Leading without Bias: Unleashing Creativity and Innovation Inclusively

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23 Sep

Leading without Bias: Unleashing Creativity and Innovation Inclusively

Leading without Bias: Unleashing Creativity and Innovation Inclusively

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 (12:00 AM to 11:59 PM)
2 PDCs
Provider: Institute for Sustainable Diversity & Inclusion
Course Name: Leading without Bias: Unleashing Creativity and Innovation Inclusively

Speaker: Shari Dunn
Program Type: Videoconferences, webcasts, audiocasts, podcasts, eBooks, self-directed E-Learning
Registration URL: https://i4sdi.org/workshop-4-2026/

Email Details

Learning Outcomes: By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: Define competency checking and identify where it enters everyday leadership decisions — hiring, assignments, feedback, credit, and airtime. Explain how biased decision patterns suppress creativity and innovation on a team, and describe that mechanism to a peer. Analyze one decision or process they personally own using an Applied Equity lens, naming the criteria in use and who those criteria advantage. Use at least one non-shaming move to interrupt bias in a live conversation.

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Bias rarely arrives as hostility. It arrives as a standard applied unevenly, a hire decided on fit, an idea that lands differently depending on who says it. This session examines one of the most costly and least examined of bias patterns: Competency Checking™ — the repeated demand that certain people prove, and re-prove, that they belong in the room. Drawing on her book, Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work (HarperCollins), Shari Dunn, presenter for this session, traces how competency checking gets built into ordinary systems — hiring criteria, stretch assignments, feedback, who receives credit and who receives scrutiny — and what it costs an organization in ideas that never get said, tried, or funded. "Bias almost never announces itself. It shows up as a standard — and standards feel neutral right up until you ask who wrote them." From there the session turns to practice. Shari’s frame is Applied Equity™: equity as something applied to a decision, not a value declared in a statement. Bring a decision or process you own. Test out how well you are leading without bias! You’ll leave with language for interrupting bias in real time in a way that keeps people in the conversation rather than shutting it down. Learning Outcomes: By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to: Define competency checking and identify where it enters everyday leadership decisions — hiring, assignments, feedback, credit, and airtime. Explain how biased decision patterns suppress creativity and innovation on a team, and describe that mechanism to a peer. Analyze one decision or process they personally own using an Applied Equity lens, naming the criteria in use and who those criteria advantage. Use at least one non-shaming move to interrupt bias in a live conversation.