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Work and Life with Stew Friedman
Ep 177. Stephanie Creary: Be a Better Ally to Your Black Colleagues
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Stephanie Creary, Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School, has been teaching a course called “Leading Diversity in Organizations” since Fall 2017. She was one of the principal investigators on a report from Wharton’s People Analytics Department and the firm Diversity Inc. that shows which practices seem to work for companies. Stephanie recently authored a piece in Harvard Business Review called “How to Be a Better Ally to Your Black Friends”. Her research centers on identifying and understanding the work that individuals and leaders do to manage identity in asymmetric relationships – where power differentials between relationship partners are high – and how their efforts shape self-views, relationship quality, and the performance of work. Her research also examines the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion practices. She is a founding faculty member of the Wharton IDEAS lab (Identity, Diversity, Engagement, Affect, and Social Relationships), an affiliated faculty member of Wharton People Analytics, a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), and affiliated faculty member of the Penn Center for Africana Studies. She heads the Leading Diversity@Wharton Speaker Series as part of her Leading Diversity in Organizations course at Wharton.
In this episode, Stew and Stephanie discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, what seems to work and what doesn’t, how to be an effective ally for minority voices, and how to acknowledge and confront systemic racism to make our workplaces and our society more equitable and productive.
Here then is an invitation, a challenge, for you, once you’ve listened to the conversation, if you’re interested in practicing to be a better ally to your Black colleagues. Find one with whom you can talk and express, in your own way, that you’re interested in listening and in trying to understand, to better related, to their experience. Write to Stew to let him know what you discover, at friedman@wharton.upenn.edu, or connect with him on LinkedIn. While you’re at it, share your thoughts with him on this episode and your ideas for people you’d like to hear on future shows.
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