My friend Kalev sent me this terrific Harvard Business Review article on how we can use social media as a platform for change.
I hope you will read it and implement the ideas throughout the piece. Here’s an excerpt and a link to the full article.
Here are some highlights from the article:
- Use your social network to broadcast anti-racist, anti-sexist values.
- Empower — and back up — women and racial minorities by including them in your social network.
- Put active inclusion into practice.
“You have a bigger sphere of influence than you realize. Most people think about their immediate circle of friends as their audience. However, research in the study of social networks has shown they are wrong. Your ideas and behaviors ripple out from you, influencing your friends, friends of friends whom you may not even know, and friends of those friends as well.
The implication is that you have enormous capacity to influence others to be anti-racist and to be anti-sexist in the workplace — those you know directly and individuals as many as three social steps away from you. But to make a real impact, you must move your conversations with colleagues, and what you share online, beyond value statements toward concrete anti-bias actions.
Share your support for de-biasing your organization with your friends, engage them in conversations about the problems of bias and exclusion in your workplace, and tell them what actions you are taking to make your team fair and inclusive. Unless they are committed to racism and sexism, they will be influenced to share your sentiments, and to speak with their friends about it, who then will do the same.”