Rethinking EDI Training Amid Today’s Changing Social Consciousness

This article aims to help employers implement equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) training efforts that can make the difference between meeting today’s elevated expectations and falling short by focusing only on select characteristics like race and gender. Understanding the pervasiveness of biases and how they impact our thinking and behaviour can help us try to moderate how we act and communicate, which is why introspection and implicit bias tests are used to detect the strength of a person’s automatic associations between mental representations. But introspection and implicit bias tests don’t eliminate biases or help us avoid falling into the Judgment Trap. According to the research behind the TRACOM SOCIAL STYLE Model, 75 per cent of people with whom you interact have a different behavioural pattern or “Social Style,” including the Driving Style, Expressive Style, Amiable Style, and Analytical Style. Social intelligence training can help those with each of the four Social Styles make adjustments that can enable people to interact more effectively, empathetically, and transparently. By deploying Social Style training to focus on behaviours, organizations empower people to recognize how their perceived strengths can actually impede their relationships with co-workers, while moving them to appreciate diversity of thought and behaviour. This counters the unfounded judgments that our brains ironically make in the name of efficiency, and thus enables us to interact more respectfully and effectively.

• Workplace diversity, Unconscious Bias, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Programs, EDI Training