How Self-Advocacy Benefits the Individual and the Organization

Advocating for yourself is a key skill to ensure you make the desired progress in your career, but it does not come naturally for many people. Self-advocacy means taking the initiative to communicate your needs and wants to others so they can understand how to support your overall well-being and goals. Advocacy can feel like bragging or admitting weakness, but in reality, it is key to ensuring your unique career path is charted toward your goals.

Benefits of Self-Advocacy

Speaking up for your successes and needs serves many purposes for you and your organization:

• Raise awareness (both positive and negative) — Ensure people know what work you have put into a project to highlight your role in its success. Communicate any challenges stopping you from achieving desired outcomes. Both pieces of information help everyone understand what it takes to get a project successfully completed in your organization.
• Get help to advance your career — By sharing your career goals and how you may need help to reach them, you are providing an opportunity for others to support your goals. For example, they may delegate some of their tasks to help you grow or consider you for open positions within the organization.
• Improve work-life balance — Setting boundaries and communicating openly about how life outside of work impacts your day-to-day will help define a healthy balance for you and inform organizational policies.

Be the Change

Self-advocacy is always an important skill, but it becomes even more important in times of organizational change — layoffs, mergers, new management, and even new presidential administrations.

If we think of a few key elements of change management—effective communication, transparency, understanding of goals and responsibilities—we’ll see that they can be introduced through self-advocacy. Being a self-advocate means openly talking about organizational goals and your role in them while also highlighting where you may lack the skills or knowledge to support a particular task or area. Having open discussions helps better define roles and goals for an organization in the midst of change.

Strengthening Your Advocacy

Constantly practicing advocacy enables you to meet change with more confidence and success. So, what are some ways to become a better advocate for yourself?

• Define clear goals — Know where you want to go in your career.
• Detail your value — Spend time thinking about what value you bring to your team and the larger organization.
• Create a “highlight reel” — Don’t assume people know about your great work. Share successes on a regular basis and save examples of praise.
• Imagine worst-case scenarios — With self-advocacy, the worst case is you are told “no.” Think about why you may hear “no” and develop alternatives.

A focus on self-advocacy is really a focus on collaboration. By speaking up for your needs and your strengths, you’re helping people work better with you and creating more functional teams.

As the founder of GovEvents and GovWhitePapers, Kerry is on a mission to help businesses interact with, evolve, and serve the government. With 25+ years of experience in the information technology and government industries, Kerry drives the overall strategy and oversees operations for both companies. She has also served in executive marketing roles at a number of government IT providers.

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