The Importance of Listening Skills in Advocacy

The profession of advocacy, whether at a personal or community level, requires the development of a basic set of skills. These skills include powerful listening and questioning skills, meeting direction and management, assertiveness, and the ability to deal with resistance and promote collaboration. Listening skills are the cornerstone for all other skills an advocate needs.

Listening is the linchpin of advocacy.

Basic Communication

Advocates begin their work with listening. The advocate's role in any interaction is to facilitate an individual's or a community's achievement of a set goal---anything from coping with an emotional trauma or loss to building a playground or homeless shelter. In any case, the first thing the advocate must do is understand what the client or community wants to accomplish.

Adopting the Client's Goals

Before an advocate can successfully move forward with his clients, he must ensure that the clients, not himself, determine the direction they want to go. The failure of many advocacy efforts can be traced back to advocates who impose their own goals and purposes on the clients rather than listening and understanding what the clients want to accomplish. An advocate must listen well enough to be able to adopt the clients' goals as his own.

Meetings

Throughout meetings during the advocacy process, the advocate must listen carefully to identify themes and synthesize common ideas. Finding common ground not only reduces tension and oppositional tides, but also provides stepping stones toward agreement on goals. Hearing what clients (and opposition) really want allows the advocate to clarify information and direction for the clients. For example, an advocate guiding a local homelessness initiative heard one agency complain that it could not transport clients to its programs. The advocate then connected that need with that of another agency that had transportation but no programs for the homeless. The advocate guided the creation of a project in which the two agencies and several others collaborated to share equipment and resources to meet everyone's needs and identify additional funding for the homelessness project.

Brainstorming

Advocates must encourage a safe environment in which participants can express their views without ridicule or being cut off. Hearing concerns and ideas then reflecting them back to participants powerfully moves groups toward agreement and action on goals. If an advocate allows brainstorming to stretch beyond the conventional to include out-of-the-box thinking, the brainstorming will generate creative solutions. The advocate helps everyone listen better during brainstorming by modeling good listening behavior.

Assertiveness

The advocate's listening skills include the ability to understand good ideas even if presented weakly by participants. Then the advocate can assertively re-explain or interpret the ideas for a larger group. In other situations, inevitably some participants will prove resistant to moving forward. When this occurs, by listening, the advocate can assertively identify points of concern and select ideas that have the best likelihood of success.

Collaboration

Guiding collaboration during the advocacy process will more likely succeed if the advocate has listened well, heard the expressed needs of participants and guided them to articulate their own solutions. A transit advocacy group, for instance, will more likely contact legislators in support of an idea that came from the group than they would for a plan pushed by a local transit provider without their input.

References

• Process And Advocacy Skills- United Nations Development Programme
• Advocacy Skills
• Core Organizational Skills