Last week, we explored why allyship in the workplace matters and the real impact it can have on LGBTQ+ employees, as well as ways teammates can be active allies at work. If you missed that post, you can read it here.
This week, we're going to focus on what leaders can do to be active allies and create workplaces where employees can thrive, because being an ally at work is different for teammates vs. leadership. Leaders have the unique ability to make change at a larger scale.
Allyship For Leaders
Teammates can make a real difference – but leaders have something teammates don’t: power. The power to set the tone, challenge systems, and make it structurally safe (or unsafe) to be out at work. That’s a responsibility, not just an opportunity.
The business case for this isn’t abstract. McKinsey research has found that active allyship directly impacts whether LGBTQ+ employees feel isolated or supported – and more than half of gay, lesbian, and nonbinary employees report stronger feelings of being “the only one” at work without visible support structures in place. Companies with genuinely inclusive cultures see higher engagement, stronger retention, and better collaboration. The ones that don’t face a different set of outcomes: lower job satisfaction, higher burnout, and real attrition risk.
The stakes got sharper recently. An HRC/CMI survey found that 72.4% of LGBTQ+ employees said they would feel less included if companies rolled back DEI initiatives – and 19.6% said they would quit or start looking. Another 33.6% said their productivity would decline. That’s not a culture problem. That’s a business risk.
Leaders are the ones who decide whether inclusion is structural or performative. They choose whether Pride month gets a budget or just a Slack message. They decide whether a harmful comment gets addressed or let slide. They set what’s normal – and their teams take careful notes. The actions below aren’t just nice to have. They’re the difference between a workplace where people can show up fully and one where they’re quietly calculating the cost of being themselves.
| FOR TEAM LEADERS | |
| Pay attention to who’s speaking – and who isn’t. | Any manager or leader who’s paying attention should start to notice patterns in how their team interacts – who speaks up, who goes quiet, who gets talked over. Easier said than done, sure, but there are practical ways to start. Tools like Fathom can record and transcribe your meetings, and if you don’t have the bandwidth to read through everything yourself, upload the transcripts to an AI tool and ask it to surface patterns. Who’s contributing? Who isn’t? Is there a recurring dynamic where one person’s ideas get dismissed or talked over – particularly someone who might already be navigating an environment where they don’t feel fully safe? If someone has stopped participating, it’s worth asking why. Has their idea been shut down before? Do they feel like their voice counts? Those are questions worth sitting with. |
| Don’t stay neutral in the face of harm. | Your employees may technically all be “equals” on paper – but the moment someone is being homophobic or transphobic, that level playing field disappears. One person has just positioned themselves as an antagonist to another person’s existence, and as the leader in the room, that becomes your responsibility to address. “Letting both sides speak” sounds fair in theory. In practice, it isn’t – not when one of those sides is invalidating an entire identity. There’s no both-sides version of someone’s right to exist. Leaders set the tone for what’s acceptable, and staying neutral in that moment is its own kind of statement. |
| Set the tone for psychological safety – actively. | Active, visible leadership behavior (not just policy) creates environments where people feel safe. Even small things – sharing your own pronouns, addressing a comment in the moment, checking in with someone one-on-one – signal to the whole team what’s normal here. |
The interview I described at the beginning of this blog post series is one example – an interviewer who casually mentioned her wife and changed the entire dynamic of that conversation for me. But allyship in leadership doesn’t always look that clean.
At a team dinner at that same company, my big boss joked that the LGBTQIA+ members of the team had the best gossip when the group got together – dating stories, life updates, all of it – and that he was jealous he wasn’t in on it. He half-joked that maybe he should start telling people he was bisexual just to get included.
It’s a comment with some complicated implications, and I’m not holding it up as a model of perfect allyship. But there was something genuinely endearing about a leader who wanted to be close to his team, who noticed the warmth in those conversations and wanted in on it rather than being threatened by it. Intent matters less than impact – but it’s worth naming that leaders who are curious and warm, even imperfectly, tend to build safer teams than ones who keep their distance.
That same company eventually brought on a team member specifically focused on mental health support and pride programming – someone who ran activities and conversations that helped people feel seen and supported. That was a leadership decision. Someone in charge decided that this was worth investing in, that their team deserved more than a rainbow logo in June.
Those structural choices – the ones that cost something – are where real leadership allyship lives.
