Advocacy

I thought I knew what advocacy was. I knew what I wanted it to be for me. I just didn’t expect it to be the person it turned out to be.

I have held several different positions in the company I was hired at fresh out of college. I just finished my sixth year. Briefly, not that I’m resume writing by any means, I held a position in our engineering department for three years working with our top clients in that industry and building trust that I could deliver quality, but also quick results. Needless to say, it was a bittersweet goodbye when I moved into our sales department.

Yes, sales. I worked on our technical sales team for two years and gained the trust of most of our clients in the Midwest. I learned the art of reading people, effective negotiation, and most horizontal services that our engineers don’t know we offer. I had an unpleasant experience with my boss (more on that later) leaving me in a difficult place. I wasn’t lucky for the opportunity that came next. It was the dedicated work that I put into my sales territory.

Our Business Development Manager reached out to me and asked if  would be interested in starting to learn the technical project work associated with next steps into the commercial team. I didn’t jump from Sales to Business Development since the functions of the two work so closely with each other (and there were no open requisitions). It would not have been effective collaboration at the time.

As an “engineer” again, I set my goals to learn an industry that I knew on the sales side, but didn’t know on the deep technical evaluation side. There was a dotted line to the BDM while still working under engineering management, and even though I worked closely with the engineering manager while I was in sales, they placed me under one of his direct reports.

I had interacted with my supervisor (before he was my supervisor) when I was on our sales team, and I had some preconceived notions about his values. When people talk a certain way about someone, you are more likely to have larger bias towards what you have heard if you do not have a standing relationship with this person. I am not proud of this but I admit that I had an extremely skeptical attitude with him the first six months. Him being on the west coast and myself in the Midwest, it was hard to read each other having never met.

I started to lean in after a while. He told me he trusted my project handling capabilities and to me, that was a key turning point for our mutual trust in each other. We have been in a pretty good spot since then, and I feel like he’s really on my side and ready to go to bat for me if I ever needed it. Recently, we’ve been really focused on developing me for the commercial team and I am glad he is keeping good on his word.

We recently had a discussion on a conference I requested to attend. During that discussion, he asked me if he could ask something personal, to which I said “sure”. He probed about my relationship with another coworker in the sense about our good terms and whatnot. I said, to be honest, we haven’t talked in a minute, but I don’t know why. What shocked me next is that he is so in-tune with other people’s behaviors, that he recognized this even from the west coast and via phone call. This call was not one that I had ever attended though.

I never took this as “gossip”, because that is not how the conversation came across. He suggested I make amends with this person since “you can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broken”. This hit me right in the feels. Someone cared that much about my relationships with my other colleagues and wants to see me succeed in influencing those around me in my current and future roles. He didn’t have to say anything to me. He’s not obligated.

I would like to take a moment to visit one word that has been sitting with me pretty prominently over the last week: loyalty. I’m not just talking about this since it resides so heavily in my zodiac (oh hey, fellow Leos!). In a day and age where everything is replaceable, we often overlook this fundamental gesture and subconsciously act in our own interests.

From this experience, I look at loyalty as two-fold: to a word and to the people around you. Loyalty to your word is where your character is made. You get to prove that character through your integrity every single day. Loyalty to people is where your network is made. By showing up consistently, remembering the small things, and being there when you say you will, others are more inclined to trust you based on your character, thus expanding the number of people you can count on and the number of people that can count on you. By building loyalty (i.e. trust), you increase the number of people around you that you can look to as your advocate.

Even when I wasn’t “at the table” my supervisor was there advocating for me and then brought me that awareness. When someone wants to see you succeed above all else that’s when you know you’ve found your true advocate… even if it’s not who you thought it would be.