Making Change Permanent with Advocacy

Most of what I’ve written about in this series covers well-worn ideas and concepts you can find in countless frameworks, books, and courses. But one thing has always struck me as odd: none of them focus on advocacy as the ultimate goal of change management.

And to be clear, I’m talking about corporate organizational change management, not advertising or brand promotion. In marketing, advocacy is the endgame. It's why companies put logos on clothing and turn customers into brand evangelists. But in corporate change initiatives, advocacy is rarely positioned as the final stage.

Why? I could speculate on many reasons, but ultimately, true advocacy requires a level of ownership that most organizations are either unwilling or incapable of fostering. You cannot force people to become advocates from the top down. The old joke--"The beatings will continue until morale improves"--feels painfully relevant here.
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The unfortunate reality is that most people reading this article will never get the chance to implement true advocacy in their workplace. And that’s a shame. It speaks to how modern organizations view work—as something transactional, rather than something people feel a deep sense of ownership over. The best part is that ownership does not require abandoning a true life-work balance. 

The Path to Advocacy

The idea that advocacy is the final stage of change management isn’t new, nor is it mine. In my previous article, Facilitating Real Change, I outlined a pattern I recognized in behavioral change:

Awareness → Understanding → Acceptance → Adoption → Advocacy
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For most of my adult life, I’ve been fascinated by this idea: What does it take to get to advocacy? It has shaped my approach to leadership in both professional and personal ways.

The Parent Association Experiment

​The first time I truly understood the power of advocacy was when I served as president of the parent association at my children’s school.

I was approached in our second year at the school because the organization was struggling to find a leader. What I found was a top-down volunteer group where parents were disengaged. Meetings dragged on because everyone had to navigate the internal politics of the president. As a result, very little actually got done.

What struck me was that people were already passionate about the cause, but they just didn’t feel ownership over the organization itself. I found a lot of parallels with ideas I explored in my master’s thesis on the motivations of university major donors. Unsurprisingly, the biggest predictor of lifelong giving was a donor’s sense of ownership of their school, often formed through deep involvement in student programs.

That idea stuck with me. People give back because they feel connected to something bigger than themselves and want to shape its success.
So my goal with the parent association was simple: maximize ownership and autonomy for volunteers.

Over many years, we overhauled the structure, replacing top-down leadership with autonomous committees. Each year, we ran a retreat where parents planned and prioritized work based on their passions and alignment with the school’s mission. The most passionate individuals chaired committees and controlled the work.

The only two things that remained “top-down” were the fundraising campaign and teacher appreciation week. Everything else was entirely committee-driven. Board meetings became status updates, not approval sessions. We even explicitly labeled each agenda item as:
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• Inform (just sharing updates)
• Input requested (seeking feedback)
• Approval needed (formal decision-making)

This structure allowed those doing the work to retain control, preventing their efforts from being derailed by well-meaning but misguided comments like, “Have you thought about…?”
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After 10 years leading the organization, I finally stepped away. And here’s what didn’t happen: it didn’t collapse. In volunteer organizations, when a strong leader leaves, things often fall apart. But years after my departure—even after the disruptions of the pandemic—the group is stronger than ever. The advocacy model worked. The structure enabled advocacy to sustain itself beyond any one individual.

The Unexpected Success of a Self-Managing Team

In previous articles, I’ve talked about mob programming and other techniques my teams have implemented, but at its core, what made this work was a deep sense of trust and vulnerability. The team set aside ego, embraced failures as learning opportunities, and focused relentlessly on finding the best solutions.

A few key things made this possible:

1. Small, low-risk iterations – We took in work in small enough increments that mistakes were minor and easy to fix. This removed a lot of fear from the process.
2. Psychological safety – Every two weeks, we measured psychological safety, clarity, energy, work-life balance, and confidence. These became leading indicators of success, allowing us to track how changes in process or workload impacted team morale.
3. Continual refinement – If something wasn’t working, we fixed it immediately. The process evolved constantly.

After 6 to 9 months, this approach became the glue that held the team together. They couldn’t imagine working any other way. More importantly, they became advocates and were willing to spread these ideas across the company.
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And then...leadership changed.

The new executive team didn’t understand or value what we had built, and they dismantled the system almost immediately.

Normally, when leadership blows up a successful initiative, teams just accept their reality and revert to the old way of working.
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But not this team.

They fought to preserve what they had created. Even in a radically different environment, they worked to incorporate elements of what they had built into their new teams. They had gone from initial skepticism to embracing the model to championing it despite adversity.
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That transformation—from resistance to advocacy—is the greatest professional achievement of my career.

The Cautionary Tale: When Advocacy Becomes Zealotry

For much of my life, I viewed advocacy as a mythical end state—something possible in theory but nearly impossible to achieve in reality.

The fact that I’ve now seen it happen twice still amazes me.

But I want to offer a cautionary tale about what happens when advocacy goes too far. When advocacy isn’t built on a proper foundation, it can turn into zealotry.

When people feel deep ownership over something unique and successful, it can become part of their identity. That’s when advocacy risks turning into dogmatic enforcement. It happens all the time. You see it in tech teams that refuse to consider new methodologies, in corporate cultures that resist change in the name of preserving their "ideal" state, and in movements that turn rigidly exclusionary.

As a leader, the best way to combat this is to question everything.
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Creative teams are never static. What worked six months ago may not work today. The world changes, and we must be humble enough to recognize that and brave enough not to fear it.

Final Thoughts

Advocacy isn’t just about sustaining change. It’s about making it self-reinforcing. If you can build something that people want to protect and evolve, then you’ve achieved real, lasting change.

But true advocacy requires ownership, not just compliance. It cannot be mandated from the top down.
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And it must remain adaptable.

Because even the best systems, if left unchecked, will eventually become the very thing they once sought to change.

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