Three Ways to Elevate Your Voice in Your Organization

As I have grown in my career, I am fortunate enough to be able to share my experiences and knowledge with others in a mentorship capacity. One of the individuals I mentor received feedback on their performance review about promoting their work and what they have been doing more.

When he told me this and asked for advice, I thought back to the feedback I heard early on in my career. This was certainly one of those things I heard as well. As a person who only wishes to voice my opinion when adding additional value to the conversation, I was often not seen as valuable because I wasn't speaking up.

As a person who only wishes to voice my opinion when adding additional value to the conversation, I was often not seen as valuable because I wasn't speaking up.

Reflecting on what I have done in the past, as I began to learn to be successful in User Experience Research by constantly having to sell my work, I gave him the following advice.

1. Find ways to share best practices or processes. If you are focused on a skill that a lot of other members are not working on, schedule a brown bag and educate others on what you're working on and the process you go through to do it.

In my first role after graduate school where we were building training software and doing no usability or UX work on the software, I decided to do a brown bag for the entire company on how UX can help their projects. This ended up elevating my pitch, showing people I existed, and resulted in more folks interested in having me work on their projects.

People in organizations associate value with people they constantly see and hear from, especially when their message is consistent.

2. Find ways to socialize your work regularly, laterally. This can be meeting one on one with people on your team, discussing things you're working on, and offering to help them achieve their goals.

As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), I do this regularly. I meet with product managers and other departments (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support) to share at a high level what information UXR can provide and try to learn how I can help them in their roles to meet their goals.

People will talk, so this will start to get your name and personal brand out there at work. 

3. If your skillset matches a senior member of your team, work with them to get your voice elevated. The more you let other people know your intentions, the more likely they can help you be seen!

When presenting back on research we have conducted where I have had junior team members support the research, I will often times give a summary of what we did and why, then let the junior folks talk about the high level findings. This gives them more credit in the stakeholders’ and other team members’ eyes because they are seen and heard providing input.

There are possibly a hundred more ways to do this, but the key thing is to find opportunities to be seen and heard. People in organizations associate value with people they constantly see and hear from, especially when their message is consistent. You can do this in big ways with presentations or small ways like publicly posting in an office chat (e.g., Slack). What works for you and each organization will be a little different, but finding ways to elevate your voice and build allies is necessary for long term career success.