Take the first steps in managing bias. Host Amber Clayton sits down with Sarah Bettman, founder & principal, Bettman Consulting Group, to discuss the cognition behind our biases and how to counteract them, as well as when it’s appropriate to solicit leadership buy-in and address them within your organization.
Understand biases with the “if, then, therefore” framework. Host Amber Clayton sits down with Sarah Bettman, founder & principal, Bettman Consulting Group, to discuss the cognition behind our biases and how to counteract them, as well as when it’s appropriate to solicit leadership buy-in and address them within your organization.
This podcast is approved for .5 PDCs toward SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP recertification. Listen to the complete episode to get your activity ID at the end. ID expires February 1, 2026
Rate/review Honest HR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Monique Akanbi: Welcome to Honest HR, the podcast for informed and aspiring HR professionals, intent on transforming workplace challenges into golden opportunities.
Wendy Fong: Every week we chat with industry experts to bring you insights, trends, and actionable advice through relatable stories from the real world of HR. Honest HR is a SHRM podcast, and by joining us, you're helping to build a more engaged workforce and drive organizational success. I'm Wendy Fong.
Amber Clayton: I'm Amber Clayton.
Monique Akanbi: And I'm Monique Akanbi. Now, let's get honest.
Amber Clayton: Now, let's get honest.
Wendy Fong: Now, let's get honest.
Amber Clayton: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I'm Amber Clayton, senior director of Knowledge Center Operations at SHRM and co-host of Honest HR, and I'm here today with Sarah Bettman, Principal and Founder of Bettman Consulting Group. Welcome.
Sarah Bettman: Thank you. It's great to be here with you.
Amber Clayton: We're very glad to have you. So, to start off, can you tell us a bit about your work, implementing inclusion and diversity initiatives and managing bias?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah, absolutely. So, many years ago I was a paramedic firefighter. I mentioned that in our pre-talk, and I learned that everyone has a story, and I noticed I was interested in that. It's things that I read about, thought about, thought about through my community and friends, and it became crystallized when I worked for Kaiser Health, and I was part of a inclusion council, more around health disparity, but as I started doing team development and leadership development, it gave me the words, the tools, and such. From there I joined Linkage, now a SHRM company and traveled around the world, as part of their team that did Advancing Women Leaders: Inclusive Leadership, and then, from there, built a DEI strategy for a large Fortune 500 company, and then have been out on my own for three years.
Amber Clayton: That's great, and you're here at our conference. You just facilitated a session.
Sarah Bettman: I did. We Can't Fix What We Can't See and How to Manage and Mitigate Bias.
Amber Clayton: Great. Well, so what does bias mean? We hear this term all the time. What does it mean exactly?
Sarah Bettman: I'm going to be clear. I'm not a psychologist, org psychologist, or any of those fancy things. I'm really applied, and to me, bias is the shortcuts our brains take. We take in a lot of information but only process a few, and our brain uses 20% of our energy, so we try to make connections, so we don't use as much energy, and so we make associations and to fast track so that we don't use that energy. The problem is a lot of this is unconscious, so we talk about unconscious bias. Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture, but it becomes this thing that it's our first instinct in reaction when, if we pause, realize there's more information, more to the story, more to the scene we're seeing, and we need to take a look at it, because sometimes if we run on that first instinct, it can do harm. Actually, my session, I talk about hiking in the woods, and you come across a bear. What do you do?
Amber Clayton: Just run.
Sarah Bettman: Oh.
Amber Clayton: I don't know.
Sarah Bettman: Well, good. You're a perfect victim to my story, because I then show how to be safe in bear country, and it says, "Don't run," so our instinct is to run, when actually, the thing to do is, "What kind of bear is it? Where am I? What are they doing?" and this is all in this pamphlet I read. I think it applies to bias. Our first instinct, it might not be the right thing. How do we pause, take in more information? I know there's thinking fast and slow and a lot of research on it, but that's what it means to me.
Amber Clayton: Yeah, I would almost be afraid to sit, look, and say, "Oh. What kind of bear is this?" I mean, again, first instinct is to run, so that's really interesting. Yeah, I'm definitely am somebody who needs to pause before I act on something.
Sarah Bettman: Yes.
Amber Clayton: Yes. Well, I read in an article that there are more than 150 types of unconscious bias in the workplace. It's quite a bit. How do you help your simplify that for your clients?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah. I think that's important, because depending on the organization, the culture, they bring up different biases. I have a framework that I like to teach and, frankly, was born out of my journey and understanding my biases, and that's, "If, then, therefore," and so I talk about maternal bias is, if she just had a baby, then she's exhausted; therefore, she doesn't want the high profile project, and I had a client for whom this bias was potentially in the situation.
She wanted the project, because it was the project that was going to lead to the promotion, but her manager, a male manager, he and his wife had had a child six months, a year earlier, and on-ramping back from maternity leave was so hard for his wife and, frankly, hard for him too. So, out of the goodness of his heart, his "if, then, therefore," even though it was maternal bias, he was potentially going to make decisions on her behalf and not give her the project, knowing that she could still get the promotion doing it differently, so part of the work is, when you do that, you're making decisions, and we need to talk to each other.
So, in coaching this client, I said, "Have you talked to your manager?"
She's like, "No, he knows."
I'm like, "No, talk to your manager," and they were able to have a very rich discussion. He was applying his bias from his own experience to her situation. Well, she was doing fine, and her experience was, "I would come back early from maternity leave if you needed to me," because she really wanted the project, and the mistake that happens in organizations, if they hadn't have had that conversation, out of the goodness of heart, he's like, "Oh. Just stay on leave. I'll give you the project later, or I see another path." He sees that. All she sees is she didn't get the project.
Amber Clayton: Yes.
Sarah Bettman: So, then, ultimately, she exits the organization for another opportunity, and this manager, this sponsor who believed in her, is scratching his head going, "What happened?" And so "if, then, therefore" can catch us and be a framework, that I catch myself in my head all the time and crack myself up, kind of like, "Oh, wow. That's a good one," but then you can hear it in others, and you can realize, "Okay. There's a conversation that needs to happen there."
Amber Clayton: Yeah, and I'm sure that he's thinking, "I'm doing a good thing here. I've been giving her an opportunity to rest and relax," and not really thinking about the outcome of not providing that project to her," so that's really interesting. Why should employers care? I think that's a simple question, but maybe not so simple.
Sarah Bettman: I'm going to say an answer at risk of getting kicked off the stage here, and I don't know that they should.
Amber Clayton: Okay, that's interesting.
Sarah Bettman: There are organizations that are not having inclusive beliefs, whether it's through religious reasons, ideals, and there's one in particular. It's a retail outlet, very religious oriented, anti-LGBTQ.
Amber Clayton: Yes.
Sarah Bettman: And I say they're in integrity, because we know what they stand for. We could try to convince them to be different, but the amount of energy, I'd rather work with the organizations that are sitting with the question, and so the "Why bother?" is why bother for your culture? Where does it say in your culture, why is it important for you achieving your goals? So, I have an architecture engineering firm that I worked with, and the leader is like, "I want my employees," my words, "To be stoked to work here." He had his own version and, "I don't want us to be a reason or a barrier for them achieving their goals and their work." That was it. That was the "why bother," and so then it was important to him to learn things about himself, as a white, male leader, to have hard conversations with his leadership, to support and listen to people in his organization that had points of view.
So, I think it's hard, is that we imply a company should be a certain way, and if it's not aligned with their values, what I'd rather them be is an integrity and be who they say, so that in this organization, no one who's LGBTQ will go to it. They will never get my dollars either. I feel I can vote. That said, we're not asking it to be something that, fundamentally, would be such a big stretch, that they'd be out of integrity and do more harm than good, and that really is the bottom line. I don't think they should care. I think they should figure out why, and it might be, "We actually don't care." Good, great. Now you know. Don't put out rainbow flags for Pride. Don't do anything around Black Lives Matter. Just don't do anything, and I believe the consequences will come, as people who are coming up in the workforce look for these things, look for the information.
Amber Clayton: Yes.
Sarah Bettman: And it'll work out, but I think it's more dangerous and does more harm for an organization to claim to be something that they fundamentally cannot be because their culture won't allow it.
Amber Clayton: Wow. I mean, that's really compelling. I am actually glad that you brought that up, and if I'm thinking of the same place, they're successful still, even despite their beliefs and their values, and their people that work for them, that they believe the same thing. It goes back to communication, really. Obviously, if you have certain values and beliefs, you're going to want your company, the company that you work for, to have a certain culture, to have certain values and beliefs as well, and that the employer needs to communicate that out to the external people who are potential candidates, but also people who are customers as well, customers and clients.
Sarah Bettman: Yeah.
Amber Clayton: So, what are the benefits of mitigating bias?
Sarah Bettman: Well, I told you earlier, I'm not a statistics person, but I'm going to pull out some statistics. So, in the workforce, let's use women as an example, women are graduating from both undergraduate but also advanced degrees at a greater rate than men, but women only hold 12, 18%. That's why I don't get to do statistics, a small percentage of that in C suites of Fortune 500 companies, so something is in the way, something's getting in the way. Putting it back to an organization, McKinsey talks about the broken rung. I've worked with organizations where they have parity at the early career, and then there's a point where it just dips.
What is that? A lot of times there's some element of bias, some way of the culture that's getting in the way. So, if an organization is claiming they want to be inclusive and they want to solve this problem, the first place they have to look is those subtle nuanced biases that inform every conversation. I call it like a nuanced fog. Otherwise, they're jumping to strategy and tactics that, actually, they can't do well, and now we're going back to maybe my paramedic in me doing harm, because the policies and procedures don't actually do what they meant to, because it's infused with the bias, and actually ends up being protective of the systemic structures that create the mess in the first place.
Amber Clayton: Now, an example, I'm just going to say this, and maybe it's not the right example, I'm just going to put it out there, is if you have a male and a female who's up in the same jobs, equal jobs at the moment, my thought is, because I've heard this before, women need to take leave at some point because they might want to have children, or they're too emotional, they're too needy. I've heard all of those things before. Is that something that you would consider to be-
Sarah Bettman: Oh, yeah.
Amber Clayton: Yeah.
Sarah Bettman: So, the first one's maternal bias. There's also performance bias, and I use majority and minority when I talk about this, because I work in systems, and the cultures are different. So, performance bias, if you're, say, working for an HR team, which sometimes can be more women, the majority will hold people to a different account than the minority. By that, I mean not demographic representation, but just what's the representation in the team, and so it happens, primarily, with women, because a lot of leadership teams are still white and male, that I've seen this where, given equal qualifications, the woman has to take a senior director role, not the VP role, where the male with the same qualifications, and this is like we're hiring four people, so this is an A-B kind of test, the males go straight to VP even though they're equivalent in many ways.
I do think some of this is designing the job description, getting clear what those minor things are, but also being very clear, what are the cultural biases in the system that perpetuate this? Because I go back to, we can't fix what we can't see, and when you grow up in a culture of an organization or living, and it may not be stated values and culture. It's the behaved values and cultures, we can't see it, so we have to teach people to see it. So, I believe that's one of the places we have to start.
Amber Clayton: Are there any policies or practices HR leaders can implement, as far as mitigating bias?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah, so I'm going to be a bit controversial again, because I believe bias is a leadership development and culture issue, as I've talked about before, and that we have to earn our way to policies and procedures. If we don't understand the "why bother?" we're doing it, and what our biases are in the system and in the culture, then our policies and procedures risk doing harm. I've seen this. Talent acquisition implements anti-bias training, and then the hiring manager doesn't believe in it, and now they're at odds with each other as they're trying to hire new candidates.
So, going back to, I think having the conversation, understanding what the biases are, looking at "if, then, therefore," what do we make up about each other and how we do this, is actually more important. I imagine you have wonderful consultants that come on here and people who can share all those policy procedures, but I'm always going to say, "You need to understand who you are and what the biases are in yourself, on the team, and in the system before you do policy procedures or else you'll risk not meeting your objectives," and I always go back to doing more harm.
Amber Clayton: Yeah. I mean, to me, that makes sense. I don't find it controversial. I mean, obviously, you want to have buy-in, and being able to include all the voices, the employees, the managers, leadership in that is going to give you more buy-in to those policies and procedures that are developed. What are the mistakes that organizations make when trying to tackle bias in an organization?
Sarah Bettman: Jumping to strategy and tactics. I think leadership teams, as I said earlier, are good at strategy and tactics. It feels safe, but having the conversation, "Why is this important to us? Why bother? Seeking information, and not through an assessment, town halls, or some places that might not fundamentally be safe, but be curious." The unconscious bias course that I teach wasn't to be the end-all, be-all bias course. It was really because, as I taught it, I would get three or four people come up to me and say, "I want to be a part of this. I want to contribute." That was the way, in our organization, we were able to build 10 resource group, because I would teach bias, and then people would come up to me and say, "I want to be involved," and here's the catch; you never want to be the one that makes a decision.
So, I would say, "Okay. Make a business case on what the resource group will do, what its impact will be, and I will put you in front of executive leadership to make the pitch." I always made it from a business resource group, so that it was a strategic advisor to the business. Being able to build relationship, so that leadership could call and ask questions and they could do it together, I think, is the first place to start, versus jumping into strategy and tactics, because going back to that leader, it simply was he wanted his employees to be stoked to work for the company and have the company not contribute to the harm done. It was in a community that has history of white supremacy, redlining, significant disparities within the community. He didn't want to be the organization that was making that worse, and once he got that, then everything, strategy, tactics, and policies and procedures came from that place of the leadership team, and they were meaningful and they got more buy-in.
Amber Clayton: How about mistakes organizations make when trying to get started with creating a more inclusive culture? I know that's something that we've heard from members, just trying to figure out how to get started, especially when they don't necessarily have buy-in from the leadership or from the top.
Sarah Bettman: Yeah. A couple of things, and in no particular order. So, one is they assign the person that raises the issue, the job of fixing it. So I have done advancing women leaders work faculty with Lincoln SHRMS, Women in Leadership Institute, and women come to that. Then, they go back to their workplace, and they might be general counsel or finance, and they're saying, "You help us be inclusive." I don't know, because it's organizational development. It's culture change. It's leadership development, right? There's an expertise there to do this, so that's one mistake, making it only about HR and the policies and procedures you're talking about. It's not a talent development issue. It's not talent acquisition. It's none of those things. It is a culture issue, and HR is the implementer of many of the things that make it possible to change, but until the leadership is bought in and on board, nothing can happen.
Then, going back to, I'll use an example, a lot of companies jump in, and then they use best practices, so I had a company use the global best practices for DEI, I think the UN. I've had people use diversity best practice, CalIS, and they haven't stopped to think about who we are, so they use the list to define what they're doing, so that group that's passionate about it does all this work, and the organization's not coming with them, and then they've exhausted and run themselves out. I think it's really important to go slow to go fast. I always start, "We're going to do a leadership offsite and have a conversation about this." To your first question about why should people do this? Sometimes they shouldn't, right? Maybe they're not ready. Maybe culturally, it's just not for them. They have to understand why it's important to them and what it means. Being an advocate for LGBTQIA+, wherever you stop the letters, you have to understand gender identity, transgender experience, and what's happening to your employees outside. Not every organization's ready for that, right? They think it's just a gay issue, right? A sexual orientation.
Amber Clayton: Or adding pronouns to a signature line.
Sarah Bettman: Or adding pronouns, right? And it's like, I'd rather you not do that. Let individuals who think it's important, because if you don't understand what it means, you will fundamentally do more harm than good, and I'll always come back to that. So, having the conversation, asking why bother, having leadership oversight know their part of the learning process, partner with HR, and then let the advocates and the people who are passionate be advisors. Don't make them do the work.
Amber Clayton: Yes.
Sarah Bettman: They already do the heavy lift in their life outside, and sometimes people ask, "You're a white woman. Why do you do this work?" It's because my friends are exhausted, and I go to predominantly white male spaces to do the work, and they don't want to do the emotional labor in their spaces, but I can, and I'll go in there and have these conversations. Then, when they're, "Yeah, we're all and we're great," then I have a long list of people who can come in and support them in their next journey, so I think organizations, whether it's change management, safety culture, whatever, get very tactical and miss this fundamental step. Creating inclusive culture is a culture change, so the same with safety culture, cybersecurity. I don't think the work is any different, and you can't miss this mindset shift. Who do we need to be as leaders? Where, in our culture, informs this before you get into the action of doing things?
Amber Clayton: And would you say, because many HR professionals do take this on themselves, is that something that you would discourage? Are you okay, or would you say it's okay for HR professionals to be that person to go to leadership and say, "This is what I think we should start doing?" or do we wait, like you mentioned, for the person who is advocating for it?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah, I think it depends. A true consultant answer, it depends. There are incredible HR leaders who can, I believe, in some ways HR has been protective of organizations in engagement and inclusive culture, and culture change is a little bit activist, so if the culture is such that it has more that traditional ideal, that person's going to be Sisyphus, pushing the stone up the hill. Now, you could work with a consultant. You could bring someone that's a different leader, and then they work together so that they're both working to create the momentum, but I've seen incredibly successful HR leaders, business partners drive the change. So, it depends on the culture, the receptivity. Part of the reason, I joke, as a consultant, I get to come in and say things that they might get fired for, and the worst thing that you do is fire the consultant, but on the same sense, consultants sometimes can be shiny.
So, I'm saying what you've been saying all along, but because they're hearing it from me, because I saw it at different organizations, somehow it has more weight, so I do believe, if there's an HR leader who wants to do something, look around. Who's making changes? How's it being active? Find those strategic partners to partner with. Challenge, because one of the things that I've seen is talent acquisition is given the job, and then they can't be successful, back to the example I gave before, because the hiring manager is not held accountable to having a diverse slate or some of the anti-bias practices within the interview process, and now that person's actually putting their job at risk, because they're going counter to leadership, and if they're executive, they're in a power position. They have more air cover, so I think, in a true consultant fashion, it depends.
Again, there are women who are passionate on the advancement of women and want to come back, whether they're general counsel or finance, and want to do it, and maybe they don't want to do it, right? And so, part of my role has always been kind of that fractional, help people navigate and answer some of these questions, so that if it is the HR leader, they can be successful and have their voice heard., So I'm working closely with them to validate. If it's women going to a woman in leadership, it's like, "Okay. Let's find who in the organization, maybe a project manager, that can help do the things that need to be done to facilitate the conversations," or it might be simply, I hate to say it, if you're not getting support, you're not the one, and I don't know that the organization's going to do it. I actually had a coaching client recently who's leaving her organization, because she's pushed and pushed for this.
At some point, she's like, "It's not going to budge. And that's not about the individual. It's not about the HR leader," and I think that's the do harm, because the HR leaders I work with or the culture experts, whatever, they want to make change, and they are passionate about the organization and the people in the organization, and that's a hard place to say that the environment's not going to change, and they make it about them and their failure, and I should get certified and I should get this, when in fact it doesn't matter who they are. The organization's just not ready, and that's why you got to start at the leadership, because then that HR leader or that culture person knows how far they can push it. Many of us have beliefs outside of what the culture can tolerate, and we meet the client where they are and move them where they can. You got to know where the appetite is. It may be a tiny move, it may be a huge move, but until you know that, you could just catch yourself in a mess.
Amber Clayton: Yeah. I feel like I've actually had that in my past experience myself, where the culture, I wanted so much to help improve the culture of the organization, but the leadership, the owner of the organization just wouldn't budge on it, and at one point I was just like, "Okay. I can't do anymore. I tried."
Sarah Bettman: No, and it's like dating. Sometimes we get, I'm guilty of this, I hope others are, but I'm in love with the potential versus the reality.
Amber Clayton: Yes.
Sarah Bettman: And I think people get into this, like finally, we're having this conversation. They can see the potential and all the things, and no, there was one conversation. It doesn't have all the meaning that we want it to have, because we do want to change and we believe in it, and it's a hard, hard place, and I think that's why a lot of leaders are exhausted.
Amber Clayton: Well, I can tell you, for sure, that you are not alone in that, because I've been there.
Sarah Bettman: Yeah.
Amber Clayton: Absolutely. So, how can we, as individuals, identify our own bias, and what can we do to manage it?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah, so I like the, "if, then, therefore." Catch yourself, and we're here at a conference, and it's like, "Oh. If she's wearing that, then she must be therefore, or if he's in that role," that we catch ourselves. Not all of it is malicious. Just notice when we say it, some of it's true, some of it's not, and notice that. Then, challenge yourself. Is it true? Do you know it's true? Because you actually might push yourself and realize, "No, it's not true." Okay. I'm making some stuff up here. That's okay. Listen to it in others, and I'm a huge believer in this work, that when you can secret shop and you can start to see micro inequities, so people being treated differently based on situations, you can hear the "if, then, therefore," now you can actually mitigate the bias, because you're working with it. I have found the implicit association test to be helpful, that you just search implicit association.
It's a number of universities who came together and realized the old ways of trying to measure bias and stereotyping were, "Are you biased?"
"Well, of course I'm not biased," right? And so, they figured out a scientific way, that's way above my pay grade, to show where there might be biases, and I'll give you an example. There's a gender career which looks at how strongly do you associate male with career, female with family, and to strong, which might be traditional norms, where men go to work and women stay at home, to no bias. I did the implicit association test, gender career, and despite being a firefighter, having a sister in a male dominated, being supported as a woman in male spaces, I had a slight bias. Now, I could have left it at that and thought all sorts of things, but I really wanted to get curious, "Okay. How does this show up?"
Well, at a conference like this I might ask you, "Are you married? Do you have kids? How's that?" Then, I'll ask male colleagues, "What's your job? What's your project? Where have you worked?' And so, I am using my bias because I'm shy, not that you would know that here on this podcast, but the networking, and so I'm going to something easy that feels good, but if we were a team, and I'm always asking women about their family, which by the way, women love being asked about, "When are you going to have kids? When are you going to get married?" Those questions, so they're not even good questions, but I'm always asking the men about their career. When I get asked to recommend members of my team for a job, I can only speak on behalf of the men because I never got curious.
So, being able to take the implicit association test, know the subtleties and how it shows up, and where that could contribute to the systemic bias in an organization, so the solution, for me, is I ask everyone about their kids and family, and I ask everyone about their work so that I can speak on behalf of both, because I also believe, if I'm a great leader, I'm supporting people in their personal side of life, yeah, go to your kid's soccer game. Oh, yeah. You want to go run your dog? Great, cool. And I want them to achieve their career aspirations. So, implicit association test, and then look forward to others, and again, we can sometimes get fired up about DEI and, "I know this," and whatever, and first be kind, and then if you hear someone with an "if, then, therefore," in a meeting where it's consequential or even not consequential.
Actually, better to practice and not consequential, it's like, "Is that true? I'm curious why you would say that?"
Because you might actually find, if I only mention the men on my team, and you're like, "So, Sarah, none of the women are qualified?"
I'm going to have a moment go, "Oh, no. They are qualified, but through my bias, I was just giving you the men's career. No. Actually, I think these three women are probably qualified."
And now we're working together. You have my back, and I don't have to get it right all the time. Then, the last piece, which I think goes to the policy and procedure, now I'll let you have policy and procedure, is build it in. So, build it into your training, build it into your, even we'd do interviews, and I'd sit in the interviews and kind of challenge bias in nine box conversations to say, "Okay. I noticed we're talking, having this conversation about the men, but not about the women. You're exceptionalizing this person versus that."
And because we all work together, it's a team sport, no one takes offense. It's agreed upon, and that's what we're doing and that's where, I think, there are brilliant practitioners that know that nuance, and can take the usual HR policies and procedures and put a layer of just richness through that lens of bias, but again, you can't have that conversation until you're comfortable with, "Yeah. I'm biased. You caught me. Cool. Let's figure it out, because I don't want to screw up this process," or "I want to be in good relationship," or "I want to hire great candidates, and I just won't see them if I'm used to this experience."
Amber Clayton: Yeah, absolutely. I know this is not one of the questions, so hopefully it's okay to answer this, AI and bias. Just with AI and bias, how does that play into the things that you've shared today?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah. Well, let me just say that's way above my pay grade. I'm honored that you think I actually have details on that, but no, I do have a perspective, and understanding that bias, AI is a learning system, and it's like garbage in, garbage out. If it is built around our organizational structures in the United States, and say, director and above, it is inherently biased for a white, male structure, because that's who's putting the information in. So, we have to know that, right? I know there's brilliant people working on it and figuring this out, so for right now, the same way you would pause with your colleagues and say, "Okay. Do we have any bias in here? Do we look at job descriptions?" Assess any output of AI through that lens, and here's the catch; I might not see what you're going to see. You and I might not see what they're going to see, and having a diverse group of eyes on it, because the nuances that we live, the micro inequities, microaggressions.
Amber Clayton: Aggressions.
Sarah Bettman: The biases, all those things could show up in AI, and we won't be able to see them. That's why you need many eyes, and whether you're inclusion council or you have that diversity on your team, so I think it's something important to think about, and understand where is the data coming in, and if it's your organizational data or industry data, then understand who's putting the information in and where it's bent, and then just apply the same principles you would with your organization.
I think everyone needs to stay on top of AI and using it, but always have that lens, so look for the practitioners out there who are talking about it, who have ideas and concepts and know what to do with it. I don't happen to be one of them, but I know a few that I would introduce you to, so I think that's what we need, is the people who are steeped in it, and understand the technology and how to manage the bias and such, but that's true with everything. We should have people in our back pocket we can call, where like, "Okay. I'm a white woman. This is beyond me. Here are the people I can call to make sure, check myself."
Amber Clayton: I love that, and thank you for entertaining another question that I didn't have for you.
Sarah Bettman: Of course.
Amber Clayton: So, one final question for you. How does an organization get started on their towards inclusion?
Sarah Bettman: Yeah, and I think I may have already answered this, but fear of repeating, but I think it's important. Just ask yourself, "Why bother? Why is this important to us? Where in our culture and our values does this say important?" So, in that Fortune 500, I pitched this idea. We are starting from scratch, and basically, I was going to do the strategy for advancing women, but one of the senior leaders said, "But what about everyone else?"
I'm like, "Okay."
So, three months in the job, I pitched a DEI strategy, and the chief HR officer said, "Let's do it."
I'm like, "Oh, crap. Now we got to do it," and then I went, "Oh, crap. I got to go look at the values," and fortunately, inclusion was in the people value it was written in. So, backing up, if it's not written in your values, if it is not part of your informal value, and I will say, if you don't have the components of culture, mission, values, you don't understand the core belief behind the values, down to behaviors, you still have culture. It's just in behaviors. I joke. I can sit in your meetings and walk your halls, and I'll know you, what your values are. You've got to just make sure there's alignment and a "Why bother?" because it's not easy work and it's hard work, but again, analogy with dating, when a relationship's worth it, we do the work, we want to be better, we want to contribute. So, that's the first, "Why bother?"
Then, know it's the long game. Just like relationship, the marriages that, when I've talked to people who have been married for decades, they say, "We just kept saying yes, day after day." They didn't plan to be together 20 years, even though they probably planned and it was implied they'd be together forever, but they got through things. When it was hard, they chose each other. When they wanted to be angry, they chose each other. I'm ten years in my relationship, five years in my marriage, and we just get better and better because we choose each other, and I think organizations are similar. You choose the culture and the environment you want to create, so you choose to be in relationship. By you, I am thinking of leaders. They choose to be in a relationship in a way so that their employees are stoked, and I always joke that my California upbringing, do you want engaged employees or stoked employees? Because when you have stoked employees, and they have every identity that's representative of the culture within which you serve, that's pretty damn cool and awesome, and it's a great organization.
Amber Clayton: Absolutely, and so I just want to go back real quick and make sure that our listeners and our audience knows the website, again, that you mentioned with regards to the assessment.
Sarah Bettman: It's implicit association test, Harvard Implicit. It'll come up, and it's all the same thing.
Amber Clayton: Okay, great. And then those three, "if, then, therefore."
Sarah Bettman: Therefore.
Amber Clayton: I love that, and I'm going to start using that right after we finish today. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your deep insights with us. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Honest HR. Until next time.
Outro: This podcast is approved for 0.5 professional development Credits, AKA PDCs, towards SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP recertification. Enter the following PDC activity ID in your SHRM activity portal to log your credit, 26Q99CQ. That's 26Q99CQ. This ID expires on February 1st, 2026.