Confirmation Bias - A Sneaky Thing

A recent experience with a university executive and his direct report inspired me to talk about confirmation bias. Do you know what that is?

Confirmation bias is our cognitive tendency to seek out and interpret information in a way that confirms our existing beliefs. It leads to inaccurate conclusions about a person and subsequently results in poor decision making related to them.

What happened? Despite abundant evidence of notable improvements regarding one of the team leaders that reported to this executive, he refused to acknowledge the new information and facts about her positive growth.

He even disregarded positive reports from her direct reports themselves and from an independent third-party consultant's objective analysis.

He instead kept referencing what was happening several years ago with her, as if it was still relevant and still an accurate reflection of the current state, which it was not.

So stuck on his former beliefs based off old information and miscommunication, he missed the mark in such extreme ways that it was odd and uncomfortable. It was confirmation bias in action.

What's the big deal? His resistance to challenge his biased beliefs about this leader made him unwilling to accept new and improved information about her, even from reliable sources. This resulted in him choosing not to partner with her for success.

He even engaged in activities to intentionally exclude her from the strategic decision-making table.

The outcome? The highly capable and strong team leader became discouraged by the exclusion she was experiencing from him. She wondered what was preventing him from seeing her as the trusted and respected leader she had become.

Her despair grew as she felt increasing misunderstood by him, and eventually the feelings of helplessness (no matter what she did, it would never be good enough) led her to start applying to other roles.

When she left (yes, inevitably for a bigger and better role) it left a tremendously negative impact on those left behind.

Not surprisingly, trust in the executive was lost, as they reflected on how poorly she was treated by him.

Team morale plummeted, productivity tanked, and faith in upper management was permanently damaged because of how terribly the situation was handled by university leadership.

Soon after, retention was impacted, too, as two other superstar employees resigned citing poor leadership as the reason.

Lesson Learned: If you consider yourself a leader, you must be willing to review new information objectively and think critically with the intention to make decisions as free as possible from your own cognitive bias.

Another way to say this, is you need to be aware of your ego and keep it in check. This includes a willingness to hear and accept other perspectives that are different than yours.

This is especially important when it involves bias against a leader from an underrepresented group. Bias in decision-making continues to play a big factor contributing to the abysmal numbers of Black and Hispanic leaders at the executive level - only 3% Black and 4% Hispanic.

Here's the thing - none of us are immune to cognitive biases like confirmation bias, but we can choose to be more self-aware and commit to being a part of the solution instead of contributing to the growing problem

Check out this recent article from Forbes that includes 5 ways to counter confirmation bias.

Have you encountered confirmation bias at work?

I'm curious if this resonates with you and if you've experienced this yourself or have observed it with others at work.