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You are here: Home / The Blog / Reflections on Leadership and Unconscious Bias

Reflections on Leadership and Unconscious Bias

July 9, 2018 By eJP

By Gali Cooks

In business school, I learned about the concept of “crucibles of leadership.” These are experiences in a leader’s journey that are “a trial and a test, a point of deep self-reflection that forced them to question who they were and what mattered to them.”

A few months ago, I experienced my own crucible of leadership. It wasn’t overly dramatic, as portrayed in the movies (with crescendo-ing music in the background), but it left a mark.

Last fall, the organization I lead, Leading Edge, released a report with findings from our second annual employee engagement survey. Once our report was up online, printed, and blasted out through a press release, we anxiously awaited how the field of Jewish organizations would respond.

Almost immediately, a trusted partner to our organization alerted us to a major oversight. The report, which contained six quotes from thought leaders on topics related to organizational management and workplace culture, quoted only men.

I couldn’t believe it. A cold sweat tingled across my forehead… How could this happen? How had I, a woman who has experienced firsthand the feeling of not being seen or heard, missed this? How had the team of five others who also worked on the report – including three other women and two feminist-identified men – overlooked that we had not quoted any female leaders?

I was ashamed and embarrassed. Our organization, which enables Jewish nonprofits to become great places to work and is dedicated to modeling best practices, had fallen short.

We quickly worked to correct the error. We apologized for our mistake to the trusted partner and thanked them for bringing it to our attention. We replaced several existing quotes with new ones from pioneering leaders, including Sheryl Sandberg and Brene Brown. Then we updated the report online and in print.

It was a crisis averted – but it certainly didn’t feel “over” to us. At a time when women are raising their voices to demand accountability for the myriad ways in which they have been silenced or rendered invisible, my colleagues and I could not simply reduce our mistake to carelessness.

Over the past months, I have come to understand that our oversight is a symptom of unconscious bias  – a product of long-held assumptions about who leaders are and what they look like. Consider Heather Murphy’s recent New York Times article, “Picture a Woman. Is She a Leader?” In the article, Murphy describes an exercise in which people were asked to draw a picture of a leader. The vast majority of respondents drew a man.

We know from our research and from the work of Advancing Women Professionals that women comprise about 70% of the Jewish nonprofit workforce but represent only 30% of the CEOs. This dramatic gender disparity in the C-suite is not due to a lack of talent. There is no shortage of women who are well-qualified to lead Jewish organizations of all kinds. But our society’s perceptions of leadership, and the stories we tell ourselves about who is “in charge,” continue to leave women on the sidelines.

Of course, unconscious bias is not limited to the exclusion of women. People of color, people with disabilities, and people who identify as LGBTQ are also frequently left out of our communal narratives of leadership. We need to make sure that all leaders whose identities are underrepresented – and often invisible – in our Jewish communal story are no longer an after-thought.

Although Leading Edge does not explicitly focus on gender or diversity in the workforce, we are working intentionally to integrate an inclusive lens into everything we do. Fueled by this experience, when gathering data from the field, working with CEO search committees, supporting professionals to strengthen their organizational cultures, and representing portraits of leadership in our materials, we will strive to uphold the values of diversity, equity and inclusion so that our work reflects the entire community.

I share this story in the hopes that by naming and owning our acts of unconscious bias, we can begin to chip away at the exclusion they perpetuate.

Leading Edge will continue to push its work forward. Along the way, we will make more mistakes and likely experience other crucibles of leadership. That comes with the territory when trying to find new solutions to old problems.

But when we stumble and skin our knees, when we realize we have fallen short, we will strive to learn from our missteps and be better than before.

Gali Cooks is Executive Director of Leading Edge
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Filed Under: The Blog Tagged With: leadership, Leading Edge

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Idit Klein says

    July 9, 2018 at 3:22 pm

    Kol hakavod to Gali Cooks for this thoughtful and important piece. It takes courage to acknowledge missteps in judgment — all the more so on issues that matter to us personally. This kind of courage is the leadership our community needs more of; all of us would do well to emulate such honesty. It is easy to point out egregious sexism, racism, homophobia, and other instances of injustice. It is much harder to face how we all help to perpetuate these biases. Thank you, Gali, for modeling how we can only create change in the world if we start with ourselves.

  2. Andrea Jacobs says

    July 9, 2018 at 4:03 pm

    Thank you Gali for this open and candid reflection on the hard work we all must do to overcome the impact of systemic bias in our community. The example of your leadership – the vulnerability you demonstrate in service of growth and understanding – is so crucial to this work. Thank you Gali for showing us the way.

  3. ruth messinger says

    July 9, 2018 at 4:23 pm

    brava!!!

  4. Jodi Bromberg says

    July 9, 2018 at 5:42 pm

    Thank you, Gali, for your thoughtful leadership on this issue and so many others. We’re all better for it.

  5. Dana Toppel says

    July 9, 2018 at 8:55 pm

    Thank you Gali for sharing your thoughtful, important reflection. It resonates with me and I am sure with many of us. Let us know how we can support your work going forward. Dana Toppel, COO JFS San Diego.

  6. Wendy Aronson says

    July 9, 2018 at 9:36 pm

    What she said! (Did anyone else notice that everyone who has commented thus far is female?)

  7. David Phillips says

    July 10, 2018 at 1:10 am

    Well done Gali – appreciate the honesty, candor and guts. Kol hakavod.

  8. Joanna Samuels says

    July 10, 2018 at 3:58 pm

    Fantastic piece, Gali! Thank you so much for shining on a light on how pervasive and pernicious unconscious bias is. And thank you, even more so, for modeling a type of leadership that is responsive and responsible.

  9. Abby Levine says

    July 11, 2018 at 7:54 am

    Thank you Gali. This piece models courage and leadership. It’s an honor and a privilege to read it and it inspires me to follow your lead.

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