Tap Into Your Allyship Power - with Julie Kratz

Update: 2025-10-06

Description

Lucinda is joined by allyship expert Julie Kratz, who discusses her research on why people with power often disengage from conversations about diversity and inclusion, feeling either "threatened" or "irrelevant."

Together they explore her latest book, which outlines a "use fear as fuel" strategy and introduces a framework for building allyship programs. Julie stresses that everyone has power and a social responsibility to champion inclusion, arguing that strong allyship is less about transactional "doing" and more about building meaningful relationships that lead to personal fulfilment, better team dynamics, and positive organisational change.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Many people in positions of power, particularly white men, do not believe conversations about diversity and inclusion are meant to include them, often fuelled by fears of status loss, irrelevance, or the belief that allyship offers "all risk, no reward."

Everyone has power, and the first step to becoming an effective ally is to build a strong "allyship why" rooted in the understanding that humans are a social species whose survival and happiness depend on collaboration and helping one another.

Effective allyship involves moving beyond individual action to creating systemic change, which includes building highly customised allyship programs that focus on key behaviours like modeling and storytelling to make inclusive practices contagious.

Organisations need to focus on building inclusive policies (e.g., caregiving leave, pay equity) and objective hiring and promotion processes to minimise bias, as people are often judged on potential (if they resemble current leadership) or actual performance (if they are different).

BEST MOMENTS

"The first step that I offer is really building your allyship why. Like why do you want to be helpful to other people?"

"Power's not bad, it's what you do with it that matters. And so don't you want to be on the good side of history, like don't you want to be the one that's standing up to social issues, even if it doesn't impact you?"

"The more you are look and act like the C-suite leader, that again is predominantly white male, the more you have proxy to power."

"Modelling plus storytelling. So I can model the behaviour, and you could be like, 'Yeah, that's great for Julie, but that doesn't really work for me and my style.' But what if I told you a story in addition to that, that you could kind of see yourself in?"

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The HR Uprising Podcast | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Stitcher⁠

⁠The HR Uprising LinkedIn Group⁠

⁠How to Prioritise Self-Care (The HR Uprising)⁠

⁠How To Be A Change Superhero - by Lucinda Carney⁠

HR Uprising Mastermind - ⁠https://hruprising.com/mastermind/⁠

⁠www.changesuperhero.com⁠

⁠www.hruprising.com⁠

Get your copy of How To Be A Change Superhero by emailing at ⁠info@actus.co.uk⁠

CONTACT JULIE

Her LinkedIn- ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliekratz/⁠

The Next Pivot Point Website - ⁠https://www.nextpivotpoint.com/
ABOUT THE HOST

Lucinda Carney is a Business Psychologist with 15 years in Senior Corporate L&D roles and a further 10 as CEO of Actus Software where she worked closely with HR colleagues helping them to solve the same challenges across a huge range of industries. It was this breadth of experience that inspired Lucinda to set up the HR Uprising community to facilitate greater collaboration across HR professionals in different sectors, helping them to ‘rise up’ together.

“If you look up, you rise up”

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