965: Why Your Boss Isn’t Advocating for You…and What to Do About it with Dr. Nicholas Pearce

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, welcome.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to be chatting with you. You have so much wisdom in so many domains, but my producers originally found you from your phenomenal Harvard Business Review article called What to Do When Your Boss Won’t Advocate for You. And it sounds like you struck a nerve with this one, Nicholas. What’s the scoop here?

Nicholas Pearce
I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with. People long to have great mentors and great managers who are invested in their success and care about them as humans. But if there’s something that we learned during the pandemic is that a lot of leaders don’t care about the humanity in us. They view us as not human beings, but as human doings.

And for those who have managers who don’t really care about them, don’t care about their forward progress, or won’t bring their name up in rooms that they’re not able to occupy, it creates a challenge to figure out how to navigate your career and your life forward when you recognize you’re lacking that sponsorship.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Nicholas, coming strong right out of the gate. I love it. So, they don’t care about our humanity. That’s a strong sentence and yet it seems accurate. It’s not that they wish us harm actively, but it’s just kind of like, you know, at the end of the day, you are a means to producing a thing, and that’s a fairly prevalent attitude. If you had to hazard a guess, what percent of managers do you think fall in the humanity-affirming versus humanity-eh column?

Nicholas Pearce
That’s a hard number to guess at, but I can tell you that most corporations, based on how they are structured, tend to look at people as products, even the language of human resources or human capital. Human capital was, I guess, designed to be something of a more humane way of saying HR, but when you think about human capital, putting human capital alongside physical capital or financial capital, these are resources that are under the control of the organization for the organization’s purposes, not things that have lives of their own to be valued.

So, putting people in the thing column, I think it’s very, very common. And, unfortunately, most folks who have been in the working world for any amount of time know that while HR may sound like they exist for the people, most HR departments exist to shield an organization from lawsuit. So, HR typically is not really there for you. HR is there for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Telling it like it is. So, just for funsies, is there a language that you prefer to use when it comes to organizations and people, like, the people department or learning and development? Like, what are the terms you like to use?

Nicholas Pearce
I love the concept of people and culture. Having an executive leader who is primarily responsible for the development and wellbeing of the people in the organization and the stewardship of a healthy culture, I think that language works well. I think learning and development, as you mentioned, Pete is great because it focuses on the value added to the people and their development. Anything that does not make it sound like the organization owns or controls assets. That type of language, I think, has its own limitations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Nicholas, I just love where you’re rolling. And I know, in your background, you are both a business school professor and a pastor. And it’s really beautiful to kind of see how the thinking interplays here in terms of just even the words we use, we can find irksome or even dangerous.

Nicholas Pearce
That’s exactly right. I think words have power and words should be used with intention. And I think the words that our organizations and corporations have used over the years are reflective of the desired intention. And as we begin to deconstruct some of those harmful ways of thinking and being in workplace life, we have the opportunity to refresh not only our perspectives, but our language as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. All right. And we’re just getting started talking about advocacy. So, we’re going to say this word a lot. Maybe since we’re talking words, could you give us some definition? When we talk about having a boss or someone advocate for you at work or advocacy, generally speaking, within work, what do we mean by that? You said speaking up for someone when they’re not in the room, that’s something, got a ring to it. Are there any other dimensions of that you’d highlight?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. So, I think about advocacy as the act of sponsorship, and I juxtapose sponsorship against mentorship. So let me describe the two and contrast them. Mentorship is having that person who will coach you, who will pull you aside and say, “Hey, I like what you did there. Maybe a little bit more of this next time, a little bit less of that.”

Maybe they’re going out to coffee with you once every couple of weeks or every four weeks or every quarter. They’re there to help you navigate. They’re there to invest in your development. They care about you as a human. They care about your performance. They’re trying to invest in making you a better you.

Sponsorship is altogether separate. Sponsorship is not so much about making the direct investment of time in giving feedback, and having lunch regularly, and having coffee, and giving micro corrective feedback. Sponsors are people who are opportunity creators. They are career accelerators and catalysts of opportunity. These are individuals who are bringing your name up when you’re not in the room. And as is often said, 80% of what is said about you is said when you’re not in the room.

So, for many people, especially women, people of color, and others who tend to be excluded from a lot of opportunities in many work environments, they tend to be over-mentored, “We’ll give you a coach, we’ll give you feedback, we’re going to make you a better you,” under the guise that the reason you have not ascended is because you need to be made better.

But what they really need are sponsors, people who are willing to say, “Hey, did we consider giving Nicholas that opportunity? Did we consider giving Jane that promotion? What are the reasons why we’re holding her back? Are we saying she lacks ‘seasoning’? What exactly do we mean by that? Does she need to add paprika and stir? Like, what are we saying?”

The people who are willing to do the blocking and tackling to make sure that organizational politics or bias don’t derail your career, those are your sponsors. And so, many people are over-mentored, but under-sponsored. And so, the whole concept of advocacy speaks to an individual using their credibility, their capital on you to advance you and your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then can you tell us, it’s like, “Okay, boys, it’s really important that we have people speaking up for us when we’re not in the room,” how would we even know the extent to which this is or is not happening since we’re not in those rooms?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. You can tell, one, what your boss is saying to you offline. Do you and your manager have a relationship where feedback flows naturally and continuously? Or are you in a situation where your feedback comes mostly in the form of a formal annual or semi-annual review process during which you get blindsided with feedback that sounds off-base? If so, that could be a warning sign that your boss is not going to bat for you when you’re not in the room.

Do you and your boss enjoy a collaborative relationship? Or do you feel like your boss is competing with you? If your boss competes with you, because perhaps they view you as a threat to their advancement, or as a threat to their supremacy, they’re probably not advocating for you.

If you’ve been in a role for three or five years, and there’s never been a conversation about what your future looks like, I mean, let’s be for real, Pete, if you’ve been in a role a year or two, and there hasn’t even been a conversation about what your future looks like, that may be an indication that your boss doesn’t care what your future looks like, and that they’re certainly not advocating for you and for it at tables that you may not even know exist in the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, I love what you’re saying in that it’s very candid and blunt, and I think some of us don’t even want to entertain the belief that this harshness, reality is present when we’re hearing a lot of nice things.

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. I have been in spaces personally and have coached leaders, and employees, students of mine who had all the raw ingredients, I mean, had all the learning, all the degrees, all the certifications, all the skills, all the receipts in terms of high performance, and yet found themselves stuck. And what happens for many people is that it’s the ultimate gaslighting. You’re left to wonder, “What did I do wrong? What did I not do right? Is it me? What am I lacking? What do I need to change? Am I too much? Am I too little? Do I need to turn up, turn down? What is it that’s wrong with me?”

And a lot of us wind up falling into cycles of anxiety and depression because we have been trained at a certain level to believe that the problem is always us. And what I’ve discovered is that there are a lot of people who are incredibly gifted and incredible contributors and collaborators who just run into managers and bosses who don’t know how to lead, or don’t know how to be humane, or are insecure.

And because this continues to do incredible damage to people in an era and a season where mental health needs are already at their highest, I feel at some level, Pete, that the truth will set the people free. And to release themselves from the fear or the feeling that they are not enough and to, perhaps, sometimes release their boss from the expectation that they will be a good advocate when perhaps they don’t want to be or don’t know how to be.

Now, I do have to rush and add this, that if you’re just a chronic underperformer, these words don’t apply to you. Like, you need to do better, right? But if you find yourself consistently meeting or exceeding expectations, you’re knocking the ball out of the park, so to speak, on a consistent basis, everyone can see your brilliance and your promise but your boss, maybe it’s not you. It might just be them. And they’re not perfect people. They’re people, they’re not perfect, but it is your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m wondering, if folks find themselves in this position, they might feel kind of stuck. Could you maybe give us a bit of hope, a bit of inspiration, a story of someone who saw a transformation in this department in terms of advocacy wasn’t happening and then it kicked off and good things unfolded?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of my coaching clients had this very scenario happen, where the boss was really great in terms of giving mentorship and guidance and coaching and feedback, very warm relationship, their families got together on weekends. I mean, it seemed like a really healthy relationship on one level, but they recognized that, at a certain level, the boss really appreciated them being in that role. Because, let’s just say they got their TPS reports in on time every time, and the concept of losing that individual to another team or to a higher level, perhaps in a different business unit, would create issues for that boss.

And so, that boss, at a level, was conspiring to suboptimize that individual by being nice, being kind, keeping them happy, but not giving them the growth opportunities that they deserved and needed to continue to fulfill their potential. So, this individual had the conversation with their boss and said, “Hey, I really enjoy being on your team. Help me see what future could look like. Help me see what next can be.” And that opened up a healthy conversation where the boss kind of came clean and said, “I knew this day would come. And I’ve really enjoyed having you on the team.”

And they kind of came clean about how there were opportunities that existed in the organization and they were waiting on that individual to come forward to raise their hand and say, “Hey, I actually do want to grow. I don’t just want more money. I don’t just want autonomy. I don’t just want flex hours. I actually want to grow. I want to be able to be my best and become even better at a higher level in the organization.”

And so, that conversation actually opened the door for the boss to advocate because the foundational relationship was in place, high performance was already acknowledged, and so this was just an invitation to the boss to move from mentor to sponsor.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Understood. And I like what you say there. It’s not necessarily evil. Like, they have warm feelings about, it’s like, “No, this person is so amazing. I feel so blessed,” and delighted to have them on their team, but it’s just a little bit of selfishness, which we all are subject to. It’s like, “This is so amazing. I don’t want this person to ever leave.”

But, again, you know that it’s a finite clock. When there’s someone amazing in a role, it’s, like, it’s only a matter of time before they go to a bigger role. And I think this is the way of all things. I think we had a handyman who was awesome and someone said, “Oh, he probably should increase his rates.” And I said, “Inevitably he will.”

Nicholas Pearce
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
“Because we are aware of his awesomeness.”

Nicholas Pearce
Exactly. We don’t want to be the ones to tell him that, or we’re happy to tell him as long as he keeps our rate unchanged, right? But this is exactly it. This happens a lot, you know, Pete. It happens in the nonprofit sector a ton, where you have long-serving executive directors or CEOs or presidents, they’ll be in the seat for 25, 30, 40 years. And they’ll have a talented person underneath them in the organization, who everybody within a mile can see has CEO or executive director capability. But that CEO recognizes, “I’m 55, and I have no intention to retire anytime soon.”

“So, because there’s only one CEO at a time, and I intend to sit in this seat for another 10 to 15 years, I have a choice to make. Either I invest in you becoming the very best you can be, which means losing you, or I continue to suboptimize you to make you question whether you have what it takes to be in my seat. But because I’m not ready to give up my seat to you at this time, now I’m not advocating for you. I’m not bringing your name up in the marketplace because I could lose you, and you fulfill an important part on this team. I value more what you produce than who you are.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nicholas, you are just touching on exactly, I think, some eye-opening stuff for a lot of people, like, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s like, “Oh, this is what’s really going on under the surface. Understood.” So, lay it on us, if we find ourselves in such a position, what do we do about it?

Nicholas Pearce
Well, one very practical thing that we can all do is to look for advocacy elsewhere. Your boss may not be the only advocate you can get in your organization. Ideally, you’d have a direct supervisor who could go to bat for you because they know your work most closely, but there are other influencers who can give you the boost you need. There could be someone in the organization that is even more high ranking than your boss.

Maybe an ally who might bring your name up. Maybe it’s someone you met in the context of an employee resource group. Maybe it’s someone who you met at the company holiday party. Maybe it’s someone you ran into at a company-wide task force. Maybe it’s someone who, when the time came for the company’s intramural softball team to form, they were the person you rode to the games with. Who knows? But there are other people who can speak to you and can perhaps be an accomplice, a co-conspirator, if you will, in advancing your cause and advancing your career.

Another really helpful thing, and this is something that’s hard for a lot of us, is to build our networks outside of our organizations. For many of us, we may be socialized to feel that is disloyal or underhanded or somehow strategic in the most nefarious sense, but I believe that, what I call 360 -degree advocacy, is a gift that we should all take advantage of. We’ve got advocates above us. We’ve got advocates beside us who are our peers. And we can also have advocates in our direct reports.

Not underestimating the value of people beyond your boss in your organization can be helpful, but also people outside of your immediate workplace who may be LinkedIn connections, or are part of professional associations, or alumni groups, or other civic and community service outlets. Those individuals can speak to your promise as well and may be able to help create opportunities for you outside the organization.

And sometimes, as the saying goes, folks won’t miss the water until the well runs dry. And sometimes you give people the gift of goodbye, and it doesn’t have to be messy. It can just be an investment in self. Investing in yourself and your future does not have to be self-ish, right? Because at the end of the day, let’s face it, Pete, if someone lets you sit on the bench for 10 years and they never advocate for you, that’s 10 years of your life that are down the drain.

And they’re not going to come to you at the end of those 10 years and say, “You know what, Pete, I’m sorry you wasted your entire 30s.” It’s going to be on you to make up for that lost time. And an apology is not going to do it. You owe it to yourself. I was having a conversation with a group of executives who are whining and complaining about Millennials and Gen Z being disloyal. And I said, “Listen, y’all can complain and moan about that all day long until you recognize that companies aren’t loyal like they used to be. Unless you’re giving Gen Z a pension, which you’re not, the company’s already said, ‘Ah, we’re not really loyal to you.’”

If you say in your HR policies, that in order for a 401k or 403b to be fully vested, an individual has to work there three years, you’re telling them from the outset, “We’re investing in you, sort of. Until you’ve been here a while, we’re going to claw back part of the money we’ve invested in your retirement.” So, all of these are signals to individuals that companies aren’t loyal. And so, if companies aren’t going to be loyal to their people, how can you expect people to be loyal to their companies in the way that they were 75 years ago. The rules of the game have changed. And so, it’s not about being disloyal or selfish. It’s just about being smart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that absolutely resonates. And that was kind of my philosophy when I started my career, it’s like, “I don’t think I can count on any employer long-term ever.” So, it felt kind of mercenary. It was like, “What can I do to make sure I have skills to do anything?” And I was like, “Strategy consulting seems like a good choice out of undergrad.”

And so, and I think it was serving well with developing some skills and some network and some savings to then go do entrepreneurial things. But, Nicholas, I got to hear, when you dropped these truth bombs on these executives whining about the Millennials, how did they reply?

Nicholas Pearce
Oh, they got it immediately. I said, “Listen, all of the participation trophies and all that stuff is cool when it’s your kid or your grandbaby out there on the soccer field getting the little trophy because they put their cleats on the right feet. But when they become your employee, all the participation trophy stuff, where you’re getting rewarded for effort, that goes out the window. It goes out the window.”

And so, recognize, that it was not the Millennials and Gen Z that made participation trophies. It was the uncles and aunts and moms and dads and coaches who could not handle walking away without a shiny object because they showed up and tried their best, and the participation trophy industry was born, but Millennials didn’t demand it. It was the world into which they came of age. They understood it as an expectation. And if Gen X and Baby Boomers had not put participation trophies in the lexicon, Millennials would not expect them in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, we’re getting a lot of good contexts from all over here. So, build the network outside the organization. Any other top tips you’d recommend? If we find ourselves not having that advocacy, what else should we do?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of the most common cliches that I have heard that I actually believe has truth underneath it is that sometimes rejection can be protection and redirection.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It rhymes too.

Nicholas Pearce
And so, if you find your manager not advocating for you, it could very well be an intentionally closed door that is designed to push you in the direction of purpose. This is something that I talk about a fair amount in my book which is entitled The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work. And what I find is that, in many cases, the adversity that we may face, whether personally from a health perspective or otherwise, or even professionally in terms of doors that are slammed shut in our faces, sometimes that adversity is actually the grist of discovering purpose.

Oftentimes, people think that the purpose that we have in life is to just be happy. And I’m not the happiness police. I’m not anti-happiness, Pete. However, I have discovered that, oftentimes, it is those painful circumstances that push us into a place where we discover purpose that we would never have discovered before. And so, while many of us want to organize our lives around the avoidance of pain, if we avoid pain, we actually may be avoiding purpose.

Now, I’m not saying we should be trying to attract pain. Hear me clearly. All I’m saying is that sometimes when a boss doesn’t advocate, when a door closes, it could be a catalyst that is pushing you toward purpose and protecting you from calamity that you had no clue was coming your way. So, really embracing the moment in a different way and reframing it as not so much, “This is a flaw in me,” but perhaps more, “This is giving me an opportunity to reflect, to retool, to perhaps even take a break and rest and really think about how I connect my soul with my role.”

“Maybe I was just doing a job, earning a nine to five paycheck, doing the things, paying down my student loans, making the moves, doing the things. But now I actually want there to be meaning in my work. Yeah, I’ve got skills. Yeah, I work for the big shiny company with the stock options and all of the trinkets. But now I actually want to do something with my life that matters. I want to have purpose in my work. I want to connect my soul with my role.” And maybe that closed door was the catalyst to get you to see that purpose is calling.

Pete Mockaitis
That was well said. Well said. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Nicholas Pearce
Sure. I think that as much as we often think about what happens when others don’t advocate for us, I think that it’s important that we recognize our responsibility to advocate for others. Oftentimes, it’s very easy to think about what your boss is or is not doing for you, and you’re absorbed in what’s happening over your head, and you’re thinking that you are the main character in the organization story, and you are not.

Many of us don’t advocate for others because we’ve never been advocated for. And while that may be understandable, I don’t think that’s a valid excuse. We have to be intentional about lifting as we climb, not having the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality where only one of us can be advocated for at a time, “And if it’s not me, that means you win and I lose.” I think this zero-sum game mentality, this fixed-pie thinking is eroding the fabric of society.

And so, I think for as many people who may be attracted to our conversation today, because they find themselves in spaces where they weren’t getting advocated for, perhaps being the leader you wish you had can be a very important part of your life’s work and your own personal scorecard in terms of how you evaluate your leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. And now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nicholas Pearce
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Nicholas Pearce
A favorite bit of research that I love talking about is this vintage study that was conducted by Kathy Phillips, Katie Liljenquist, and Maggie Neale. They’ve done this study looking at the power of diversity to help teams win. And the science on this from over 20 years ago is quite clear, that diverse teams can outperform homogenous teams when the task calls for creativity, innovation, information-sharing, and tackling complexity. This is a well-stated, well-worn vintage research finding. It is not a part of the recent DEI movement. This is pure science from back in the before times that many organizations know about but haven’t really embraced.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Nicholas Pearce
Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Nicholas Pearce
Sabbath.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nicholas Pearce
Favorite habit is prayer for me. It’s time to really refocus.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quoted back to you often?

Nicholas Pearce
Yeah, oftentimes, it’s really in the space of this purpose conversation that we started to explore a little bit toward the end. And it is the fact that you owe it to yourself to live a life on purpose. You were created with a purpose. You have a reason for being. And you owe it to yourself to discover that and to do something about it.

A lot of people say that they are reflecting or meditating or praying for purpose because they need clarity on what their purpose is. And for some people, that is truly the case. But there’s a significant percentage of people who I think are probably with us today, Pete, who don’t need further clarity. They need more courage. And once they acknowledge the fact that they’ve got the clarity they need already, the missing ingredient is courage, now it’s their move.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Nicholas Pearce
NicholasPearce.org is a great place. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, social media, Facebook @napphd. I also have a TED Talk that folks have been enjoying entitled, “Don’t Ask Me What I Do.” So, any of those spaces will be great to connect.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Nicholas Pearce
Be the change you want to see. If you feel like you’re not getting advocated for, advocate for someone else. If you had a terrible onboarding experience, make someone else’s onboarding a little softer. If you feel like it’s time for you to pivot from a job, don’t be messy on the way out the door. Embrace the gift of the lessons you learned in the previous season and take the high road and walk out with grace, not looking at that past experience as time wasted, but looking at yourself perhaps as an alum of that organization or institution, and always seeking to do your best, no matter where you find yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Nicholas, this has been fantastic. I wish you much good advocacy and purpose.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Likewise.