Do You Know How To Be A Good Ally? with Dr. Meg Warren
Feb 4, 2021
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Dr. Meg Warren, Assistant Professor of Management at Western Washington University, discusses the latest research on allyship in workplaces and why diversity policies often fail. Topics include: advice for stepping into allyship conversations, defining privileged and marginalized groups, understanding allyship, the negative consequences of top-down diversity policies, and the importance of interpersonal support and visible advocacy in building allyship.
Effective allyship requires humility and honesty, acknowledging knowledge gaps and potential clumsiness.
Relative privilege varies based on context and allyship involves leveraging it to support disadvantaged groups.
Deep dives
The Importance of Humility and Honesty in Allyship
In this podcast episode, Dr. Meg Warren discusses the importance of humility and honesty in effective allyship. She highlights that being a good person with good intentions does not automatically translate into effective allyship. The distance between intention and impact can be large, and our socialization tends to maintain the status quo and ignore the suffering of marginalized groups. Dr. Warren emphasizes the need for individuals to acknowledge their own knowledge gaps and potential clumsiness in allyship, fostering realistic expectations. By starting with humility and honesty, individuals can contribute their intentions, listening skills, and other abilities to promote allyship and support marginalized groups.
Understanding Relative Privilege and Marginalized Outgroups
Dr. Warren explains how relative privilege and marginalized outgroups are defined in her research. Relative privilege refers to the systematic advantage enjoyed by certain groups due to their identities, such as men, white individuals, or able-bodied individuals. Dr. Warren highlights that relative privilege varies based on the context, and individuals may hold relative privilege in some areas while experiencing marginalization in others. She further emphasizes that allyship requires leveraging relative privilege to support disadvantaged groups. This understanding of relative privilege helps individuals identify where they have power and how they can contribute to creating a more equitable and inclusive environment.
Effective Allyship: Interpersonal Support and Visible Advocacy
Dr. Warren delves into effective allyship behaviors. She discusses two major themes that emerged from her research: interpersonal support and visible advocacy. Interpersonal support includes behaviors like active listening, being a sounding board, and being present for marginalized groups. Visible advocacy, differentiating from performative allyship, involves investing time and energy, taking risks, and speaking up in influential ways to promote equity and challenge the status quo. Dr. Warren highlights that while both types of behaviors are important, visible advocacy is particularly powerful for making a lasting difference. She suggests that highlighting achievements and strengths of marginalized group members is an actionable and non-confrontational strategy that can foster inclusion, build relationships, and promote trust within organizations.
Dr. Meg Warren is an Assistant Professor of Management at Western Washington University. Meg’s award-winning research uses a positive psychology approach to study how individuals from relatively privileged groups can serve as allies to marginalized outgroups. She’s a co-editor of the International Journal of Wellbeing and the lead editor of two books, Scientific Advances in Positive Psychology and Toward a Positive Psychology of Relationships.
In this week’s episode, we explore what the latest research is finding on how we can be better allies in workplaces and why many workplace diversity and inclusion policies fail to make a positive difference.
[ 03:15] - Meg offers some advice for how we can more readily step into conversations about allyship with each other, even when we’re worried about saying the wrong things.
[07:07] - Meg shares how researchers define who is in a relatively privileged group and who is in a marginalized outgroup.
[09:57] - Meg shares how researchers define allyship.
[11:12] - Meg offers insights from her research on why and how exceptional allies show up for marginalized groups in workplaces.
[15:22] - Meg explains why the top-down enactment of diversity policies often have unintended negative consequences in workplaces and how these can be avoided.
[17:58] - Meg shares new research on a simple and quick allyship intervention in workplaces that has been found to boost feelings of inclusion and vitality.
[22:48] - Meg explores how allyship behaviors and psychological safety may be intertwined.
[24:37] - Meg offers some cautions and caveats for helping people to build the skills to be more effective allies.
Thanks so much for joining me again this week. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this post.
You can also listen to all the episodes of Making Positive Psychology Work streamed directly to your smartphone or iPad through stitcher. No need for downloading or syncing.
Until next time, take care! Thank you, Meg!
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