Being the Second-Best Advocate
Jay McVann
Naval Intelligence Officer | Strategic Leader | Intelligence & Military Expert
Mentees,
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how you should be your own best advocate (see link below). This week, I want to alter that perspective and come at the topic from a leader’s point of view. While your subordinates should, as I argued, be their own best advocates, you should be their next best advocate (i.e., second-best). This is especially true of junior personnel who lack the knowledge and experience to fully advocate on for themselves. An Ensign is not going to know how to write a good draft FITREP. Your Lance Corporal does not know what awards are available to them or if they qualify for said award. Your fresh out of college GS (government civilian) has never written a brag sheet. It is your job, as a leader, to help them develop these skills and make-up for any shortcomings and knowledge gaps. Moreover, it is also your obligation to help push them beyond the limits of their own self-advocacy. It is time to use your rank, position, and experience to keep moving the football down field.
While my previous post focused on self-advocacy related to awards, I am going to go broader, for this round, and discuss ways that military and IC leaders can become better advocates, across multiple fronts.
- The first step in advocating for your personnel is getting to know them. You cannot brag about an accomplishment for which you do not know about. Get to know the roles and responsibilities of your personnel; know what they are producing and accomplishing in support of their roles and responsibilities. Get to know their work ethic and how they treat others. Learn about their career goals and where they see themselves in the future.
-- To that end, a useful technique is to teach your personnel how to keep brag sheets. This will help them with their own self-advocacy as it will help them better understand what they actually “do” at work and what they contribute to the team/unit and/or overall mission. Good brag sheets are the starting point for any good award or evaluation. Brag sheets also help you get to know your folks and track their accomplishments.
--- My wonderful editor, LT Ashleigh Martz, pointed out that, “Brag sheets ultimately help track contributions, etc. over, what can be, long periods of time. It’s often difficult to draw, from memory, quantifiable data that occurred months to a year in the past.”
-- Similarly, use status and activity updates as back-up brag sheets and to help track what your team is doing. For example, in my current position, I send a weekly “GBU” (Good, Bad, Ugly) to my commander. It lays out what we have done, what we have coming up, and the teams running priorities and responsibilities. This practice forces me to look at what our team and individual members are accomplishing and also provides me a ready archive of past accomplishments and milestones.
- This practice is controversial amongst other services, but I firmly believe that you should make your subordinates draft their own individual awards and evaluations. There is no better way to learn how to write these products for others than to write them for yourself. The process helps your folks learn to advocate for themselves and, in the future, advocate for their subordinates through effective writing.
-- A key aspect of making this a useful exercise is to make that you offer your subordinates feedback on their drafts. Ideally, you review the draft, provide feedback, and make the member update the drafts. If time does not allow, at least show the member the changes you made and why. [For full disclosure, this has always been something I struggle with. Once I have edited and forwarded an evaluation or award, I usually want to move immediately on to the next thing. Following up on awards and evaluations is a leadership weakness of mine and something I am working on.]
-- One big foot stomp is that having your subordinates draft their own paperwork does NOT alleviate your responsibility of refining and completing the final product. You are not being a good advocate if you simply forward on whatever the member gave you. Having a member draft their paperwork is meant to teach how to advocate for themselves, but the final product that you route reflects your advocacy on their behalf.
- Becoming an effective award and evaluation writer can be extremely difficult. The type of writing required for military awards and evaluations rarely comes naturally and is usually different from previous writing experiences. To be an effective advocate, though, you have to be an effective writer. You are going to have to get better at it. Seek out mentors and more experienced personnel who can help review your writing and provide tips. A lot of the time, senior enlisted personnel, especially those with administrative experience, can be some of the best mentors in this area. Finally, practice, practice, practice.
-- While working within the strictures of professional confidentiality and personal identifiable information, it is a good habit to build an archive of “good example” evaluations and awards. These can be especially useful when drafting new packages while also serving as effective teaching tools.
- You need to get smart on evaluation and award opportunities. For starters, when are your folks’ reports due? Knowing this information will help you build a timeline ahead of when you should being working on them. If you fail to plan accordingly, you will find yourself scrambling at the last minute and unable to thoroughly review the products prior to submission. Second, you need to get smart on the different types of evaluations. These differ significantly between officer and enlisted, military and civilian, active duty and reserve, and certainly by service. Finally, learn about award opportunities.
-- When it comes to awards, you will be surprised by how often they can be awarded simply because other leaders are not submitting their people. Writing packages takes time and effort, so a lot of otherwise deserving personnel will not get submitted simply out of laziness. Take advantage of that laziness by submitting your folks, even if it is a long shot.
-- To belabor the point, giving write-ups their proper attention is a very time-consuming process. Once you have determined submission dates, work backwards; make sure that you give yourself, your subordinate, and any other reviewers plenty of time with the document. Provide all interested parties copies those timelines and remind them of upcoming due dates on a reoccurring (darn near annoying) basis.
- Once the package moves forward, you need to stay involved to the maximum extent possible. If there is a ranking board, try to get on it. If you cannot, talk to someone who will be there, and make sure they know the strengths and accomplishments of your folks so they can advocate accordingly. This is very important for enlisted members, where initial ranking boards are usually done by senior enlisted personnel. As an officer, make sure that your enlisted personnel have a Senior NCO or Chief in the room who can, and will, speak on their behalf.
- Do not take no for an answer. There are times when you will recommend your folks for recognition and be met by initial resistance. For example, you may recommend one of your subordinates for an end-of-tour award which is higher than normal. In those cases, the canned response may be, “That’s not how we do it here.” If you think your folks are deserving of that recognition, do not take no as an answer, especially if the best justification is, “That is how we have always done it.” Pushback and if need be, go up the chain of command.
-- LT Martz also pointed out, “Every single command – across all services – is required to have the minimum thresholds for which an award may awarded. That’s an easy go/no-go for award justification. Not the end all, be all…but a starting point.
-- Here’s a related note that LT Ben “SWallet” Hernandez shared with me following one of my recent emails, “Only the commanding officer is authorized to deny an award. Micro managerial or traditionalist Chiefs may attempt to talk an ENS into not forwarding a NAM up because “look, skipper isn’t going to sign it anyways, why waste their time?” As I’ve often told leaders junior to me, COs don’t appreciate it when their subordinate leaders take authority from them – so don’t let someone put you in the position of taking risk or authority from the skipper without skipper’s permission.”
- Poo filter. Being a good advocate is part of being a good leader. With that said, you should only advocate for your subordinates within the limits of what they have earned and, subsequently, deserve. Your job is not to get everyone recognized to the maximum extent possible, but, rather, to get them recognized to the maximum extent that they deserve. No one is going to know your subordinates better than you do, so you need to be the one to provide the sanity check. If your Airman deserves to be a quarterly award winner, submit them. If not, do not. If your Ensign deserves an end of tour commendation medal, help them get it. You are vital to ensuring the integrity and fairness of the system.
- Realize that while you should care for your troops and advocate on their behalf, do not single mindedly advocate on their behalf to the detriment of other deserving personnel. I sat on some ranking boards with a well-meaning O5 who pushed for his JOs to get top ranking, regardless of their timing or the accomplishments of their peers. He was like a proud parent who could not imagine his kids taking second place. Rather than serve as a model of good behavior, it came across as obnoxious and blind. He was willing to take away opportunities from other deserving junior officers in the single-minded pursuit of propping his own folks up. Do not be like that.
In closing, your job as a leader is to advocate on behalf of your personnel to the maximum extent that they deserve. This starts with helping them advocate for themselves. Next, it is your turn to move things forward and use every resource at your disposal to do so.
V/r,
McFly
This post first appeared in my "Mentorship Via Email" blog on MilSuite on 13 January, 2022. https://www.milsuite.mil/book/people/jay.p.mcvann
The opinions expressed in this email/post are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of PERS-473 (INTEL), Joint Staff, United States Navy, Department of Defense, or United States government