Do Others Have Bias Against Our Strengths?

Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

For Women’s History Month, I encourage you to examine how your biases on leadership styles and traits may be biased for or against women (and other minoritized people) in the workplace.

In previous Medium articles, I have explored the idea of using leadership inventories and assessments to understand how they work with others and showcase their leadership on a team. I introduced a management plan that helped frame how to get staff to learn, refine and teach a skill related to their strengths to better support office goals. Both of these lessons have helped me develop skills I would not have otherwise learned through my decades of work in higher education.

But recently, I viewed a webinar offered by the American College Personnel Association, through the Commission for Student Involvement. It was titled “Deconstructing and Reconstructing StrengthsQuest Education Through a Critical Whiteness Lens.” The content of the webinar focused on presenting leadership inventories to students, but its application was also useful for working with professionals.

Not all people experience leadership inventories and assessments the same way. Look at ways to mitigate the perceived reception of each leadership type as shared by women, POC and other marginalized people on your team. Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

The webinar framed some of the issues that leadership educators, and people who use leadership inventories…