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Developing a Culture of Allyship

Before you head out to fearlessly test your allyship savvy in the workplace, we offer this final chapter on the critical task of building ally communities. Ultimately, allyship is about people being allies for each other. We must be intentional and deliberate in growing our communities of allies through purposeful networking. Create a constellation of dudes who get it and can be resources, supporters, and advocates in gender equity work—with women. Communities of male allies can be formal or grassroots. In either case, a community of allies serves two functions.

First, it frees the influence, creativity, and passion of an untapped resource for equity in organizations. Getting men off the sidelines and into the gender diversity and inclusion conversation is a real game changer. By making men stakeholders in gender partnership, they’re not outsiders wondering, “What is my role?” Second, ally communities provide a forum where men get involved, educate each other, become comfortable asking difficult questions, clarify their own thinking, and learn how they can best contribute through meaningful and intentional action.¹ Marjorie Clifton of Clifton Consulting affirmed that “we have to create a safe space at work where men can figure out gender equality, understand it better, talk about it, and ask questions. There’s this perception that men can’t participate in this conversation unless they’re perfect—there’s not a forgiving place where you can ‘step in it’ and correct course. We have to give everyone a margin of grace and a space for men and women to share their stories and perspectives.”

This chapter contains four strategies on how to advance an allyship culture at work in order to build and leverage a broader community, cultivate connection and collaboration, and transform culture.

Launch a Male Allies Community

Who should you include when initially building an ally community? Start with the cadre of dudes who get it, show interest, and have the heart for the work. Then expand through your networks—invitations and nominations are a good starting point. Appreciating the range of reasons why men attend and participate in ally initiatives goes a long way toward building an inclusive community. Thriving ally communities educate, inspire, and support men. You will not attract or build anything through compulsory and “CYA” programming. You are building connections in a community of people who care and are committed to changing the status quo, while shifting the culture. Start small and dream big. The following seven actions will help.

Cast a wide net. Allyship initiatives can be powerful because they have a broad reach. They create a knowledge base for managers as well as individual contributors. Include all aspects of your organization, every business unit, and don’t forget satellite or remote parts. To promote connection within other employee resource groups, reach out to their leadership with an invitation to connect.

Leverage your legends. Legends comprise that small group of male leaders who are widely known for championing diversity in your organization.² Reinforce and develop your legends as male influencers and role models. Their influence on other men is incredibly powerful; through their behavior, legends strengthen a courageous sense of aspiration and purpose in the allyship of junior men.

Identify those allies who have expressed an interest in developing themselves.³ Meet them where they are, understand their motivation, and carefully develop and sharpen their commitment. Give them opportunities to share their experiences and understand the meaning of their allyship. Sharing personal ally stories (“why I care about gender equality”) helps other allies to reflect on their own experiences and feelings about the importance of gender partnership. Sharing and storytelling build connections between members and weave a sense of belonging into the community. This is especially important as you need to draw on resources, commit to action, and overcome resistance.

Encourage tempered radicals and rebel leaders. Tempered radicals and rebel talent are those cultural insiders with an outsider perspective—people who understand gender equity.⁴ Look for men who demonstrate rebel leader expertise. Their passion, curiosity, and creativity enable organizational change. Challenging the status quo, traditional gender roles, and expanding perspectives comes naturally and authentically to them. These leaders are particularly helpful in overcoming resistance and barriers to change; they’re not afraid to confront when needed. Encourage these guys and let them lead.

Solicit nominations. Ask managers to nominate members of their team who might be strong male ally candidates. Engage the women’s networks in your company to identify men who they perceive as established or aspiring gender diversity advocates.⁵

Enhance the nomination and invitation process. Notify nominated and invited men with an affirming emphasis on how others view them as strong advocates for gender diversity. Never underestimate the power of affirmation and recognition. Affirming notifications and invitations also reinforce the message that gender equity is an organizational priority. To foster greater interest, have the executive sponsor advocating for the ally initiative send an email to each nominee’s direct manager.⁶

Launch an open invitation for self-selection. Sending an open ally-community invitation allows interested men to self-select. Finding men outside the usual suspects helps to broaden the appeal of a male ally group. You may be surprised who expresses interest. Men who previously seemed apathetic about gender diversity may come forward and become passionate advocates.⁷

Strategically Grow Your Allies’ Community

Practice what you’ve learned. The two components of allyship must remain front and center when building a male allies community. First, promote gender fairness and equity through supportive and collaborative relationships with women. Allies work alongside women, not for women, not instead of women, and certainly not to rescue women. Return to this foundation of allyship often in building an ally community. Without women alongside as allies, gender partnership is simply not possible. Ambassador Donald Steinberg created a community of male allies in the global development sector called Mobilizing Men as Partners for Women, Peace and Security. This international community employs the mantra: “Nothing about us without us.”⁸ This means, in essence, to work alongside women to ensure equal access and inclusion of women in all aspects of the workplace, and never presume to speak for women, only amplify their voices. This community has an official charter and principles in which the mantra is repeated to keep its purpose clear and fresh. It perpetuates a mindset of learning from women. You can also leverage this mindset to collaborate with the legions of women who have been leading gender equity work for decades in your own organization.

Second, drive systemic change through public acts of sponsorship and advocacy. There is nothing like committing publicly to show transparency and have others hold you accountable for your actions. Create a set of pledge principles for allies to sign, which increases commitment and ownership. Then leverage that public commitment to recruit and reinforce additional advocates for gender equity. (See the sidebar “Sample Pledge Principles.”)

With these two allyship tenets guiding your efforts to launch an ally community, integrate the following best practices into your community.⁹

Partner closely with a women’s initiative in your organization. Whether in an employee resource group, women’s leadership initiative, or an informal grassroots group of women for gender equity, work in close partnership to align action and advocacy. Offer to create a male and female cochair structure for both your male ally community and the women’s resource group. Ask a senior woman to be your executive sponsor if your community is an official part of the company.

Start small; don’t try to boil the ocean. Work within your sphere of influence looking for small wins. In resource-constrained environments, grassroots efforts are how to work these days. You may not have time to plan and develop a formal program, but you can work at your local level. Work laterally with the men and women near you first.

Keep it action oriented and focused on outcomes. The power of a community is in combined resources and synergistic efforts to drive real change. Don’t let it devolve into mere cheap talk and social gatherings. Male allies are looking to understand what they can do.

Avoid costly bureaucratic structure. Focus on advocacy. Stay agile. Unnecessary ally community structure and hierarchy divert attention from the real work of allyship. They also waste money and energy that could be spent to create change.

Base the community’s advocacy on evidence and facts. Keep women’s actual experiences and voices at the forefront and ensure that your group’s actions are rooted in ground truth. Challenge unsupported narratives, myths, stereotypes, and biased perceptions, such as the idea that meeting alone with a woman is dangerous or that women are just waiting to falsely accuse men of harassment.

Facilitate contact with senior leaders as program sponsors to strengthen community efforts and ties. As the community grows, diversify networks to broaden the scope and influence of your advocacy.

Promote healthy gender identities. Recognize how traditional forms of masculinity lead to biased behavior and stereotypes. Foster healthy norms of masculinity that don’t artificially constrain men and women in the workplace or at home. Deloitte’s research on men provides insight into how men feel stuck in the traditional workplace and how rigid gender rules inhibit gender partnership.¹⁰ Men have overwhelming pressure to avoid asking for help from their male or female colleagues. Men are also less likely to have friendships and personal relationships based on trust with men or women that can be outlets for pressure and fear. To avoid signs of weakness, men learn to cover and become hypercompetitive and stoic, and don’t disclose stress and anxiety. Many of these behaviors can be detrimental to the careers of women and other underrepresented minorities.¹¹

Promote actions and advocacy to address sexual harassment. By recognizing men’s role in stopping sexual harassment, drive systemic change in language and behavior through bystander intervention and education.

Include participants from a wide variety of backgrounds. Reaching broader groups of men and being taken seriously in social justice work mean you have to be fully inclusive in your own ally community. Does your community include men of color, gay men, and men from different generations? Ask often how you can reach across cultural boundaries to pull diverse men into the ally fold. If your organization has employee resource groups, start by reaching out to connect with each of these groups and invite them to collaborate.

Focus on dos, not don’ts. Instead of telling men not to steal women’s ideas, show them how to amplify and ensure they give credit. In a space that is heavily focused on what not to do, male ally groups do just the opposite. They equip men with both the rationale and the tools to act. They also show men that there is more than one way to be a male ally.

Develop an expectation of accountability. Allyship requires getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. This includes an expectation that each of us will be held accountable for our language and behavior. Because allies both make mistakes and sincerely want to get better, they expect to be confronted. Real allies both invite and thoughtfully implement feedback.

Implement bystander intervention as part of ally education. The research is clear that ally development must include the development of skills for bystanders to intervene. Diffusion of responsibility is part of the human condition, and you must thoughtfully address the challenges to overcoming bystander paralysis in male allies. Bystander intervention helps allies to notice an event, define it as a problem, take responsibility for intervening, decide on a course of action, and implement the intervention.

Clarify Desired Outcomes

Ally networks and communities provide a space to discuss and share things they are learning about women and allyship with other men and women. Having a community where men feel they’re included leads them to be more engaged. Attorney Frank Bernstein of Squire Patton Boggs LLP explained that gender partnership also makes us better business partners by encouraging humility and eliminating blind spots. Bernstein said, “A man’s got to know his limitations, and recognizing what we know and don’t know is key in all aspects of life. People who aren’t like me bring different perspectives and something important to contribute.” Effective ally communities leverage learning and inclusion to achieve five desired outcomes.¹²

Making gender real and relevant. Men in these communities often describe their involvement, especially after hearing women’s workplace experiences, as “opening my eyes” and “breaking me out of a bubble.” What was once theoretical became concrete. When these accounts come from women they know, it creates that personal connection that motivates action.

Deepening understanding. Through connection and listening, men come to appreciate the nuance and complexity of gender equity in the workplace. Previously random incidents start to coalesce into predictable patterns of behavior. Men’s mindsets shift to see that progress requires not only changing behavioral norms but also changing organizational systems and structures. Through the opportunity to partner with their female peers, men appreciate the need for women and men to work together to drive change. For example, PNC Bank’s male allyship program includes a learning exercise where each man reaches out to three female colleagues and asks questions about their experience as a woman at the bank.

Understanding the critical role of listening. Men develop an awareness of the need to talk less and listen more. They come to value listening at work and at home, too. They ask their partners how they can be better allies for them, listen carefully, and take the feedback to heart.

Becoming more self-reflective. Men participating in male ally groups are prompted to consider how their—past and current—behavior affected women at work and their spouses and partners at home. Ultimately, many men have the epiphany that they have been part of the problem and now need to be part of the solution.

Clarifying men’s role in supporting gender diversity. In the workplace, men achieve clarity about what does and does not help to support women at work. One of the many benefits of male ally involvement is that instead of feeling lost and confused, men come to feel empowered and want to use all they’ve learned to support change.

Connect allies through networks outside your organization, including allies at conferences or other forums. Women’s leadership conferences increasingly are welcoming men as allies to learn and connect. Some of these forums are encouraging men’s learning, awareness, and ally development through specific tracks and programs. Because your allies’ community is closely partnered with women’s resource groups, there is a terrific opportunity to learn together at these conferences. Allies benefit by participating in ongoing, supportive education and networking opportunities at forums, learning best practices, and connecting with like-minded gender advocates; such participation is essential to developing ally skills.

Cultivate Connection and Collaboration

Now that you’ve identified the core group of guys who get it and have started laying the foundation for creating an ally identity, it’s time to focus on interpersonal relationships, networking, and team building. You need to maintain a positive and aspirational approach to developing collaborative relationships with your female work colleagues. Focusing on increased interactions results in more positive exposure to women and, ultimately, greater validation of ally efforts by female colleagues. Here are a few best practices, with emphasis on benefits, positive outcomes, success stories, and interconnectedness.

First, create opportunities to interact with women in your organization through networking, mentoring, and professional development events. As we’ve already suggested, if your organization has a women’s employee resource group, start by coordinating events with them. This serves three purposes: it provides positive interaction with women in leadership, increases male allies’ motivation and commitment, and solidifies a relationship with a group of women who have an overlapping purpose—classic allyship. Subha Barry of Working Mother Media stressed that allyship and increased cross-gender professional interaction needs to start early. She suggested starting with entry-level personnel: “Build mentoring networks where men and women are working together within the organizational culture from the beginning.” More frequent and positive interactions help people to reduce group differences, dispel myths and stereotypes, and build connection.¹³ Cultivating connection and collaboration is about developing men as allies and having women accept men as allies. The social connection that male allies enjoy through positive interactions with women produces feelings of acceptance, support, and belonging as an ally.¹⁴ Positive reinforcement of the ally identity leads to personal commitment and motivation in allyship that fosters gender equity. Rachana Bhide of Bloomberg Radio News said that women and men need to reinforce the capabilities of men as allies because many men don’t realize how much positive reinforcement they need. Without reinforcement, getting them on board is difficult and slow. She suggested that “if you tell men they’ve been identified as showing many of the skills and attitudes of excellent mentors and allies for women and invite them to a workshop on that basis, I can’t imagine they’re going to cross their arms and be defensive. We need to create that positive framing.”

Second, communicate support for social change as part of your inter actions with women. Male allies thoughtfully consider how their presence and actions influence the motivations, identities, and resolve of their female friends.¹⁵ Having an awareness of their privilege, allies offer autonomy-oriented support that empowers women; it doesn’t make women dependent on men’s support.¹⁶ And don’t fall into the trap of co-opting the messages of women’s groups and making this about men as allies. Janet Foutty of Deloitte said that “it’s one thing for me as a female leader to set expectations for my team, but incredibly important that the men on my team are as loud and clear as I am on gender partnership. These have been important allies because they’ve had to lean in to reinforce and amplify messages based on the trust issue in work relationships between men and women.”

Third, periodically reflect on the purpose, progress, and development of your allies’ initiative. Early in the creation process and at regular intervals after, check in with women leading gender initiatives to ensure that your efforts are aligned, ask for feedback and guidance, and reinforce the need to hold men accountable to their female colleagues.¹⁷ Be ready to shift your approach as the cultural narrative changes. Do small things on your team right now to give women more opportunities and voice. Don’t spend endless time looking for the latest research or best programs. Just get started. Use your own friendships and collaborations with female colleagues as a prime opportunity to intentionally role-model allyship for other men.

If your community-building efforts even smell like CYA training or mandatory participation, you will fail. As Gretchen Carlson explained, “Don’t do it the way we used to train for sexual harassment prevention—this is not effective. Don’t make it a compliance issue.” A culture of allyship is based on authentic connection and supportive and collaborative relationships based on action, not “check the box” training programs of the traditional twentieth-century workplace.

Ally Actions

•Launch a male allies community. Identify those allies who have expressed an interest in developing themselves and encourage cultural insiders with an outsider perspective as men who understand gender equity. Include all parts of your organization, every business unit, satellite or remote locations, and other employee resource groups.

•Strategically grow your allies’ community. Base the community’s advocacy on evidence and facts and keep it action oriented and focused on outcomes working within your sphere of influence to create small wins.

•Clarify desired outcomes. Make gender real and relevant by deepening understanding and appreciating the nuance and complexity of gender equity in the workplace, while clarifying men’s role in supporting gender diversity.

•Cultivate connection and collaboration. Create opportunities to interact with women in your organization through networking, mentoring, and professional development events.