Why advocating for your team is so important

Recently I addressed a room of medical professionals and parents of children with disability to give a parent’s perspective on advocating for your child.

In that speech, it dawned upon me as it is expected that a parent advocates for their child and empowers them to be the best they can be, I started to think about what this means in the workplace as a leader in advocating for your team. 

Success is never a one person job. 

In my address, I spoke about as a parent, you need to be the captain of the ship, with the health professionals, your crew and together you steer it towards a positive outcome for your child.

As you wouldn’t leave your child hung to dry and to take on life’s challenges alone, the same goes for your team.

Respecting your team and advocating for them increases self-confidence and their ability to perform at the peak performance levels necessary to increase their success, and the success of the team. 

As a business owner and as such an incidental leader, this has never been clearer for me than it is now. With skin in the game beyond the paycheck, it is easy to sometimes get absorbed with the every day of running a business - ensuring there is enough business coming in and managing the operations, that it can be easy to forget about the heartbeat of the business, your people.

According to research on employee engagement, an employee's relationship with their manager is one of the key drivers.

Not advocating for your team will lead to high turnover of staff, poor reputation as an employer and loss of productivity and cost for the business.

There are three ways in which you can advocate today for your team:

Ask questions and listen...deeply

Spend time with your team. Understand what makes them tick and what frustrates them so you can determine where you need to provide extra support or opportunities to enable their growth. Don’t assume you know what they are thinking or base it on last year's performance review. People change and their circumstances change, so being intune with each individual enables you to work with them and support them to ensure they can feel confident to perform at their best.

Follow up and follow through

Ensuring that you follow up and follow through embeds a level of trust between you and your team. It says to them that you respect them, their opinions and their work. By doing this, it gives a clear message to each member that you acknowledge their dignity, their worth and their value as a human being, not just an employee. 

Communication

Regular, honest and transparent communication with your team sends a clear message that you are approachable and treat each employee within the organisation with humility, interest and respect. This includes keeping the team informed with the right information at the right time and most importantly, having their back when they are not treated with the respect and care that they deserve.

Advocating for your team is like advocating for your child - treat them with respect and care and in turn, like a child, your team will grow up to be the best that they can, in the years that they are under your care and leadership and for the rest of their professional careers.