CIICPD 2023

manager concluded that upon leading an open communication about the problem in his team, the interaction within his team “settled” . In addition to the undesirable behaviour from within his own team, the manager faced stereotypical reactions within the company as a whole recalling that at the beginning, “the biases [against his new team member] were visible everywhere, also in other groups who, when coming for a meeting, were reserved as if communicating behind an invisible wall” . His ability to streamline his own as well as the team’s unconscious biases can also be demonstrated in how he described the adjustment time of the new employee to the corporate culture and work. In the reflective part of the narrative, the manager explained his metacognitive processes when seeking an understanding of his African colleague’s adaptation to the new job environment. To describe his process of adjustment, the manager recalled the moment he met his employee for the first time, including his expectations from hiring a person from a very different background and the advantages for his team: When we met for the first time and he came for the interview, of course the biases were present… When he came into our team, I thought, it will be a change, refreshing for the group. And it was nice that he was there, because we gained a totally different insight on various things that we hadn’t seen before. Believing a new colleague from a different background would contribute to new perspectives, the manager made more profound realisations by putting the situation into theoretical contexts. He recalled a graph from the beginning of their training comparing the process of new employee adaptation in diverse vs monocultural teams: It was exactly like in the graph, that when you accept someone from a different social group, so it simply takes some time until you open up to each other, until they grasp the local principles. This was the same; we felt his performance is insufficient from our expectations. But then, it changed, improved. Understanding that adjustment of people from varied backgrounds requires a longer time before the results arrive, and the depth of the new employee adaptation to the corporate culture is indicated in the final part of the manager’s story. Staying in contact after his African employee returned to his home country, the manager received valuable feedback about the colleague’s change in his working style from their mutual conversations: We stayed in contact, and he told us that after he returned back, he experienced exactly the same feeling that all people work slowly there. He said it is horrible, I explain something to them, they agree and then I learn they did not do it. So, I said to him, you see, this is exactly the situation that we fought, faced together at the beginning. So, he somewhat adopted the European or our mentality when approaching solutions to the problems. In sum, this situation not only showed how stereotypes affect the managers’ practice, but also highlights the importance of leadership skills, including open-mindedness, objectivity and communication skills when managing diversity. It also demonstrates that training aimed at recognising, understanding and dealing with unconscious biases

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