How to Be an Ally: Actions You Can Take for a Stronger, Happier Workplace

Book excerpt: Through the power of allyship, each of us can create an equitable, innovative workplace where everyone feels safe, valued, and able to thrive How can you help someone else thrive? How can you interrupt the biases, microaggressions, and inequities that prevent people around you from excelling? How can you build an innovative workplace fueled by equity, diversity and belonging? Every business leader today should be asking themselves these questions. Systems and processes have been skewed too long in favor of some at the expense of others, and things are changing—fast. How to Be an Ally shows how to take personal responsibility for driving change that’s good for people—and for business. You’ll learn the ins and outs of allyship and build the knowledge and skills you need to: Listen and learn new perspectives Identify your own biases Avoid unintentionally harming people with microaggressions Express empathy with courage Advocate for people in small, everyday ways Rethink your work to be more inclusive, equitable, and accessible Build team norms that cultivate allyship Create equitable, inclusive systems and processes Uniquely insightful and extremely timely, How to Be an Ally humanizes diversity and inclusion and facilitates greater empathy and understanding between people of all identities. It teaches us that every individual can learn about the imbalance in opportunity and work to correct it. The key to true diversity, equity, and inclusion is allyship. This one-of-a-kind guide provides everything you need to use allyship to create a better workplace for ourselves and our colleagues.