AS A renowned business psychologist and inclusivity expert, Professor Binna Kandola has been an influential voice for more than three decades in awakening governments and corporations to the importance of adopting policies and practices that promote diversity, and equality in the workplace.When Pearn Kandola, the company he jointly founded some 35 years ago, first started offering advice to companies on issues such as unconscious bias and race inequality, such topics were rarely broached in the boardroom.
In fact, the field of business psychology itself was barely recognised as a separate discipline in its own right.“At that time, if the work you did as a psychologist was with commercial companies you were simply referred to as a business consultant. That was one of the things we wanted to change – we wanted to be recognised as a distinct profession. We never used the term consultants to describe ourselves, and there is much more awareness of the distinct profession of business psychology now.”
In fact, this field is one of psychology’s biggest growth areas even though, as Kandola readily concedes, to the uninitiated, the term might conjure upvisions of an anxious FTSE boss lying on a couch in a consulting room with a picture of Freud on the wall.
He points out that the reality is nothing like that and that business psychologists are quite distinct from psycho-analysts or therapists, and tend to deal with clients on a group basis with in a normal working environment, offering advice on practical matters as opposed to probing their subconscious thoughts. That said, just like sports psychologists, they do sometimes work on individual motivational issues.
“A business psychologist applies the science of psychology to the workplace, and our approach is to look at the whole of an employee or employer life cycle from attracting people, developing them, identifying leaders, coaching and helping people to exit,” he tells the GG2 Power List. “All can benefit, but our client base tends to be big organisations, big government departments and, generally speaking, multinationals. “A client could be telling us ‘we are not happy with our graduate selection process and can you develop a new process for us,’ or they might want us to look at ways they can identify and develop future leaders, or ask us to help them develop ways they can attract a more diverse set of candidates.”One of the most important and successful government projects Kandola has worked on involved the transformation of the police force in Northern Ireland following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.Among the Agreement’s recommendations were rebranding the controversial RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) as the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland), a new oath committing officers to upholding human rights, cutting the force to 7,500 and recruiting equal proportions from each community of Protestants and Catholics. The aim was to take the police from being viewed as an arm of the state into a situation where they were perceived as unbiased and protecting everybody equally. “Our job was to set up selection processes for recruitment, and this is where the principles of psychology had to be applied. How exactly do you set up a fair and reliable selection process? As you can imagine, because of the sectarian nature of the Northern Ireland conflict there was a lot of sensitivity about selection.
The aim was to produce a police force reflective of the community, and I am pleased to say it has been very successful.”More recently, Kandola has been working with the government on ways of increasing the number of people from ethnic minorities in senior Civil Service roles. “We’ve been running something called the META (Minority Ethnic Leadership Development) programme.
“The aim is to transform the upper echelons of government departments so that they are more reflective of Britain as a whole.“So far, our team at Pearn Kandola has worked with about 180 ethnic minority employees who the Civil Service think might benefit from being in senior positions. We’ve coached them in areas they can improve in and then perhaps apply for a higher position. It’s been very successful and quite a significant number are now in senior positions.”
Pearn Kandola employs around 40 people, most of whom are psychologists, works with some of the largest firms in world.When the GG2 Power List caught up with Kandola, he had just returned from New York after addressing nearly 7000 employees at Citigroup Inc, the third largest bank in America.Besides dealing with multinational giants, Kandola’s work also takes him into communities. “We do a lot of work with charities on a pro bono basis. There is a programme called Business in the Community who ran an international initiative called Mosaic which focuses a lot on kids from mainly Muslim backgrounds who don’t always achieve as much as they could, and we coach them on things like leadership skills.
“Some of the youngsters we have been involved with have gone back to their countries to set up schools or finance schemes or entrepreneurship schemes and it’s great when you feel you are having a positive impact at that sort of level.”
Besides being senior partner and co-founder of Pearn Kandola, Kandola is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, including: The Invention of Difference: The story of gender bias at work; The Value of Difference: Eliminating bias in organisations; and Racism at Work: The Danger of Indifference.He is also the co-author of several other management books and a visiting professor at Leeds University Business School and Aston University.Kandola, born in Warwick to parents who emigrated to the UK from Punjab in the 1950s, was awarded an OBE in 2008 for his services to disadvantaged people and diversity.
