Prejudice There Are Several Ways That I

Prejudice There are several ways that I can combat prejudice in the workplace. The first is by not engaging in it myself. This seems almost self-explanatory, but the truth is that we are all human beings and sometimes you have subtle or unconscious biases. Self-awareness is the first step to improving oneself. Further, if I am to have any further influence on others, I should probably be well aware of who I am, and if I have any biases or things like that.

You've got to have a little bit of humility in order to be a teacher to others, especially when they are your peers. This is called Level 5 leadership (Collins, 2005). The second way that I can combat prejudice in the workplace is by taking a leadership role among my peers. This is the personal level of combatting prejudice, and it involves insuring that others around me are not engaging in those sorts of bad attitudes and habits that create a hostile or negative work environment.

Leveraging differences is something that creates the conditions for having no prejudice in the organization. As a leader, my role would be to understand what each team member brings to the table, even if we have people who cannot be trusted to bring coffee to the table, let alone anything else. Such determinations must be made on the basis of merit, however, not physical traits. Bruner (2012) notes that many leaders do not really understand what diversity is, or how it can benefit their organizations.

He suggests that leaders need to take a specific outlook towards diversity, for example viewing diversity as an opportunity to be seized. Such an approach needs to be taken at the leadership level, because that is where you are showing others how it should be done. There is definitely a cultural framing in many organizations that diversity is something to be solved and Bruner's point is that such an approach is ultimately going to get in the way of properly leveraging diverse capabilities that a diverse group has.

So the mindset needs to change, and one of the things as a leader that I can do is to make sure that I am a thought leader and opinion leader on this matter. A third way that I can reduce prejudice in the workplace is to change the way that organizations understand prejudice. First, there must be a working definition of prejudice so that managers understand what it is that they are dealing with.

Clawson (2008) offers one, and makes the point that when it is clearly defined, everybody in the organization can work together to eliminate it. This way, each person within the organization will be empowered to perform the individual tasks of understanding prejudice and eliminating it -- this work must be done at the org culture level, and not simply rely on management to make it happen. Institutional prejudice is a big issue, and I can also help to spearhead a move to root that out.

There might be prejudice embedded in policies, and the result of that is that these policies would need to be identified and then changed. The result of this is probably that I can take charge of this situation, but also to encourage others to look at their policies and whether they are discriminatory. It might.