CIICPD 2023

accepting modern ways of thinking. The way to achieve this was suggested by one of the managers when he stressed “cooperation and sharing”, within the company as well as on a global scale, as a key to a progressive and competitive business. 3.2 Unconscious Biases as CIs in Leadership Practice The training sessions aimed to help managers deal with prejudices in their workplace, in order to gain the maximum from diversity. Each occurrence of an unconscious bias was treated as a critical incident adding to their managerial experience – an event faced and lived through and further turned into a narration recalled and reflected upon by the participants. To understand these critical moments, the manager trainees first learned how to realise their own biases by identifying specific situations, and the pitfalls, from their practices to further define their first-hand emotional, cognitive and behavioural reactions and juxtapose them to their own re-evaluation and planning for practical solutions and implementation. Based on that, the participants were introduced to a set of practical tools, the nudges, to manage team diversity in their workplace more efficiently. In the following text, analyses of three selected critical incidents caused due to a particular bias will be illustrated to show how to lead the participants through their reflections, realisations and solutions. 3.2.1 Critical Incident 1: Stereotyping In the first incident selected for analysis, the manager shared a story about a situation when dealing with stereotyping in his team upon hiring a person originating from an African country. In the first part of the narrative, the manager provided the background information, including his own perceptions about the new employee: A person from an African country was supposed to join us. He was a usual black man. Simply a nice guy and it was a pity that he had to return back to his country for family reasons… He was in fact a university teacher at the same time when working with us, which one would not recognise from his appearance. He was kind of spontaneous, always in a good mood. In short, the manager first introduced his new team member’s country of origin, pinpointing his skin colour, typical of people from the African regions. The series of positive assessments of their new team member that followed, including his friendly attitude, education and academic background, or a natural and happy personality indicated the incident coming, i.e. “some of the somewhat inappropriate jokes” toward the new employee from his team, when at the beginning of their cooperation, “one of the people placed a banana on his desk.” Inappropriate ethnic jokes aimed at the new employee from his colleagues are typical behaviour toward people of different origins based on stereotypical interpretations. To tackle the problem, both, a proper first-hand reaction, as well as building long term leadership within the team, is crucial. The manager in this case proved his good instincts and experience when describing his immediate actions: “This was really a difficult situation we had to solve. So, we had to sit down and talk about some existing rules, things that cannot be happening, if we have to work together.” And indeed, the

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