Self-Advocacy in the Workplace

• Paula West
• April 24, 2025
• Media Article

At AgCareers 2024, Jonathan Shaver encouraged leaders to foster self-advocacy by building confidence, embracing growth mindsets, and creating brave spaces where every voice has value.

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Jonathan Shaver, Envision Partners LLC, led an interactive session at the 2024 AgCareers Agriculture & Food Roundtable about Self-Advocacy in the Workplace. He began the session by asking us to consider what prevents us from self-advocating in our workplaces. Why aren’t we asking for new challenges or responsibilities? What barriers do we have? He then asked us to think about organizational barriers and how organizations can create a culture of self-advocacy. The room was quiet, and the audience was on the edge of their seats as we knew and recognized our barriers. I expected I was not the only one to think about the obstacles I knew about or suspected of those I was on teams with.  

 

As a group, we found common barriers. To no surprise, Jonathon explained in detail that barriers commonly shared were those from past experiences, our fear of the perceptions of others, trust with others, and the feeling of needing to advocate for others. One of the biggest ones that stuck out for me was that taking the initiative would appear to others that I would benefit greatly from that initiative.  

 

Pause for a minute and ask yourself, what stops you from asking questions? What is your barrier to self-advocacy?  

 

Jonathon then spoke and demonstrated the correlation between confidence vs competence. He shared some fantastic slides that showed that new hires started with high confidence but low competence. This is natural; they don’t know everything about how the company functions, its culture, and many policies. As these employees continue their time with the company, they often fall in confidence, but their competence increases. Ideally, employees regain that confidence within the appropriate time and move into a high confidence, high competence level.  

 

He then asked what happens when someone doesn’t regain their confidence. He explained that this is a dangerous spot for employees as they can become disengaged and eventually may leave.  

 

Jonathon continued the discussion by talking more about disengagement. He spoke about how the employees who are not high contributors or contributing at all are not taking opportunities and might leave the organization. He said that employers should want to reengage these employees as they are competent and not ‘toxic’ people. They need their confidence back.   

 

He then explained what is keeping employees from getting their confidence back. One possibility could be fear of leadership disapproval; there could be history that holds them back. They do not want the feeling of ‘doing that again’ when things go wrong. They could feel a lack of resources – they cannot keep up with the current workload. They could have a bad history with micromanagers that have reduced their confidence. Jonathon also said that a key element is that their employer doesn’t talk to them as much as others. This could be because the employee is competent and doesn’t need as much supervision as other employees. This can result in the employee not feeling important, reducing their confidence. Other reasons can look like:  

• There isn’t enough transparency around mistakes or permission to make mistakes.  

• They are labeled as the ‘new guy.’  

• Mistakes are not released. ‘Remember when this happened because of this.’  

• Labeled as not as good as (name of the person who left the company).  

• The pain of making the mistake again, fear or regret around it.  

 

Jonathan talked about having a growth mindset to support individual confidence that leads to appropriate self-confidence. Embrace the words “I don’t know how to, ‘yet.’ I want to teach healthy humility by showing that I have something to contribute and that others do. He explained that confidence can also be demonstrated by teaching others how to communicate regarding company goals.  

  

Jonathan explained there are ways to create brave spaces in your organization that allow for people to feel confident. By teaching team leaders to create brave spaces they can ‘fix’ employees who have lost their confidence by:  

• Encourage new members to contribute, finding positive in those contributions  

• Find the positive  

• Don’t hold back information  

• Provide clear expectations and guidelines  

• Be open to new ideas  

• Be fast to recognize contributions  

• Show your lack of competence  

• Role model how to contextualize individual efforts in the bigger picture  

 

Jonathon wrapped up the presentation by providing some foundations for us to take away that will help employers get their employees to the high confidence high trust level:  

• Give bite-sized projects to show skills and right-sized projects to match competence  

• Set clear guidelines and expectations  

• Don't hold back details or information about the project  

• Help employees learn about the organization  

• Formal networking  

• Mentors/Sponsors  

• Recognize there are social differences and embrace them  

• Create career development paths and competency models for positions  

• Talk about the speed of career progression. Share examples with employees.  

• Training programs  

 

And finally, to teach self-advocacy. Employers should want self-advocacy to be self-driven. Organizations should provide knowledge of larger organizational contexts to manage expectations.  

 

Jonathan believes that we can each be role models of self-advocacy.