 Every leader I work with is trying to figure out how to fight gender biases. And one of the biggest barriers to that is defensiveness. People are constantly saying, oh yeah, I know biases are out there. You're biased, I'm not. I've learned a lot about this from Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. And she says, look, I wrote a whole book on gender bias. I still have these biases. Even today, I'm standing in a room and I have a whole group of men and women and I call on the men first. I don't mean to do it, but it happens. People start to say, oh wow, well, if you're biased, it's possible that I am too. I think that every time we talk about bias, it's useful to say, look, here are my biases and I'm gonna put those on the table and then other people are more likely to open up as well. After I got tenure as a professor, I decided I was gonna try to share my insights with a broader audience. So I sat down to write the book and I ended up writing about 103,000 words and I sent them to my agent and he said, I don't even think your mom would read this. It's just not something that would ever be interesting to the rest of the world. And I realized that I'm really prone to falling into tunnel vision and this is something that a lot of leaders face. You find out maybe it's not going exactly as expected, you double down, you try to work even harder to make sure that it succeeds. I was so invested in finishing the book that I ended up wasting a few more months. It's critical to get feedback along the way, especially when you're trying to champion a new idea and take on a task you haven't done before. Leaders love to hire on cultural fit. Working as a manager, leading an advertising team, I was looking for people who fit every single core value that we held and a couple months went by and our company's performance completely tanked. Why? I'd hired a bunch of people who think exactly in the same way that I did. They didn't bring diversity of thought to the table. So I ended up taking a bet on somebody who really did not fit the sales culture at all and it turned out that he had really creative solutions to problems. He was the most productive salesperson in the history of our team. Cultural fit actually holds us back. Why not figure out what's missing from the culture and then bring in people who can actually add that to the table.