According to most dictionary definitions, an advocate is “a person who puts a case on behalf of someone else”. When it comes to the role that managers and leaders play in workplace health and wellbeing, acts of advocacy have a subtle but important role to play.

Let me explain with a personal example…

A little over 25 years ago I worked in an export shipping role for a large forestry company. It was the last job I had before studying psychology at university. Six months after taking the role, the company embarked on a corporate merger that changed the shape of the industry.

As is often the case with mergers, a period of great instability followed. There was the usual search for cost efficiencies, plenty of process re-engineering and, as the two company cultures and workforces collided, lots of political ‘turf wars’. You could say the post-merger climate was short-on-positivity and long-on-toxicity. Not surprisingly, bad behaviour was not hard to find.

Unfortunately, our customer service department became a lightning rod for a lot of the negativity floating around. But this is NOT what I remember the most. What I remember most was the manager we had at the time. In this blog, let’s call her ‘Jill’.

Seeing the forest AND the trees

As Maya Angelou once said “people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel’”. I like this quote because it reflects my experience of Jill and, I suspect, the experience of others in that team. Without recounting all the details, Jill was very good at a few key things:

She had a good knowledge of the industry & understood the broader context.
She responded to internal politics with impressive optimism & good humour.
She cared deeply about the team & displayed great loyalty towards us.

To use a relevant metaphor for a forestry company, you could say Jill was someone who could see both the forest (i.e., the company in transition) AND the trees (i.e., the members of our team). Whilst both were important to her, the team seemed especially important.

The Advocacy of ‘servant leadership’

Perhaps more than any leader I’ve known, Jill embodied the principles of servant leadership. This is a leadership approach that – paradoxically – seeks to create positive organisational outcomes by putting the needs of others first. It recognises that giving employees moral & motivational support gives them a sense that their wellbeing matters & generates a desire to pay back the leader’s respect with proactive, productive effort.

This is precisely what Jill did. Whether she was aware of it or not, amid the toxicity of the merged company, Jill kept a close eye on the needs of the team & responded in ways that were sometimes quite obvious, and oftentimes not so obvious.

This included:

maintaining a consistent approach to often unjustified stakeholder criticism & complaint, by always publicly supporting team member decisions, and then - if necessary - privately coaching us to find solutions or insight.
- prioritising our development & growth by encouraging formal (e.g., internal courses) & informal (e.g., site visits) learning and then - critically - helping us create the time needed to utilise those opportunities.
consistently checking-in with team members about their wellbeing & how they might like to be supported.
constantly scanning for changes that could be made to enhance the experience of the team.

Wellbeing advocacy drives trust!

Recent studies into servant leadership have shown it has an influence on an important dimension of trust. For example, after collecting data from 233 manager-subordinate pairs, researchers in Pakistan found that when managers were perceived to be genuinely focused on others’ welfare, their interactions created feelings of psychological safety that subordinates believed they could rely on.

Importantly, it was found this emotional element of trust was more important to individual performance (in-role behaviour) & organisational citizenship (extra-role behaviour) than subordinates’ perception of a manager’s competence, knowledge, & reliability (the cognitive element of trust).

This suggests that leaders can influence wellbeing more by how they care than what they know.

So what?

Management science continues to present leaders with good reasons why they should stay focused on the needs of those they lead. But this can be hard to do in fast-paced, rapidly changing environments, as leaders also must cope and manage their own wellbeing.

Fortunately, the servant leader approach does not mean trying to do everything that team members might want or request, as the complexity of organisations naturally constrains some types of desired change. This was certainly the case with Jill. She could not lower the intensity of change by pausing the merger, nor get all the APAC market managers to take more responsibility for their part in log shipment delays.

But what she could do was keep checking the team’s pulse regarding whatever needs we might have. At times that meant sticking up for the team by having hard conversations with internal stakeholders, and occasionally winning. At other times that meant showing basic empathy, by hearing about someone’s sadness (from a relationship breakdown) or satisfaction (from a job success). It also meant encouraging people to find ways of connecting outside of work, then using her strength of humour to create a positive atmosphere…one that left work at work and allowed humans to be human.

My final reflection is quite simple. My experience working in that team was – and still is – the best of my career. But it wasn’t because I loved the work, the company, or the industry. Given I left within 12 months to study psychology, that should be quite clear.

What I enjoyed was the challenge of the role & the support I got from the people around me, not the least of whom was Jill. As a result of her advocacy, I was able to see how much a leader’s attitude & behaviours can positively impact one’s experience at work.

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