Let's explore how men can support women’s leadership advancement, through the eyes of Jeffery Tobias Halter. He is the president of YWomen, a strategic consulting company focused on engaging men in women’s leadership advancement. He is also the former director of diversity strategy for The Coca-Cola Company and is the author of two books, including, WHY WOMEN, The Leadership Imperative to Advancing Women and Engaging Men.

Jeffery initially became interested in DEI topics after a company lawsuit resulted in significant layoffs and company restructure transitioned him from leading a sales team to leading the diversity education initiative. He recalled what he learned over time from engaging in this new diversity education initiative:

We trained over 4,000 people and I would hear stories from colleagues about racism, sexism, and homophobia. And I had what they call a ‘white male epiphany’. You realize what white male privilege is: The world revolves around you. I didn't choose to become an advocate at that point. But I chose to get really curious. One of my best friends was the president of the newly formed Women's Forum and she invited me into a committee role. As part of that, I wrote the first three-year strategic plan for the Coca-Cola Women's Forum to help us grow from 80 members, three of which were men, to about 300 members, or 3,000 members globally, and about 100 men. That’s when I started this strategy work with our customers, including Target and Walmart.

What ultimately led him to create a consulting company around this work was this realization:

As I would go to conferences, I would be one of the few men in the room and I ask them, ‘Why are you here?’ And they would say they want to be part of the solution. And then I realized that if men are 80 percent of leadership, we're 80 percent of the problem, but we're also 80 percent of the solution.

Jeffery noted that the most common barrier is that “many men in senior positions just don’t know how to start.”

He described three main barriers and their solutions to being able to help men engage in gender equity discussions and change efforts.

Greatest Barriers For Men to Engage in Gender Equity Change

Lack of empathy and feeling of apathy. Similar to what gender equity researchers Brad Johnson and David Smith learned from their research, Jeffery learned that when men do not connect to a personal experience, it’s hard to have empathy or care about a goal. That applies to many situations: It’s the personal meaning that starts leading to action.
Lack of accountability. If the company does not make it a priority, tied to pay, people often do not pay attention to this as compared to other metrics the company is prioritizing. For example, Jeffery noted that according to a McKinsey & Company report: “Out of 60 percent of men and women who are self-proclaimed advocates for advancing women and people of color, less than 6 percent mentor or sponsor a person of color. So, these are self-proclaimed advocates who aren't doing it.”
Fear. Jeffery notes that men fear several things about engaging in gender equity discussions and change efforts. They fear they will say or do the wrong thing. They fear losing power. And they fear that creating large-scale organizational change will cause a potential catastrophe for the business.

How Can Men Overcome These Barriers?

Jeffery shared four recommendations:

Listen. Jeffery states: "It’s as simple as going and having a conversation and finding out what's going on in people's lives.” For example, he recalls a conversation he learned about a colleague’s lived experiences that added burden to her travel beyond what he would personally experience: “There was an SVP for Northwestern, a very talented African American woman, who shared with me how when she would travel on business and straighten her hair, she would whisk right through TSA. And when she wore her hair in knots and wore blue jeans, she would routinely get slowed down and hassled by the TSA agents. When you listen, you start to hear these stories and want to know more. You want to know what you don't know. I'm still learning stuff every day." These moments of listening help us make personal connections, new meaning, and understanding.
Learn. Jeffery noted that the most common reason most men actively start engaging is because they have a personal connection to someone they care about in their lives and they see the cost. He noted, “Men rarely make the connection that ‘if we're not doing this work, we are hurting all of the women in our lives’: a working mother who helped raise you, your significant other, a sister, all of your female co-workers, your daughter.” For many men, they simply do not think about it until they learn about it from a direct personal connection. YWomen offers many free tools to help engage men in DEI initiatives, including an allyship assessment.
Lead. Jeffery suggests that “To overcome a lack of accountability, you have to lead by asking tough questions. For example, when Jim recommends three people for a job and they're all white men with the same affinity that Jim has, they went to the same school as Jim, they came from the same department, I have to press Jim and say, ‘Jim, are you saying, you don't have the ability to train people unlike you? And if that's the case, I don't know that you're ready for this.’"
Have the will. Jeffery notes that to overcome all the fears, “men need to have the will to take action, such as intervening and speaking up by saying, ‘Ron, what you said in that meeting, I know you're not that kind of manager. I don't think you know it came off the wrong way.’ Or when a woman's voice gets talked over in a meeting, saying, ‘Hey, can we let Mary finish her thought before we go on?’"

Jeffery has noticed that the biggest change in his work from when he started 20 years ago to now, and what he is seeing in many gender equity reports, is the movement further into understanding intersectionality. For example, the 2022 McKinsey & Company and Lean In report found that women of color face three times the challenges of white women in leadership advancement.

In addition, Jeffery notes the change in generational expectations:

Deloitte published a transparency report of what their workforce looks like. Almost their entire entry-level workforce was from the Gen Z generation. And this generation expects leaders to be conversational in topics of intersectionality, understanding things like what gender nonbinary means, and the use of pronouns. The 2022 McKinsey & Company and Lean In report indicated that when early career women do not see women advancing in their company, and not sitting in the C suite, they leave because they know they have many options. The war for talent is real and going to get exponentially worse across all industries.

The desire to embrace diversity comes with complexity. We need leaders who know what to do with that complexity and how to help people navigate it. It signals a shift in what we need of leaders today to develop the companies of tomorrow.

This post is part of my subseries on how organizations can transform leadership development for women, as described through the eyes of experts, as well as women’s lived experiences, and where gaps remain. Each of the posts from these subseries is pulled together from interviews. There was no conflict of interest to disclose with this interview. The author of this post did not receive any financial benefit or compensation for conducting or writing this interview.

Mira Brancu is co-author of the Millennials’ Guide to Workplace Politics, which includes tips like those above and more.