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“The Person Factor”: Male Allies and the Formula for Success
By Rachana Bhide
Developing strong male allies is an important element of any diversity program, and organizations have been increasing their focus in this highly important space. Yet organizations are often seduced into thinking that effective diversity programs require a set of enterprise-wide projects and initiatives to make impactful, large-scale behavior change. While such approaches are all extremely valid and have a rightful place in corporate diversity, there is a critical element that often goes untapped when looking at male allyship programs, which is, simply, the individual male ally himself.
Psychologist Kurt Lewin applied his principle of field theory to offer that, “Behavior is a function of Person and Environment,” depicted as a heuristic formula: B = f(P,E). Simply stated, one’s behavior is a combination of him/her as an individual and the environment in which he or she is acting. This means that your own behavior won’t be the same if you are in two different environments, and equally, no two people in the same environment behave the same way.
This deceivingly simple concept highlights one of the main challenges in designing diversity programs, particularly in male allyship programs: If we want to change behavior, we would be best served to look at both elements of the function — that is, the Person factors and the Environment factors.
Environment factors are things like:
– work climate
– training initiatives
– recruiting policies
Person factors, arguably a bit more complex, have to do with:
– attitudes
– thoughts
– personality
We find that organizations tend to focus heavily on the Environment factors of allyship, investing a justified, yet significant amount of time and resources into programs and initiatives, often from the top-down or a centralized mandate. Yet we would be well-served to invest our efforts also on the other meaningful piece of the equation: A focus on the individual male. What is it that makes him desire to be an ally? What fears does he have? What tradeoffs does he feel he has to make? These are areas that might be touched on through training but often don’t go further in an organizational setting to make any meaningful individual breakthrough. Group discussions and workshops often turn quickly to action planning and program design, which are necessary but only contribute to one part of the equation.
As workplace psychologists, we know that getting into deeper elements of the person takes time, permission, and often iterations of coaching or other tailored interventions. It may therefore not be the easiest or quickest approach, yet in my research I found a set of key “person factors” did reflect in organizations’ most compelling allies — for example, those allies who had made meaning of their experiences through reflective practice and those who were strong individual storytellers.
What can organizations do? The straightforward answer is to adopt an individual approach to allyship in addition to programmatic, environmental and structural approaches. Start with those allies who have expressed an interest in developing themselves — beginning from whatever level of proficiency they currently have — and take care to develop and sharpen their individual commitment. Use expert coaches and resources to help them draw out their experiences and convey the meaning of their allyship. I did this with one organization’s male ally group, by allowing space for men to bring their personal stories of “why I am an ally” and iterate on associated feelings and attitudes through reflection and storytelling. By honing in on elements of the Person, we build allies who can act as confident ambassadors of behavior change.
“But such fluffy tactics won’t work with our culture,” some might say. Well, that’s kind of the point. Focusing on the Person factor happens in a space independent of the environment; as such it can be tailored to the needs of the individual. When done intentionally and effectively on the “right side” of the formula, it can become not just an additive, but a real multiplier, for change.