Allyship
Allyship is not a badge. It's a personal journey each leader must undertake.
Allyship at work
At Becoming we work with clients who understand the impact that allyship can have on women’s opportunities and experience in the workplace. Organisations who recognise the messy reality of business life, with its informal coalitions of difference, diversity and power imbalance. Organisations who want to use allyship to achieve their diversity and inclusion goals.
People want to move beyond simply teaching leaders to speak out when inequality or unfairness is observed. These clients challenge their leaders to live out a more expansive view of allyship, creating real change.
Our approach to allyship
We believe in equipping leaders to be allies who take action. They change their own personal behaviour and work together to dismantle the unequal power systems that marginalise women (and other disempowered groups of employees). This requires allies to:
- Step into the uncomfortable.
- Walk in the other person's shoes.
- Acknowledge their role in marginalisation and inequality.
- Be led by the other person.
- Find new ways to operate and change their personal behaviour.
- Know this is work for life.
Check out our research paper, Allyship at Work: The Future of DEIB. This provides more detail on our approach in work, the way humans make sense of the world through stories, the three levels of allyship and much more.
Our work
We provide interventions which use four key levers of effective allyship to create more effective organisations:
- Develop "My Story". Firstly leaders develop their cognitive-emotional capabilities, using the tools of acceptance and committment training and an archetypal framework, so they engage in more complex ways of thinking through multiples lenses.
- Live "Our Story". This is where leaders acknowledge their similarities, differences and power differentials in their organisation, collaborating to move to more healthy organisational outcomes.
- Connect to "The Story". Without connection to the universal truths such as liberation, inclusion, fairness and respect, interventions risk becoming meaningless. Here we connect to purpose and "The Story" that is true for all of us, to provide an impetus for change.
- Build coalitions. Leaders learn to actively harness the emotional influence and diverse perspective of organisations' informal coalitions. Using their power, they move from small and parochial ripples that do not sustain long term change, to ones which truly impact DEIB outcomes for everyone.
Learn more about how we help clients address their gender diversity as well as other equity and inclusion challenges:
Get in touch to find about our innovative solutions to create effective allies.
Drive your DEIB agenda forward.
