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Creating Allies: A Workplace Allyship Training Program in India by ASK Insights
ASK Insights built Creating Allies as a workplace allyship training program in India for leaders, managers, and employee resource groups who want to move past good intentions. Participants leave with a defined role, practical language for difficult conversations, and a plan for acting on what they learn.
What Is the Creating Allies Program?
Creating Allies is ASK Insights’ program for turning people with influence into active supporters of colleagues from underrepresented groups. It sits inside the company’s wider Developmental Journeys work, alongside its Women Leadership, Gender Intelligence, LGBTQIA+, and Disability Positive tracks, and focuses specifically on the people around those groups: managers, senior leaders, and majority group employees who can use their position to change how included someone feels. The distinction matters. Most DEI training targets the group being excluded or the workforce in general. Creating Allies targets whoever already influences to change what that group experiences.
The program has been running for more than 15 years and has worked with thousands of leaders across ASK Insights’ client base. Sessions are built for three audiences: leaders and managers with the influence to set the tone for their teams, HR and DEI professionals running inclusion strategy day to day, and employee resource group members advocating from inside their own communities.
Workplace Allyship Training Program in India: What Does Creating Allies Cover?
The curriculum moves through four stages, from understanding what allyship actually means to practising it under pressure.
From Awareness to Advocacy
Participants start by separating allyship as a feeling from allyship as an action. Many people already believe in inclusion. The program’s first stage closes the gap between that belief and what a person actually does in a meeting, a hiring decision, or a hallway conversation.
Defining Roles and Impact
Not every ally acts the same way. The program walks through the different roles someone can take, upstander, sponsor, advocate, and connects each one to the specific impact it has on a colleague’s day to day experience at work.
Driving Engagement and Belonging
Facilitators connect allyship directly to business outcomes: teams with visible allies report stronger engagement, and employees from underrepresented groups are more likely to stay when they see people with influence actively backing them.
Handling Real Conversations
The later sessions focus on technique: how to raise an uncomfortable observation without shutting a conversation down, how to recognise unconscious bias in the moment, and how to build a space where people feel able to speak up.
Why Does Allyship Matter?
In most workplaces, the loudest voices in the room tend to belong to whoever already holds influence. Allyship exists to correct that imbalance. When someone with positional power actively backs a colleague from an underrepresented group, whether that means crediting an idea in a meeting or sponsoring someone for a stretch role, the effect reaches further than a policy document ever could.
ASK Insights treats allyship as a business skill, not a personality trait. Leaders and managers are coached to notice specific moments where their influence matters, then given language to act on them without it feeling forced or performative. That coaching is deliberately concrete: participants leave each session with two or three specific behaviours to try before the next one, rather than a general commitment to do better.
Who Is Creating Allies Built For?
The program suits organizations at three different starting points: leaders and managers who want practical tools instead of another awareness deck, HR and DEI teams building out a formal ERG structure who need their sponsors trained properly, and companies that have already run bias training and now want participants to act on what they learned rather than file it away.
How Do You Measure Whether Allyship Is Working?
ASK Insights ties Creating Allies to its Audits and Assessments practice, so a program does not end with a feedback form and a certificate. Senior leaders go through a 360-degree DEI survey, and the tier below them is scored on a validated psychometric scale ranging from Starting to Mentoring, giving an organization a concrete read on whether its people managers are actually behaving like allies or simply attending sessions. Individual contributors complete a separate climate assessment across ten categories, which is where an organization usually finds out whether the allyship its leaders think they are practising is actually being felt on the ground.
The Expertise and Track Record Behind Creating Allies
ASK Insights’ allyship work has a track record outside the classroom. At ABB, a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer, ASK Insights built a gamified platform to promote allyship across the organization, and ABB went on to win the Times of India and ASK Insights DEI Award 2023 in the category of Best Allyship and ERG Practices. At PepsiCo, allyship training was extended specifically to plant and frontline teams as part of a wider diversity roadmap that ran across India, the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.
Dr. Niru Kumar, MBBS, Founder and CEO of ASK Insights and a Padma Shri recipient, leads the program alongside Dr. Akshay Kumar, who holds a PhD in Clinical and Positive Psychology and serves as an Expert Consultant to the Centre for Global Inclusion in the USA. Their leadership assessments, such as the Inclusive Leadership Index used with senior client teams, draw on a broader set of inclusion competencies that ASK Insights refers to internally as its 6Cs framework. That combination, medical and psychological training at the top alongside a measurement framework underneath, is what separates Creating Allies from a single afternoon workshop on unconscious bias.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bring Creating Allies to Your Organization
If your organization has already run diversity awareness training and wants leaders and managers to act on it, ASK Insights can walk you through how Creating Allies would run for your teams.