Since time immemorial, social inequalities such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, have plagued society and prevented people from a disprivileged group from living a normal life and advancing their education or careers. While the wider society today is now more aware of these issues, people still hold unconscious biases and stereotypes about groups outside of their own, and this permeates into how they act and treat others.
It's this concept of unconscious bias that shaped the journey of Dionne Wright Poulton, Ph.D., from K-12 educator to a leading diversity and inclusion consultant and conflict mediator. Since founding Poulton Consulting Group LLC, she has worked with various organizations across many industries, including healthcare, energy, technology, and education.
Dr. Poulton shares that her first encounter with unconscious biases occurred during her first year of teaching. In the late 1990s, after obtaining her bachelor's degree via an NCAA Division 1 scholarship at Rice University and then later going to Teachers College, she returned to her hometown in Toronto to teach in a school with mostly low-income students, as a way to show students what was possible if they worked hard on their dreams. She was assigned to handle a 9th-grade class of unruly boys that several teachers were unable to manage. One of the previous teachers wished her luck handling the class, which she described as a 'bunch of animals.'
This shocked Dr. Poulton, as she believed that calling the children 'animals' was a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to that outcome. Determined to make a difference, Dr. Poulton didn't let that teacher's view of the children impact her approach to the class, and she succeeded in improving both the children's behavior and their academic performance. This led to her winning the 'Rookie Teacher of the Year' award. Later, that same teacher who called the children 'animals' told Dr. Poulton that the only reason she won the award was because she was Black and pretty.
"It angered me because she reduced my sound teaching ability to my race, gender, my looks," Dr. Poulton says. "And it was ironic because that teacher had complained about people misjudging her just because she walked with a limp. I did not escalate it into a confrontation, but it made me realize that something was going on – and I later learned that it was unconscious bias."
However, Dr. Poulton admits that not even she is spared from having unconscious biases. Several years into her teaching career, she moved from Toronto to San Francisco, where she volunteered with an after-school program for low-income students.
"I caught myself being surprised that a young Black boy could read and write well," she says. "Despite being a Black woman, born to educated Black parents, and being married to an educated Black man, I still had those thoughts. I had transferred the context in Toronto where I was teaching special education with mostly black boys to San Francisco. In that moment I had an epiphany - despite my background, I still had an involuntary response to that child. This piqued my interest in how our brains function."
These incidents spurred Dr. Poulton to continue exploring unconscious bias. In 2004, she created a workshop called Think You Are An Unbiased Teacher? Think Again!, and she received dozens of solicitations from schools and universities to hold this workshop for their educators. While studying at the University of Georgia where she earned a Ph.D. in Learning, Leadership, and Organization Development (Formerly named Adult Education), Dr. Poulton was granted permission by the university to use the workshop as the basis for her dissertation. As a result, she acquired empirical evidence to prove the efficacy of her workshops, the methodology she created, and its ability to initiate and sustain open and honest dialogue across racial, gender, and cultural lines, as well as diverse professions and age ranges in a non-threatening manner.
After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2011, Dr. Poulton decided to establish the Poulton Consulting Group LLC, which provides diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, workplace assessment, and general HR and management consulting services. Her clients include businesses of all sizes, government entities, nonprofits, and educational institutions.
During DEI training, Dr. Poulton emphasizes the importance of conducting a thorough assessment of the organization's culture and status, which will greatly influence the type of training or intervention she needs to apply. The data will dictate the overall strategy, education, and training opportunities, as well as the 'hotspots' or risk areas in the organization.
"We are in the midst of a huge backlash against DEI," Dr. Poulton says. "I think people come to this work with good intentions but I have witnessed people and organizations who are unqualified to do DEI work. Many don't know how to facilitate dialogue, defuse conflict, and apply a deep analytical lens which is essential to pick up on the intangible aspects of behavior and communication."
"These are essential ingredients to the success of this work. Instead of redirecting and de-escalating situations, unprepared facilitators can escalate already difficult dynamics further. As the facilitator, you are entrusted with providing a psychologically safe environment, therefore it is the job of the facilitator to set ground rules for discussion and protect the respect of everyone in the room, including those who may have made an ignorant or uninformed comment. Although there are under qualified facilitators out there, we should not diminish the legitimacy of this work" warns Dr. Poulton. "We are still a long way from equality and the basic right to humanity for all people, and therefore, it's imperative that we seek first to understand before we seek to get offended and assume positive intent and be kind."
