Читать книгу UNBIAS - Stacey A. Gordon - Страница 20

When I worked at Prudential many years ago, there were teams of advisors whose job was to identify individuals who needed a financial advisor, convince them they were the right advisor for them, and then sell them a product. If you've ever worked in sales, you probably recognize these directives. Our teams were created by our manager, and living in Los Angeles, California, you might assume those teams were very diverse. And you would be very wrong.

The job of the advisor is to convince the client they are the best advisor for them. It is the basic tenant of any sales job. When selling, you are told to mirror potential clients, find things in common, get them to like you. There are thousands of sales education materials on the market showing salespeople how to sell. This is called the bandwagon effect, but did you know it's actually an unconscious bias? The bandwagon effect harnesses our need to want what everyone else wants. In sales, that's great. If you can show that you're the top realtor, the best advisor, or the most sought‐after designer, you have a much higher likelihood of closing the potential client. It's also why sales professionals love referrals. If they were referred to you by a current client, the odds of closing the deal increases dramatically. But that's the trouble with all of this. We connect with people in our circle, we refer people in our circle, and our circles aren't usually very diverse.

If you were to look at a demographic survey for our Prudential office, it would not demonstrate diversity. At least, not if you analyzed the data carefully. Our teams of advisors ended up being highly segregated. If you were Chinese, you were recruited by the Chinese manager and you were hired to a team that was 80% Chinese. Of course if you were not Chinese and you happened to make it onto that team, you did not last very long because you did not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, you did not understand the culture, you were not invited to attend client meetings if the client was Chinese, and not only did you feel excluded, you were excluded. You didn't perform as well as the other members on your team and in a commission‐only sales environment, you eventually quit.

This didn't only happen with the Chinese managers. It happened with the Korean managers, the Armenian managers, and the white managers. It also happened with female managers. A demographic survey of the office where I worked would be beautifully diverse on the surface. It would show that we had a vast array of individuals who were ethnically and racially diverse, spoke a number of languages, and even had decent gender diversity. But you would have to take a further look at the data to really see that the diversity was actually segmented, not through policy, but through human behavior and our desire for affinity.

Prudential was by no means an anomaly. One of my coaching clients worked for an investment management company for almost three years. The accounts were a minimum size of $2 million and he did a great job managing the money under his care. He made sound investments and increased portfolio size tremendously. He should have been on a trajectory to lead a client account, but instead he quit his very lucrative job after being told by his white manager that their high‐net‐worth clients wouldn't be comfortable with him, a Black man, being their account manager. Without the opportunity to become a fund manager, he would be unable to lead a team and essentially had no opportunity for advancement.