Workplace allyship means actively helping and supporting colleagues from marginalized or underrepresented groups and using your influence to challenge inequity. Effective allyship is a continual process that involves awareness, education, self-examination, empathy, relationship-building, action, and advocacy.
7 Stages of the Allyship Journey – Designed by Dr Valeria Lo Iacono
In this blog post, we’ll explore the “7 Stages of the Allyship Journey,” and we’ll delve into each stage, share real-world examples, and provide practical techniques to help you navigate this path.
What Is Allyship in the Workplace?
Allyship means actively supporting marginalized groups (of which you are not part), using your own advantages to fight against unfairness together.
Dr Valeria Lo Iacono
Why Is Allyship Important?
Allyship is important in companies because it plays an important role in helping to push inclusion and equality in the workplace.
It gives a voice to marginalized groups to help them challenge the discrimination and inequity they may experience.
These marginalized groups are groups of people who are kept at the fringes of society because of characteristics they have, such as gender, social class, ethnicity, and disability.
In the workplace, discrimination can affect areas such as hiring, promotion, pay, training, and access to other employment opportunities.
Allyship is important because it provides a useful way to challenge inequality and make workplaces more inclusive and fair.
Allyship plays a key role in driving systemic inclusion in the workplace. For those teaching or promoting inclusion practices, our EDI training materials offer ready-to-use, expert-developed content to support your DEI efforts.
What Are the 7 Stages of the Allyship Journey?
The seven stages are awareness, education, self-examination, empathy and understanding, building relationships, taking action, and advocacy.
As you can see on the main diagram at the top of this page, allyship is an ongoing process, which is why we call it the “Allyship journey”.
This journey can be traced along a spiral because it is not necessarily linear. You can go back and forth between different stages. So let’s tackle one step at a time.
Stage 1: Awareness
The first stage of the allyship journey is Awareness.
It involves recognizing that there are social inequities, biases, and systemic discrimination that affect marginalized groups.
This includes understanding the role of intersectionality and how overlapping identities (such as race, gender, disability, and class) can compound discrimination.
In the workplace, this could mean noticing that people from certain groups are underrepresented in leadership roles or that certain voices tend to be overshadowed in meetings.
For example, imagine you are a manager who notices that the majority of team leaders in the company are male, despite having a diverse team.
You have become aware that there is a power imbalance issue.
Stage 2: Education
Once you are aware of the issues, the next step is to educate yourself about them.
This involves seeking out and absorbing information about different identities, cultures, experiences, and systemic issues.
So, to return to the previous example, if you are that manager, you now decide to attend training or webinars on gender inequality in the workplace, read articles and books about the issue, and listen to podcasts featuring women leaders.
Stage 3: Self-Examination
This stage often involves becoming aware of unconscious attitudes that influence our decisions, known as unconscious bias in the workplace.
It requires humility and honesty to recognize how we may unknowingly contribute to the problem.
For example, if you are the manager we have talked about, you might realize that you have been unconsciously favoring male employees for leadership roles because of your own bias.
Stage 4: Empathy and Understanding
This stage involves developing empathy for those who experience discrimination and trying to understand their experiences and perspectives.
This doesn’t mean co-opting their experiences, but rather acknowledging and validating them.
At this stage, you need to be prepared to listen more than you talk and to try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes to try to imagine how they might feel.
So, as the manager in our example, you spend time talking with female employees to try to understand their experiences, challenges, and aspirations.
Stage 5: Building Relationships
Allyship isn’t just about understanding; it’s also about building genuine relationships with those you aim to support.
This involves active listening, respect, and mutual trust.
As the manager from our example, this might mean that you start having regular one-on-one meetings with your female employees, offering mentorship, and showing genuine interest in their career growth.
Another practical and meaningful way to build stronger cross-cultural connections is to join an Employee Resource Group (ERG) if one exists in your workplace.
Stage 6: Taking Action
This stage involves actively challenging and changing behaviors, systems, and practices that contribute to inequality and discrimination.
It’s about moving from passive support to active participation in creating an inclusive environment.
At this stage, it’s important to avoid performative allyship, meaning actions that appear supportive but do little to create meaningful change.
True allyship involves sustained effort and integrity, not just symbolic gestures.
For instance, as the manager, you might initiate a gender-neutral evaluation process for promotions, ensuring that decisions are based on merit and not influenced by unconscious biases.
You might also organize training sessions for your team to educate them about gender bias and the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Stage 7: Advocacy
This stage involves helping to raise awareness of inequality issues among others, such as within your organization or society at large.
So, you will use your privilege to advocate for marginalized groups.
This could mean speaking up against discriminatory practices, supporting policies that promote equity, or using your influence to create opportunities for underrepresented groups.
So, as the manager from our example, you may use your position to advocate for more inclusive hiring and promotion practices within the company.
You may also speak out at conferences outside your company, promoting the idea that qualified female employees should be given equal opportunities for leadership roles.
Remember that allyship is a continuous journey, not a destination.
So, even after reaching the advocacy stage, it’s important to continue learning, growing, and adapting to better support marginalized groups. As such, you might want to revisit any of the other steps.
The manager in our example, based on their observation of the issue, may decide to go back to one or more of the previous stages.
So, if you were that manager, you may decide that you need to find out more about the situation of women in the workplace.
As a result, you may seek more resources to learn from. You may also want to reevaluate your biases; you might decide that you need to do more networking and build relationships with different groups, and so on.
This allyship journey is flexible, and it is possible to go back and forth between steps. Ultimately, progress will be made.
Explore more DEI strategies and tools in our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion resources.
How Can You Teach Allyship in the Workplace?
You can teach workplace allyship through discussion, reflection, realistic workplace examples, and practical exercises that help employees move from awareness to action.
Deliver an Allyship Workshop with Confidence
- Editable PowerPoint slides & trainer script
- Printable participant workbook (PDF)
- Real-world case studies and scenarios
- Interactive exercises for all 7 stages
Instantly downloadable and designed to help you train staff on inclusive practices and the allyship journey.
View Allyship Course MaterialsIf you are teaching allyship techniques and the stages of the allyship journey, the allyship training course materials below are instantly downloadable and are designed for teaching managers and employees.
