Council Post: 10 Key Steps That Will Help You Make Less Biased Decisions

We all have biases that affect our decision-making. These biases can sometimes be minor and have minimal impact, but other times they can have an outsized and potentially negative influence on your business and how it’s run.

To help you become more mindful of your biases and how to recognize them, we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council for their advice. Below they shared 10 steps leaders can take to make less biased decisions and why each step is so important.

1. Consider The Return On Investment Of Your Decision

Require ROI to be a criteria in major decision-making. Before investing in a new initiative, renewing an old SaaS license or hiring another agency, determine what the relative return on investment is. This allows you to have a more concrete idea of whether or not there’s a tangible or meaningful way for your business to increase revenue, shave costs or increase efficiencies. Since it’s hard to strictly take a quantitative approach to decision-making, one way to minimize bias is by at least including ROI as a required criterion for consideration. That way, you avoid making decisions that would clearly drive a negative return. – Firas Kittaneh, Zoma Mattress

2. Run Your Decision By A Diverse Group Of People

Actively ensure that the group you’re running your decisions by is a diverse one—not just in ethnicity, but in life experience, age, weight, gender expression, religion and locality. Input from a diverse group will help highlight biases you may be unaware of. This thinking should go all the way back to your hiring process, especially in your executive team. People often hire those who will “fit in well with the team.” While a prospective hire’s attitude should fit with the company culture, look for people who will add a new perspective to discussions. The payoff is in the critical thinking and creative problem solving and bias elimination that emerges when you mix people with different ideas and ways of looking at things. – Brian Pallas, Opportunity Network

3. Identify Facts And Bluffs

Before finalizing decisions, carefully determine if what you’re actually dealing with is a fact or a bluff. The best way to do this is by making sure that your choices aren’t corrupted by anyone—which means your thoughts and emotions are well-guarded. Practice deciding on your own with notes, supporting documents and proof of what truth backs up the fact. On the other hand, bluffs should also be recognized in a very smart, witty and graceful way. Making fewer biased decisions is easy—all you have to do is to set aside your emotions and use your brain more – Daisy Jing, Banish

4. Set Expectations And Ask For Feedback

The first step to mitigating biased decisions is to set expectations and ask for feedback. Set expectations by directly saying that the company is prioritizing a more inclusive work culture. State that employee feedback will be used to set the parameters for the process. The more data you gather, the more you can create a specific program. You can gather feedback through surveys that include questions that allow employees to elaborate on their thoughts. Include open-ended topics, such as “I feel comfortable expressing my true opinions in the workplace.” After you set the expectation and gather feedback, you can keep the conversation going through group activities and employee check-ins. This will help employees feel like they are part of the process of setting inclusive company goals. – Shu Saito, SpiroPure

5. Build A Diverse Team To Begin With

Hire for diversity and ensure diverse voices are in your advisers and board of directors. By having multiple perspectives built into your team, your business will be able to avoid the consequences of tone-deaf products, policies or consumer messaging. It’s not easy to reduce personal bias during the hiring process, but focusing on this area of business can have the biggest impact. – Jack Tai, OneClass

6. Look At Your Decisions From The Customer’s Perspective

Whether we believe it or not, we are all biased in our own ways. But making biased decisions can never be the sign of a good leader. The best way to reduce this is to put yourself in the position of the customer and see if it can be helpful for them. This will help you acknowledge and shed light on the problems that your customers can face, which will eventually have a negative impact on your business. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

7. Take Time To Identify And Confront Your Biases

Identify your bias—for you are unable to do anything about it unless you know. Take a rainy Sunday afternoon and read up on it. It’s not done with one quickly skimmed article. It’s arguably one of the most important steps toward building your business, and you are simply falling behind by not catching up on these increasingly important matters. To be fair, just and wise is to acknowledge bias. You need information and facts to act objectively. You need sound and tested logic and something to base it on—be it matters of politics, race, sexuality, environment, religion, sports, etc. You don’t need to become a lawyer, but you must know the fundamentals. – Joey Bertschler, uniworld.io

8. Always Look At The Context Of The Decision

Biases are a part of human nature. We see them in every facet of the human condition. And while that has its benefits, it can be dangerous in a cutthroat business world. As a leader, you’ll often have to make big decisions quickly, and success is getting more big decisions right than wrong. In my experience, coming at problems with the attitude of trying to find what’s right given the context of the environment instead of trying to be right, makes a huge difference. There are many ways to achieve this mindset and encourage it in your company. One that comes to mind is hiring people who are better than you at the job you hired them to do. Another is consulting with experts in the subject matter you want to make a decision. Lastly, think about opposing views and ideas. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS

9. Consume Content About Experiences Outside Your Own

Managing your personal bias is possible only through awareness. We’re so wrapped up in our own bubble of limited experiences that we often don’t understand the impact of a few words and actions. I think that it’s important for leaders to read books, articles and other content types featuring the experiences of people who are typically biased against. Immersing yourself in such content will give you a framework to work with and help reduce bias. It also further humanizes other people and helps you become sensitive to different beliefs, ideas and experiences. – Blair Williams, MemberPress

10. Develop A Hiring Matrix And Power Structure That Promotes Diversity

We are all biased. It is important to address bias not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it helps us realize our collective potential. Groupthink only reinforces what we already see. The real special sauce is in a team that has a 360-degree view. In order to develop this, it is best to design a hiring matrix that allows you to systematically build a professional culture that represents multiple views and experiences in the world. Equally important is making sure that the power structure within the organization is also diverse, and allowing everyone to benefit from the system that checks our individual and communal bias. – Samar Ali, Millions of Conversations