How to Be an Ally: Actions You Can Take for a Stronger, Happier Workplace

An original and insightful roadmap on how to become a more inclusive and empathetic leader


All of us can be better allies for each other, creating stronger and happier workplaces together. Allyship is about understanding the imbalance in opportunity and working to correct it. How to Be an Ally reveals that the key to true inclusion, equity, and diversity is allyship.


Drawing from her experience as a strategic advisor for tech companies, startups, tech hubs, and governments around the world, Melinda Briana Epler provides valuable insights on how business leaders can create a more equitable workplace by leading the change. You'll learn how to implement big and small changes to build a diverse team and ensure everyone on your team is included, heard, understood, and acknowledged. Building on that inclusion, you'll be able to grow a stronger, more successful organization.


Original and insightful, How to Be an Ally humanizes diversity and inclusion, and facilitates greater empathy and understanding between people of all backgrounds, teaching us that each of us can learn to understand the imbalance in opportunity, work to correct it, and help create a better workplace for ourselves and our colleagues.

Leverage the power of allyship to build an equitable, innovative workplace where everyone feels safe, valued, and empowered

How can you help someone else thrive? How can you interrupt the biases, microaggressions, and inequities that prevent people around you from excelling? How can you build an innovative workplace fueled by equity, diversity and belonging?

Every business leader today should be asking themselves these questions. Systems and processes have been skewed too long in favor of some at the expense of others, and things are changing--fast. How to Be an Ally shows how to take personal responsibility for driving change that's good for people--and for business. You'll learn the ins and outs of allyship and build the knowledge and skills you need to:

• Listen and learn new perspectives
• Identify your own biases
• Avoid unintentionally harming people with microaggressions
• Express empathy with courage
• Advocate for people in small, everyday ways
• Rethink your work to be more inclusive, equitable, and accessible
• Build team norms that cultivate allyship
• Create equitable, inclusive systems and processes

Uniquely insightful and extremely timely, How to Be an Ally humanizes diversity and inclusion and facilitates greater empathy and understanding between people of all identities. It teaches us that every individual can learn about the imbalance in opportunity and work to correct it.

The key to true diversity, equity, and inclusion is allyship. This one-of-a-kind guide provides everything you need to use allyship to create a better workplace for ourselves and our colleagues.