How Male Allies Can Accelerate the Path to Inclusion and Belonging

For the last few years, the Fall has been an especially exciting time for me because it’s when the Better Man Conference takes place. Starting as an annual gathering in San Francisco, the conference is now a full-day interactive event across three cities that brings together men as allies for marginalized groups, and provides them with resources, support, and training to help grow their ability to use their voices to create more inclusive environments in the communities in which they participate—both within, and beyond, the workplace. The focus is on finding a positive, constructive place of motivation, and developing the tools, insight, and reflexes to make a difference.

In a recent episode of The Will to Change, I sat down with Mita Mallick, the Head of Diversity and Cross-Cultural Marketing at Unilever, who was critical in bringing the Better Man Conference to Unilever’s headquarters in Edgewood, NJ. In the podcast, Mallick speaks about the events in her life that led to the experience of having a male ally step up for her when she was young, and how critical it was when he used his voice and position to help her find her own voice and path. It’s precisely the kind of experience that some (but not all) of us are lucky to have had, that enables us to understand the power of allyship. And it’s precisely the process of developing those ally muscles in those who can most powerfully put them to work that the Better Man conference focuses on.

“The Better Man Conference develops ally muscles in those who can most powerfully put them to work.”

In addition to Unilever and Intel as hosts, with a third host for the conference’s upcoming New York City date, a broad range of prominent organizations provided key sponsorship and sent delegations to the conference. The participation and support of companies like Cisco, Kaiser Permanente, Oracle, and Dove demonstrates a growing and high-profile commitment to helping develop voices of allyship within organizations. As we have seen with other initiatives like ERGs, impassioned and engaged institutional support is key to making these issues central to operational goals.

The Better Man conference brings together groups of men not just with the goal of allyship unto itself, but in a way that is deeply connected to strategy and leadership. Companies send groups of between 10 and 30 male delegates to experience, plan, and debrief together over the course of a day of lectures, panels, and workshops. I was one of the few women there, and my day was largely about communicating the Inclusive Leader Journey, as articulated through the Inclusive Leader Continuum, a tool to help people understand where they are on the journey to inclusive leadership, and a set of guidelines to help understand how to push oneself further along that road. I also shared with participants the Inclusive Leader Self-Assessment, an anonymous online tool to help folks pinpoint where along the Continuum they might be.

The point of my talk, the Continuum, and the Better Man conference as a whole, is to engage in awareness building, disrupt the habits of unconscious bias, help participants learn how to activate their voices, and offer them the opportunity to travel that path together as a group with whom they’ll be able to continue to work after they leave the conference and return to work.

At Unilever, I facilitated a panel with three members of the Unilever Men as Allies ERG. This is a new effort within Unilever to speak to a broad range of issues. A major focus at the moment is parental leave—specifically encouraging more fathers to take paternity leave, and because fathers were represented on the panel, they were able to reflect on their experience in a way that resonated for many other fathers in the room. This is such an important issue right now because, as is evident in a recent article published by Unilever, paternity leave isn’t just important because fathers get more time with their kids from a young age—it is also, crucially, a way to unlock women’s potential in the workplace.

In San Francisco, at the Julia Morgan Ballroom, I had a very different panel made up of senior leadership from Intel, which has a mature effort for men as allies that has been underway for some time. The leaders who joined me on the stage included Jason Solomon, Technology Development Engineering Manager; Vince Guglielmetti, GM of Americas Manufacturing Operations; and Jim Gordon, GM of Ecosystem Strategy & Business development. I spoke about the importance of activating one’s voice on issues of diversity and inclusion, doing it publicly, giving feedback to other men, and identifying unconscious bias when it comes up. Much of what we discussed is echoed in the article from the Boston Consulting Group on how men can champion diversity in the workplace.

At both conferences, I put questions to the panelists that not only asked them to speak to how they have been allies, but also—and, I think, just as powerfully—to identify instances in which they themselves have had to “cover” or otherwise obfuscate or hide parts of themselves at work. This last part is so important because we tend to lose sight of the fact that everyone has a diversity story. I also asked them to speak about unconscious bias both within, and beyond the workplace, as we tend to be differently able to identify and address certain things depending on the context. For example, while we might feel comfortable calling out unconscious bias in our home or among friends, learning how to identify and address it in the workplace may be more challenging.

The third and final iteration of the 2019 Better Man Conference is coming up on November 19th, in New York City, and I’m excited to present again, and continue the conversation. If you or your company is interested in attending, please visit https://bettermanconference.com/ for all the details.