Advocating for Yourself While Championing Others
//How can individuals who approach a challenge from different perspectives leverage their differing strengths to work toward a goal collaboratively? Andrea takes another look at the importance of balancing diverse perspectives and respecting the gifts and contributions of others, while engaging conflict with self-awareness so that we can remain aligned in our team objectives.
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Transcript
Hey there! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. So, last week we talked with Jen Heins about the Kolbe assessment and why it’s so important for us to be aware of how we personally function – the way that our brain is just set up to go and how do we make decisions and tackle problems. It is so important for us to know that.
And so, we had that conversation with Jen last week, and we also talked about why it’s important for us to know what other people are like so that we can work together better.
Today, I wanted to take that a little step further. So, if you’ve been around for a while, you know this, I absolutely love assessments. I love them because I find for myself, and my family, my clients, that they’re very affirming and help people to feel like, “Okay, this is who I am, and I feel good about who I am. Maybe it’s okay that I’m different from somebody else.” So, at a very basic level, most assessments provide that.
They, also, are usually strengths-based – what are you really good at doing and how can you focus more on these strengths? But, sometimes, I think we get a little bit too concerned about what we need, how I need to function – “This is the way that I am, so I need to be able to move like that in the world.” That’s a nice idea, but the fact of the matter is that we bump up against other people all the time.
One of the ways that I talk about influence is, think of each of us as a ball, let’s say. And that ball, when it has some flexibility to it, we’re able to sort of bounce off of one another. We impact one another. You see the impact of how something pushes in against us. And then the ball, you know, propels forward or bounces to another area, and then it pushes on something else. And there is that kind of impact that we have on one another. None of us are alone in a room with our own little ball, impacting everything the way we want to without letting anything impact us.
If that is the case, then we are delusional and probably narcissistic and psychopathic. There’s a lot of other concerns that we would have with somebody who doesn’t realize that other people can and should have an impact on ourselves. That’s something else that we’ve talked about before here on the Voice of Influence podcast.
So, influence – we impact one another. We’re going to have an impact on one another. No one of us can come to the table and say, “These are my results from this assessment. That means that I need you to do this, this, this, and this for me.” While, that’s nice to be able to say, it’s certainly not the end of the story. We also need to listen to what other people need. How do we then come together and work those things out?
So, let’s put it in another light. Employee engagement is something that people have been talking about for years now. We know a lot about that. It’s a hot topic. We know that employees who feel engaged, they do higher quality work. They put forth extra discretionary effort, really just going above and beyond their job description. When we’re wanting to influence someone, when we’re wanting to work with somebody else and have an impact on them, we also need to consider how engaged the other person is with what we’re talking about.
So, do we want them just to comply with our wishes, or do we really want them to care, to be emotionally engaged in the outcome that we’re working on together? I mean, if you don’t really care about engagement, then your influence is directive. It is that one-way kind of, “I don’t really care what anybody else thinks. I’m gonna make people do what I want them to do.”
And quite frankly, even though you might get people to do what you want them to do, their heart won’t be in it. You won’t truly have engagement. You won’t get that extra effort out of people. I’m talking about any relationship, whether it be your family, your colleagues, your whole company if you’re running a company. It’s the truth. It’s just the way things are. People have to know that their voice matters for them to truly engage.
Influence is a collaborative process. Influence is not one-way; it’s collaborative. So, to know this, all we need to do is really think about the people that have had a real impact on us. Who is someone who has helped you to grow or to change your mind about something that really made a difference in your life? Did they simply tell you what to change, or did they listen to your perspective? Did they ask you questions and give you food for thought so that you could make up your own mind?
I’m sure that you’ve also had experiences where someone wanted one-way influence with you. Maybe they considered it their job to lead you or to tell you what to think. What kind of impact did they have on you? Do you look back on their influence as something that made your life better? Were you truly engaged?
Most people, if not all, find that their lives and their work are this collaborative process. It’s not only our ideas that we want other people to engage, but how we do things together, how we reach goals together.
So, I was having a conversation with one of our kids the other day about the way that we function as a family. My husband, Aaron and I are, you know, different. We’re like a lot of couples, and we are opposites in the way that we function.
When it comes to our Kolbe results or the results of any other assessments that we’ve taken throughout the years, we are pretty opposite in personality, strengths, and how we function. But what makes it work is that our goals and our values are aligned. We approach them differently, but at least the end goal is aligned.
So, when we have tension or conflict about the process, about how we’re going to get there, we have to check in with one another and see, “Are we really still working towards the same goals?” We have to start with that question. “What are we trying to get to here? What do we want for our children? In the end, what do we want for our children?” When we have, like, a conflict about how we’re going to do something with our children, in that moment, the real question is, “What is that end goal?”
So, are we aligned still on that end goal? If we have two different thoughts on a value or a goal, perhaps they’re not in tension with one another, but they could be aligned. Maybe they do work together. Maybe they’re not just different goals and values, but maybe they’re complimentary. So, it’s important for us to align those, to figure out how they work together so that we are still shooting in the same direction. We’re still heading down the same path.
But then the question is how are we going to get there? What are the things that we’re going to do along the way? So then we need to discuss our concerns about obstacles that come into the path, that get in the way of where we’re wanting to go?
By sharing our individual perspectives, we’re able to get a more clear and full picture – which is super helpful because that alleviates anxiety or the fear of the unknown. If my husband doesn’t know that my kids are doing a good job in school, he’s going to be worried about whether or not they do a good job in school. If I don’t know that the sprinklers have been aired out or washed out or whatever it’s called, I might be worried when there’s a freeze. And I think, “What if our pipes freeze?” or something.
That fuller picture, that communication, understanding, getting that perspective, asking those questions of each other – this helps alleviate so much anxiety so that we can work and plan how to tackle the obstacle in the future.
And as I told my child, this working out of how we work together, this is an ongoing process. I’m sure you find this in any relationship that you have as well. You can try to fix a problem, but it’s going to come up again, especially when it comes to the way that we function because we’re all so different. So, this is an ongoing conversation. It’s something that we talk about, and then we play it out for a while. And then if something happens, then we have to come back to that conversation again. It’s very normal. That’s what happens in a work environment as well.
I mean, when we first got married, it was really hard to have conversations like that. When you first start to have conversations that have to do with your differences, it can be really difficult, and it might take a few days to get over them, to work things out. But the more that you do it and you see that, “You know what, I’m actually seeing that this other person. They’re not attacking me, they’re for me. And you know what, I’m really for them. We’re for each other.” So, we don’t have to feel threatened.
We can come to this conversation and problem-solve instead of sit here, and worry, and catastrophize, and feel like things are never going to get better. And the more you do it, the more you realize what the other people need from you.
Through my personal experience and education and working with people, I’ve come to this understanding – we need to advocate for ourselves while we champion others.
So, championing others is really being visibly for other people – active listening, active problem solving, active continued dialogue. Champions ask questions. “Is everything going okay for you?” “Is this working?” “Is this process working?” “Is there something that we could shift or adjust that we’d make it easier?” When you notice tension asking about it, “Is there something we can do?”
Championing others is truly about being for them – actively concerned and taking action for others. But advocating for ourselves is also incredibly important. It’s about being self-aware so that I know what I need to be able to do my best. It’s seeing myself clearly, understanding what it would take for me to thrive.
And when we advocate for ourselves, we share the problems that we face. We suggest ideas for how somebody else might be able to help us solve them, and we do all this in dialogue, recognizing that, “I’m not the only person that matters right here in this situation. I’m definitely experiencing a problem, and I want to resolve it. But my idea of the answer may not be the final best idea.”
So, when we put advocating for ourselves right alongside championing others, that is when we’re going to find the collaborative process most fulfilling, most exciting, most productive, and most engaging for everyone. And then when, as a group, we advocate for ourselves and we champion everyone else in the group… I mean, that is like an epic collaboration where every person believes that they matter, and we work towards our common shared goals and values.
So, at Voice of Influence, this is what we help individuals, leaders, subject matter experts, and teams do. We help them to gain a better sense of how they can advocate for themselves and what they need while at the same time championing each other.
If you would like help with that, you know where to find us, voiceofinfluence.net. We have free resources as well as lots of other opportunities who work with us.
Your voice matters, and you can make it matter more!
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