definition makes you biased towards female candidates because it’s a male only environment, which a lot of organizations, particularly like mine are you need to be biased to a female candidate. That could be a positive bias therefore because it forces people to think differently.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, a bias inversion.
Dan Simpson: Yes, a bias inversion. Yes, and it’s unknitting the blind spot. It’s saying, well, there will be many reasons why we as an organization don’t have the same gender representation as society. So, by all definitions, I should have a 50/50 workforce within Siemens Energy and within the leadership ranks. I don’t. Why? We could go off into another podcast altogether, couldn’t we. But the point is that to fix it, I need more women in the organization. So:
(1) I’ve got to find them
(2) I’ve got to keep them and
(3) I’ve got to keep the environment they’re working in really, really inclusive and not subject to everyday micro-inequities, microaggressions, which is what you tend to find happen. It’s the crack, it’s the banter or it’s political correctness gone mad and…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes, the banter.
Dan Simpson: Yeah. Then again, on a bias that’s where a negative bias then creeps back in because people say, well, you’ve got to fit in so to fit in you have to start talking like the others. I mean, I’ve lost count of the number of gay men I’ve met who have said they joined in the banter before coming out. They joined in the banter on homophobic jokes because they didn’t want to tell anyone that they were gay.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Because of belonging. Yes.
Dan Simpson: And because of the micro-inequities that were all around them their bias became right, I’ll join in this even though they were implicitly aware that it was the wrong thing to do.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: This power of I suppose this is culture. What are we surrounded by and what are we creating in our organizations? So, I mean, I wonder if you’ve got any bias war stories yourself or that you’ve kind of encountered along the way and also how can we individually and how can we if we’re bystanders on this, how can we support and break down bias?
Dan Simpson: So, in terms of biased war stories, I want to reframe one for you because it would be very easy for me to sit here and say, well, I’m in HR, and which one of the executive team jobs are most suitable for putting a female candidate into in order to get your gender target numbers up. HR will be right…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Tactical voting.
Dan Simpson: Tactical voting. HR will be right up there probably along with coms, maybe some of the finance roles as well. So, three or four years ago, I didn’t get a job that I went for and a candidate who was different to me got it and for a moment I convinced myself it was because their difference was the differentiator. So, I’m talking to you about this now a few years older and a few years wiser. What was really the differentiator was that they were just better qualified for the job than I was.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: That’s very honest of you to say that.
Dan Simpson: Of course, again, my own ability to self-deceive got in the way of a rational view about it. And then when I actually thought about my career, I didn’t go to an elite university, and I’ve never been academically brilliant. I’ve always had to struggle and strive to get what to me always looked like quite mediocre grades. But what I didn’t realize I had in abundance was quite high emotional intelligence and that’s actually served me quite well in the path that I’ve taken. So, in my career in food retail, and then coming here to Siemens, I don’t believe I’ve been the victim of bias other than on a couple of occasions because I’m not the type of person that will throw crockery across the room or scream and shout at people. The bias that I’ve suffered has been more along the lines of, well, he is too nice. Not tough enough.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah.
Dan Simpson: Can he make the big calls? Can he really go eyeball to eyeball? This kind of passive-aggressive macho form of leadership. The leader is actually half Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s and then sort of half George Clooney in the 1990s.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: By the way, I’m noticing you picked there just two men.
Dan Simpson: Two men yeah.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Those examples.
Dan Simpson: Yeah, and I never conformed to that stereotype of the macho leader, and what I’ve been really happy to see is that actually now we are talking much more about the compassionate, empathetic leader. I did a session last week with our leadership team about leadership essentials and we were talking about leadership through the ages. I asked them, you know, in the 1980s, who was the business leader that was most respected. To my surprise, actually, not many people could remember. It was Jack Welch. Jack Welch was the man. What was Jack Welch’s nickname on the stock market? It was “Neutron Jack”, and Jack Welch was hard and tough, and he called things. He made things efficient, but General Electric with the biggest company in the world and still, I think his turnaround and that profitability, and their net worth were still more in his tenure than it was in his successes. So, that version of leadership was giving way now to, if you ask most people, if I ask my kids who would you admire most in the business world, they’ll say Elon Musk.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Okay.
Dan Simpson: Very different
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: He wouldn’t be on my list I have to say.
Dan Simpson: But also, on the other side lots of people are pointing towards Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: And with the benefit of hindsight everyone gets the right answers, don’t they? I think most people will point to Angela Merkel being a real figure of stability even if she did make some policy errors, didn’t we all, over Russia. So, I think there are examples now of different types of leadership that are forming. And again, the bias is moving away from this all action. I mean, you’ll get the odd anomaly pop up like Donald Trump. But again, I’m sure that when you smooth it out over the course of history, these things will happen.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, I love what you’re saying here about actually part of breaking down bias, breaking down the myths that lead towards bias is having well, greater diversity. There’s that word again…
Dan Simpson: Yeah.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: …and I’ve seen that there are different tracks, different ways of doing it. So, what about the hows? So, in our organizations, how can we create allyship? What needs to happen in order to support people on the ground? I suppose there are two levels, aren’t there. The organizational level so those people listening like yourself who are in a role that actually makes decisions organizationally, and then all of us individually.
Dan Simpson: So, I believe having done this for quite a while now, working with you and others I think the first myth we have to bust is about bias itself. Bias can be good or bad depending upon the context and as we all know, it’s never really changed. All leadership is situational. So, there’ll be some instances where bias is really helpful. There’ll be other instances where it’s not. I think what you have to ensure is that you’ve got the system. Your system needs to be designed in an inclusive way just like a train nowadays is designed in an inclusive way. You need to make sure that your systems are designed in an inclusive way so that where bias might be present it can be tackled and challenged.
So, a very simple way that you can do that is in the recruitment process if your context allows this. You can introduce blind CVS. You can take all data off, except the competence of the role. The downside to that of course is if you would need to be biased towards female candidates or candidates who have distant ethnic origin, you may actually exclude them by accident. So, you have to always be using those checks and balances to do it. I think the other myth we have to bust is that unconscious bias training is not a silver bullet. Unconscious bias training is like a gateway. It’s a gateway to learning and then what you’ve got to do with the learning that you’ve assimilated, which is to understand that you might be biased in certain situations is you’ve got to practice the habit of inclusion every day in your daily work and that’s about the micro-inequities and replace them with micro affirmations. Of course, I do appreciate we’re in a bit of a fluid world at the moment, aren’t we where…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: To say the least, yeah.
Dan Simpson: …people describe culture wars going on and there are some people that say that the end of Western civilizations is what this looks like when we’re arguing over what’s a woman. I can’t believe we’re in a situation where people in power are frightened to describe a woman as a woman, because you’ve obviously got very vocal minorities now who are very, very angry about their treatment. But even then, I’m starting to get to see some more hopeful signs that some balance is coming back into the conversation. Because if you take up the trans issue, for example, very controversial. Lots of people have got different views on it. I listened to Ricky Gervais’ special on Netflix the other night and he attacked everybody. He attacked Christians. He attacked Jews. He attacked Muslims. He attacked straight white men. He attacked gay people. He attacked all kinds of groups. The only group that called for the show to be canceled was the trans community.
Now they’ve clearly got a bias that they need to address and you can see some sports bodies now are starting to address that issue and it’s controversial, but you can see if you apply those lessons to organizations, you’ve got to start addressing some of them with courage and understanding where if you are imbalanced in your workforce, whether that be ethnically imbalanced or gender imbalanced, you’ve got to take some decisions in the system…
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes.
Dan Simpson: …that unknits some of the wiring.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah.
Dan Simpson: So, if you’ve got the privileged group making all the decisions about hiring, you’ve got to bring some of the underprivileged, underrepresented groups in. You’ve got to do what people like you do really well, which is that if you’ve got underrepresented groups and you want to make them more representative, you’ve got to give them special training, special help like for example, the women’s leadership programs that you’ve run so well down the years. Lots of men say, well, that’s not inclusive, is it? And you say, well, hang on a minute, guys, you’ve got an 80% advantage in this organization just because of your gender.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah.
Dan Simpson: So, what’s not inclusive about trying. One of the other things I’ve learned quite recently is equity. So, I wasn’t quite sure about equity at first, because I was trying to work out well, what does it really mean in the context of I and D and I don’t know why, perhaps I’m not academically brilliant so it takes me a little bit longer to work these things out, but I suddenly just hit onto the notion that equity is about delivering the promise. Equal opportunity and equality is something that you try and do but then when you’ve achieved it, you’ve got equity because then it doesn’t matter. You really come as you are and your access to all those things.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes, yes, yes. The point we get to.
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: And you mentioned and thank you for your kind words about the sorts of programs, the women’s leadership programs that we certainly run at Talking Talent with wonderful clients like yourselves. I mean, is that the solution? How do women’s leadership programs, programs for underrepresented talent more broadly, are they a part of the solution here? Are they going to have their day in a few years’ time? Where do you see us going with this?
Dan Simpson: Well, you see, I don’t believe so. I tell you why. I was around and remember the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence and the accusation that the metropolitan police in Britain were institutionally racist. Cressida Dick who’s left the metropolitan police now under a cloud of institutional racism, sexism, misogyny, corruption. If you look at the groups of people that make up the metropolitan police, I don’t think you could tell any of them that they didn’t need a black police officer’s association anymore or that they didn’t need to do some more work on how to be more inclusive with the communities that they’re encountering and dealing. It’s a bit like every article I read about the death of HR we seem to be in more demand than ever at the moment for the kind of work that we are doing.
So, I believe some of these things are hardy perennials. They’re like mentoring or sponsorship. I think you will always need to work with people who through their… Again, if you go back to where does bias come from? It comes from the programming we all receive from a very young age. From the influences, the inputs, the choices we make about food, the choices we make about diet, the choices we make about what kind of places we want to live, the people we want to get married to, the communities that we’re allowed to engage with, or we’re not engaged with. I mean, how can it be that in 2022 black players still turn up at football matches and get racially abused?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah.
Dan Simpson: You think that would be out but it’s not. It’s not out of the system. It’s still very much there. Again, it goes back to my point again. I think that some people are very biased, and they know it and they hide it. So, I think one of the mistakes we say to people, my belief is that, come to work and be yourself. I’m not sure we want that for everyone.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Oh, really! Say more about that.
Dan Simpson: I think that the persona that you demonstrate at work is the version of you that you want other people to see that’s in congruence with the organizational values that you choose to work for. So, for example, at Siemens Energy, one of our values is to be open and inclusive. So, I come to work and I’m open and inclusive. I’m biased against Tottenham Hotspur Football Club because I’m an Arsenal supporter, but I wouldn’t say rude things or sing songs about Tottenham Hotspur Football Club at work. But I might assume the message is that, oh, come to work and be myself so I sing football songs about the team that we don’t like.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yes, okay.
Dan Simpson: Do you see what I mean?
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m reminded of, was Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, the professors at London Business School and they had a Harvard Business Review article a few years back and it was all about this be yourself where it’s not just that, it’s be yourself more like your best self with skill.
Dan Simpson: Yes.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: So, this kind of consciously what are we bringing? Who are we bringing? I mean goodness I’ll have to invite you back and have another conversation about authenticity. But
Dan Simpson: I think it’s so important. I think it really is because I think people can mistake the view that you need to just come as you are unvarnished. No, no, no, you need to come as you obviously, but you need to come with a filter.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: And you work at it. I mean, I think this is really something I’m kind of concluding from the conversation is you have to bring your brain to work. You’ve said that a few times.
Dan Simpson: Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Because I love that phrase as well, like likes like. So, we need to have our own antenna up for ourselves individually, but also for our teams perhaps for an organizational lens, depending on our role, and kind of have that awareness so that we can put things in place to overcome it. Again, that big piece that I’m taking from what you’re saying is we’ve got to consciously work at this to overcome it. I love your phrase it’s a hardy perennial. So, like it or not we all want to bust the bias, break the bias, break it down, send it away forever.
Dan Simpson: But I don’t think we will. So, I believe that bias and prejudice to a degree are inherent in the human condition. We are tribal creatures and if it wasn’t the color of our skin, it would be the clothing that we are wearing or the town or city that we are born in. We’re tribal creatures and prejudice is in-built and, of course, what we are very good at is adapting and we’re very good at adapting to situations where we can learn to get along. The world at the moment is a less tolerant place than it was I believe three or four years ago. Democracy is generally in decline around the world at the moment. The health of democracy is at a lower point in history than it’s ever been and some of the values that you and I might say we hold are not held by the majority of people in the world at the moment. So, our need to understand each other is even higher than it’s ever been. But you can’t go in there with this assumption that you know best, and you know right. You’ve got to really go in there with that old classic of seek first to understand then be understood.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: Yeah. Well, listen, Dan Simpson, this feels like a great note to end it on. Seek first to understand then to be understood. I don’t think we’ve managed to crack it all today. I didn’t expect us to, it’s a pretty complex topic, but thank you so much for all your insights. I hope everybody’s enjoyed listening. Thank you again to Dan Simpson…
Dan Simpson: Thank you.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: …from Siemens Energy. It’s been a pleasure.
Dan Simpson: Thanks so much Beks. Thanks, everyone.
Rebecca (Beks) Hourston: You’re very welcome. Bye.
