Workshop #4 2026

Leading without bias begins with an uncomfortable admission: no one leads without bias until they can name the bias they are already leading with.

Every organization says it wants creativity and innovation. Both require the same raw material — people who see what the group is missing, and who are free enough to say it out loud. Bias is expensive precisely because it taxes that freedom. It 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 those 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), presenter for this session, Shari Dunn, 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. Participants work with the decisions and processes they actually own, and leave with language for interrupting bias in real time in a way that keeps people in the conversation rather than shutting it down.

This is a working session. Expect dialogue, a live poll, and a breakout built around a decision you bring with you. Participants who arrive with one process in mind — a hiring loop, a promotion cycle, a project assignment, a performance review template — will get the most out of it.

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