 Hi everyone. Good morning. Welcome to our session about Elisha. Start Elisha as a verb and build it with partnership. I'm Lekha and I work as a senior information developer with IBM. All these 14 years as women in technology, I have faced challenges, microaggressions, witness and face discrimination. Respective of all this, I have wonderful allies who played a major role in shaping my career, who worked as my sponsor and a champion. Along with me, I have Kaushik, who is also the co-speaker for this topic. Over to you, Kaushik. Hi, I'm Kaushik. I'm a lead information developer with the Linux Technology Center at IBM. In today's session, we're planning to share awareness about allyship and some of our own experiences. What exactly do allies do and for whom? Allies are individuals who stand up for equal and fair treatment of people different than them, who offer some of the most effective and powerful voices for those who are underrepresented. The practice of emphasizing inclusion and human rights by a member of an in-group to advance the interest of an oppressed or a marginal outgroup is also one of the most critical activities that make the organization a more inclusive environment. Next, what does it mean to support an advocate for someone who doesn't share a key part of your identity? It requires reaching out and connecting across differences. It means you're intentionally working with people who are different than you. We'll be bridging the divide between you and someone who's unlike you in some significant way. What do we want to see as a change as a result of this allyship partnership? A more inclusive workspace with diverse culture and people. Allyship in its truest form is an ongoing relationship between the partner and an ally. However, allyship can take on many different forms. For example, a meeting where someone is getting interrupted and an ally intervenes and stands up for the person who's getting interrupted. Sometimes in life, you are going to need to work as an ally and vice versa. To be successful in either role, you need to understand the characteristics of both an ally and a partner. Allyship characteristics. The best allies are curious, humble and courageous. Allies are curious, they are open-minded and willing to challenge their own beliefs to understand how the world really works. They ask questions and actively listen to and understand the answers that they hear. Curiosity is the key tool that connects across differences. Next, allies are humble, willing to accept mistakes and owning their commitment. They choose to grow and learn and not commit the same mistakes over and over again. The ally understands their perspective is not the only perspective. They have the ability to centralize others and put their ego aside for the greater good. Finally, allies are courageous. They are willing to take on risk on behalf of others. They put themselves on the line for the sake of the greater good. They walk the walk, they are bravely authentic and stay true to their values and they deal with the consequences of their action. Now that we learned about the characteristic of an ally, a partner must also have certain characteristics that make for an effective ally share. A partner also have characteristics that complements the ally. Partners must be self-aware, trustworthy and ready for action. Having these characteristics complement the ally. For example, when an ally asks about what the partner, what in their career or what their unique challenges are, that conversation would go so good if the partner has a self-awareness coming into picture. Similarly, partners are trustworthy. Trust leads to higher quality relationship that increase well-being, but also trusting partner can more easily create a safe space that encourages allies to be humble, to be vulnerable and admit their mistake, which then allows them to change their behavior and be even better allies. Now let's do a self-assessment. Note down any personal examples you can think of from a time in your career. You have exemplified these characteristics to yourself. Those that we mentioned before, either as an ally or as a partner. As I said before, allyship is a long-lasting partnership. Establishing a shared understanding of the problems faced by your partner will ensure that whatever the ally ends up doing is indeed the right thing to do because it meets the unique needs of the partner. Let's move on to learn how to work together to accomplish a shared vision. Reverse mentoring is one of the best tools that you can use to bridge the connection. This means that the partner is the mentor and the ally is the mentee. Reverse mentoring is a natural fit for ally partnerships, which already assume a power difference and reverse mentoring effectively redistributes the power more equally between the partner and the ally. Through this, you can come up with concrete mutual goals. The goals can be later added or amended based on the agreement from both the partner and the ally. Various of the partner's experiences are noticed implicit. For example, subtle behaviors or explicit instances of discrimination, ways this has or has not manifested itself in your company. Views on work-life balance. Why is the partner going to stay or why will the partner leave his job? Expectations about career progression. What making an impact feels like to the partner. Now that we know connecting across difference is a must in allyship. Some of the messiness come along when you have to challenge each other along the way. Getting to that point though sometimes requires the discomfort in form of confrontation, healthy conflict that often arise when different views are shared. Healthy confrontation allows us to broaden the perspective and come up with more innovative ideas and better collective solution. Challenging each other can also lead to bruised egos, feeling of anger and defensiveness. Your automatic creation maybe feel like you're under attack, like the other person is trying to make you feel guilty for something that you didn't even tend to do in the first place. To make yourself feel less defensive, let's look at some techniques. First, try to reframe the situation as more of an opportunity or a welcome challenge rather than a threat. Second, remember that if you're feeling out of control, it's okay to pose and collect yourself or even take a break altogether and resume the conversation at a later time. If you find yourself getting emotional, whether your voice begins to raise or tears begin to stream, it's better to temporarily excuse yourself from that conversation than to force your partner into an awkward position of having them offer you a comfort when they are the ones in the disadvantaged position. Third, when you notice those feelings of defensiveness come creeping in the form of feeling falsely accused, switch your approach by intentionally centering the partner. Centering means intentionally revolving the conversation around one particular person and perspective. By centering the partner, you bring the focus back to their experience and their community. Once you get the conversation back on track, continue to recenter the partner by using empathy and active listening skills. The final and the foremost strategy is reframing feedback as a gift. It's easy to accept feedback as a gift when you trust that the person providing the feedback has your best interest in mind. This allows you to lower your defensiveness. You can properly digest the feedback, reflect on it and maybe even use it to make a lasting behaviour change that could enhance your performance and well-being. Additionally, honest and tough feedback from others gives us a visibility into our own blind spots. Feedback truly is a gift. Let's see what the benefits are for the ally and the partner. Allies seek out talented proteges from different racial and cultural backgrounds and become their local fans. They get to know these colleagues' strengths and weaknesses and help them develop as leaders, challenge and encourage them and tout their abilities and achievements. Whenever new projects, registrations or promotions are being discussed, they nominate proteges on the basis of their potential without expecting them to prove that they can do the job in advance. This usually requires putting some social capital on the line for risks that sponsors need to get more comfortable with. Finally, allies introduce proteges to key players in their own professional networks to open up an even broader set of opportunities for them. As an ally, when you disrupt the status quo and are a role model for the behaviour that you exhibit as an ally, you also need to analyze the cost versus risk factor. If the risk is less, then we term it as little a, and if the cost and risk is more, it is called big a. For example, if you're using inclusive language or non-rollbook cues of including people who are slightly less privileged than you, it is of little risk to you. Allyship actions. If you're a partner, though, you still should certainly watch and learn about these behaviours, especially if you want to use these behaviours with your ally or if you find yourself in an ally role in another context. And you do use these behaviours yourself. However, as a minority group member, you should use these behaviours with extreme caution, because the cost to you may very well be greater than the benefit to you and your community. Let me explain. Even though inclusion benefits everyone when out-group members advocate for diversity and inclusion, they're often penalized because they're viewed as self-benefiting, which is pretty alarming considering that many diversity inclusion leaders in the business are members of these out-groups. It's pretty awful to think that these people who are fighting to end inequality are being penalized simply because they have personally endured the same equality that they are trying to solve. I'd love to live in a world where all out-group members can call out instances of exclusion without any retaliation, but we're simply just not there yet. Research shows that women and minorities risk damaging their credibility when promoting diversity inclusion efforts. This indicates that you need to intentionally disrupt organizational systems, practices and other behaviours, especially discriminatory behaviours that reinforce inequality and bias. Allies, this is where courage really comes in. So how can you catalyze a culture of inclusion and equity at your company? Do a self-evaluation of the two. The most common reasons as to why an ally does not step in. After you've done all these analysis, let's understand when allies need to pitch in. When it comes to stepping in to stop bias or discrimination from happening, remember 3 Ds. Direct, Derail and Delegate. The first strategy is to be direct. Once you notice what's happening, calmly call it out, be firm and clear, keeping what you say short. You may not want to engage the offender directly at first, instead, talk directly to the person being targeted, the person from the minority or disadvantaged group, and see who else in the room that you can pull in to de-escalate the situation. Another tactic is to derail what's happening by interrupting it. The idea is to ignore the offender and directly engage with the person who is being targeted. Create some sort of distraction or a welcome change in conversation by redirecting to something completely unrelated. The third technique to remember is delegating help from others. Delegation is when you ask for resistance for a resource or for help for some third party. Speak to someone near what's happening to and who might be in a better position to intervene, or pull an HR or some other leader out of your organization to help you stop the bias or discrimination from continuing to occur when it comes to witnessing workplace harassment, discriminatory behavior that is severe or pervasive enough to create a toxic work environment. There will be times when for some reason or the other you will be unable to act in the moment. So even if you can't help on the spot, you can still make a big difference to the person who is the target of the bias or discrimination by reaching out afterwards, validating their experience and asking for their consent to step in as an ally and bring strong ways you can help. You may end up forming a more long term ally partnership with these people as a result. Now that we have covered all the great things an allies can do and should do to promote workplace equity and inclusion, let's move on to find out what partners can and should do to really make a life shift to work in practice. What partners can do? We are going to focus almost entirely on having strong bias for action, a concept that's fueled my own interest in passion for inclusion. So let me explain that. Two years back when the director of my business unit was building a women in leadership program, I went ahead and asked her how do I get involved, which led me to be part of various diversity initiative. I have always been a go-getter, someone who gets stuff done. I always have the philosophy that the answer is no unless you ask. So I always ask. And not only do I ask, but when I eventually get a yes, I make it count. I hold my end of deal with the resources opportunity to excellent use and make the person who nominated me feel proud. Here are some things that you can do as a good partner. The first thing I want to share is to bias what action means follow through. Let's talk through the follow through process by putting the context of a sponsor. A sponsor is a person of power who advocates for the junior person's career advancement through increased exposure and visibility among upper leadership, providing access to high-profile opportunity and assignments that can be a career change. So what if your ally was acting as your sponsor and help you run the promotion that you have been wanting, but then you didn't take it for some reason, maybe it wasn't the best thing or maybe you didn't feel quite ready for it yet. So let me let this happen to you. If an ally succeeded being a sponsor and getting a position or assignment that will help you achieve your goal, take that opportunity on it and crush it. Second, be proactive with your communication with the life, keeping them know. Let them know the impact of the work that they are doing. This will keep your ally more motivated. And if you don't inform them, they will stop doing the work. That's not leading to any of your intended results. Third, actively initiate connections between people in your community and other potential allies who want to get involved and help. Invite curious, humble and courageous majority members into your group. Maybe start formally inviting allies into the safe space of yours and your peers, of course by asking consent and gaining consensus from the other members of your community. Also when allies feel accepted by the disadvantaged group, they enter work to support. The internal motivation to participate is ball sturd. Allyship is a daily practice, meaning it's never really done. Let's look at the following case studies. An Intel case study on allyship found that when men are deliberately engaged in gender inclusion programs, 96% of organizations see progress compared to only 30% of organizations where men are not engaged. Another case study on male allyship in institutional STEM gender equity initiatives found that when men are involved in ally work, men benefit broadly because allyship decenters, the idealized masculine gender norms organizationally, and makes for more rewarding familial relationships. The Harvest Business Review case study on Be a Better Ally show that effective senior allies are not only set an example, but also outline expectations for everyone's behavior and link outcomes to responsibilities and rewards. And finally, a case study on the psychology of being a better ally in office and beyond found that the five steps of being a better ally are number one, listening, two, self-reflection, three, setting bigger goals, four, building trust, and finally five, taking action. Allyship initiatives. One of the strong allyship initiatives started by IBM in 2020 is the IBM Embrace. This is an initiative to fight against a destructive force of racism of all forms. This is also part of the Be Equal Ambassador Program. The IBM Embrace is both a call to action and an organizing principle. It's a pledge that most or almost all of our employers do take. A pledge of advocacy and an allyship, empowering IBM and IBMers to call for change to ensure racial equality. As we conclude today's session, we would want to remind you allies to be an active sponsor and a champion for your partner and their community. As an organization, always recruit talents from diverse backgrounds to bring in equity and to encourage the culture of innovation. Consider building allyship programs and initiatives in your organization to build and strengthen diversity and inclusion programs in your workplace. By using inclusive language, you acknowledge the diversity around you and help to convey respect to all people from all different backgrounds. Thank you for being a wonderful audience and actively listening to our sessions. Thank you.