Be a champion of change. Host Amber Clayton and Heather Hansen, CEO, Advocate to Win, discuss the three Cs of advocacy and how to wield the tools of a trial attorney to win over your leaders and colleagues to enact change.
Be a champion of change. Host Amber Clayton and Heather Hansen, CEO, Advocate to Win, discuss the three Cs of advocacy and how to wield the tools of a trial attorney to win over your leaders and colleagues to enact change.
This podcast is approved to provide 0.5 PDCs toward SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP recertification. Listen to the complete episode to get your activity ID at the end. ID expires January 1, 2026.
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Monique Akanbi:
Welcome to Honest HR, the podcast for informed and aspiring HR professionals intent on transforming workplace challenges into golden opportunities.
Amber Clayton:
Every week we chat with industry experts to bring you insights, trends, and actionable advice through relatable stories from the real world of HR.
Wendy Fong:
Honest HR is a SHRM podcast, and by joining us, you're helping to build a more engaged workforce and drive organizational success. I'm Wendy Fong.
Amber Clayton:
I'm Amber Clayton.
Monique Akanbi:
And I'm Monique Akanbi. Now, let's get honest.
Amber Clayton:
Now, let's get honest.
Wendy Fong:
Now, let's get honest.
Amber Clayton:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I'm Amber Clayton, senior director of Knowledge Center Operations at SHRM and co-host of Honest HR. Today I'm here with Heather Hansen, CEO of Advocate to Win. Welcome, Heather.
Heather Hansen:
Thank you so much, Amber. I'm happy to be here.
Amber Clayton:
Heather, what actually inspired you to transition from being in the courtroom to actually being a CEO of Advocate to Win?
Heather Hansen:
Well, it took some time, but what really happened was, in the courtroom I recognized the power of being able to change people's minds. The jury sat there, and I defended doctors in medical malpractice cases, and every single one of my cases, every single juror was a patient, and none of them were doctors. I represented doctors. So I recognized that my job was to change their minds from thinking like a patient to thinking like a doctor. I knew that I was good at that and that there were specific skills that were entailed and brought in to do that.
So I started doing that and then I started teaching my clients, the witnesses, how to do that as well, how to advocate. They not only did it in the courtroom, but they found that their patient satisfaction scores went up and their patients became more compliant because they learned how to advocate for their treatment plans or their ideas. And then the hospital started bringing me in to work with them to teach them how to advocate to their teams. And then it went from health care to outside of health care, and now I do it for all industries, teaching people how to use the tools I used in the courtroom to change minds.
Amber Clayton:
That's amazing. I actually worked in the healthcare field myself, so I do understand about malpractice. I just wasn't in the courtroom, thankfully.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, thankfully.
Amber Clayton:
Thankfully. So what were some of the challenges that you faced when advocating for your clients?
Heather Hansen:
In the courtroom, there were two main challenges. One was the one I already mentioned, the fact that every single person on that jury saw the world from a patient's perspective. So I really had to speak to that perspective and overcome what's called the curse of knowledge. Doctors know medicine so well that they forget what it's like not to know it, just like we know some of the things in our industry so well that we forget what it's like not to know it. So overcoming that and helping the doctors to communicate to the juries in a way that the juries would understand, that was one.
The other was that, it's sort of like the whole time that I was trying to build the building of case, the attorney on the other side was trying to knock it down. So that's a challenge, to be consistently not only trying to build but also fend off someone who's trying to knock your story down and knock down their story. It brings on a lot, but it also makes you good at seeing things from other perspectives and cross-examining your own ideas so you can see where the weaknesses are.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, absolutely. So why does becoming an advocate for change in the workplace matter?
Heather Hansen:
It's so important. Advocating, I describe it in a number of ways. I describe it as asking for what you want in a way that makes you likely to get it, but I also describe it as building beliefs. Change cannot happen unless people believe in the change. The leader who decides on the change or the group of leaders who decide in the change, they have to believe in it. But the team has to come on board. The team has to believe as well, or else the change just doesn't happen. So it's really important for everyone on the team to learn how to advocate for the change that they want to implement so that everybody buys in and the change actually happens.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I've been in that position before where I've not advocated, I guess, properly, if you will, because people didn't see my side of the story, and so I'm learning a little bit of this as we go.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard, especially when you see it so clearly why it's helpful or why it's a good idea or why it has to happen and others don't. You sort of feel like you're banging your head against the wall. But the more that you can understand your jury, and we all have one, in this situation, if you're trying to advocate for change, the team is the jury. If you want your leaders to give you more resources to make the change happen, then the leaders are the jury. The more that you can see things from their perspectives, the better you're going to be at getting them to change their beliefs.
Amber Clayton:
So what kind of skills does someone need to be a better advocate for change?
Heather Hansen:
I mean, there's a lot, but I would say that it begins with some of what I'll be talking about in my speech here, the three Cs of an advocate, which are curiosity. You really have to know how to ask good questions and be curious about what is someone's perspective. You can't change someone's perspective until you understand it. So curiosity is an important skill. And then a certain kind of empathy, cognitive empathy, which is different than emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is feeling what the other person feels. That's not as necessary. Seeing what they see is what is necessary. That's that cognitive empathy, being able to see other people's perspectives. Then the third thing I would say is, one of my favorite sayings is facts tell, stories sell, but advocates win. Because you need to be a good storyteller for sure, so that's a skill, but you also need to know how to support your story with evidence, because there's always a competing story, and the story that's most resonates and that has the best evidence to back it up is the one that's going to win.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah. You definitely sound like you've been in the courtroom.
Heather Hansen:
For too long.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah. What strategies have you found to be the most effective in advocating for change within the organizations?
Heather Hansen:
I think that it really starts with getting curious. If you want to change within an organization, you want to talk to the team about what's their current perspective and what about this change scares them or makes them nervous. In my work, I have a belief triangle, and I talk about they need to believe you that when you make a promise, you'll keep it, set an expectation, you'll meet it. They need to believe in you that you're actually capable of doing the thing, making the change that you're saying. But most importantly, and the one people forget most often, is they have to believe that you can help them. So understanding what the team fears about the change, what their pain is that they might think is going to get worse with the change instead of better, and really getting curious about that with surveys, conversations, maybe testing it with a smaller group. Even the best thing about testing it with a smaller group is sometimes they can become your advocates to the rest of the team. So it's starts with a lot of curiosity.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, that's good. Actually, I tend to do that with my team. I have a team of 25. So anytime we want to start something new or we want to change something, I always try to get their buy-in on it because I know that when we get the buy-in, they're going to embrace it, they're going to be able to move forward with it. It's just much easier for them. But that's not to say that sometimes they don't get fearful of what we're doing.
Heather Hansen:
Well, that's it. And it's so good that you even think about getting their buy-in because that's the belief piece, right? If they believe they're off to the races, and if you can get some of your team to believe, they are often the best people to get the rest of the team to believe because they're with them every day, they understand each other's perspectives. They have more influence even sometimes than the leaders do. So getting that buy-in maybe even one person at a time is going to ultimately lead to a groundswell of belief, and then ultimately the change will happen.
Amber Clayton:
So other employers, a lot of employers, I should say, doing engagement surveys, employee engagement surveys, and you mentioned surveys just a moment ago, can you kind of tell me how this triangle works when you're doing something like an engagement survey with your employees?
Heather Hansen:
These surveys have to not only be honed and directed to the change that you're doing, so you want to have an understanding about their current position, their current thoughts, their current fears about the situation as it is, and then their fears about the change. And then you have to actually take the feedback that you're getting from the engagement surveys or the surveys that I create with my clients, and you've got to be transparent because sometimes, the surveys, as you well know, there's conflict, right? Some people say one thing and some people say another. You're not quite sure what to do.
I talk a lot about building credibility. One of the ways to build credibility is to own it when things aren't perfect. So to say, "We got these survey results back. Some people are saying X, some people are saying Y. We're going to go with X, and this is why, and we'll check back in with you," that transparency and that belief triangle, it's the believe you piece, it's so important, and the survey is a great way to use that. Also, to get back to the courtroom analogy, it's great evidence. It's evidence of what people want. And then also, it's a great way to measure whether the change is being implemented. You can use surveys to see that that's happening.
Amber Clayton:
I think that's one of the challenges, is that some employers will do the employee engagement surveys and then they won't act on the results of those surveys.
Heather Hansen:
Right.
Amber Clayton:
So when you do them then, why do them at all if you're not going to pay attention to what the people are saying and you're not going to make any kind of change?
Heather Hansen:
Well, and not only that, but you've wasted the money, you've wasted the manpower, you've wasted the energy, and you've lost credibility, because now you have this feedback that you've asked for, and then you're telling the team, "We don't really care." And that's really problematic. I often, I talk about the three Cs, they're curiosity, compassion, and credibility. Credibility is the most important because if they don't believe you, you can't win. So if they don't believe that you care because they filled out the survey, they took the time to do that, and then you did nothing with it, then you've lost credibility, and that's a huge loss.
Amber Clayton:
Absolutely. I agree. So can you share an example of a positive change that resulted from the methods that you're teaching others in the workplace?
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, I mean, I love to share stories. So recently, within the past year and a half, I went into an organization that wanted to do a huge change, and it was new technology, which is happening, I mean with AI everywhere and all the time. And this team was not adopting the new technology at all. So we did a lot of what we're talking about here. We did a survey to get curious and to understand their perspective, and that's the compassion piece. And then I have a process that I call the SEE technique, S-E-E, which is tell a different story, use evidence to support that story, and then use the energy of your body the way that you present as you talk about it.
So I worked with the leaders to come up with a story that resonated not with the leader, but with the team because of what they had told us, and then evidence that was going to resonate with the team, because sometimes that's different evidence than what resonates with the leaders. And then the way that they presented it, we really worked a lot on, I'm a little bit obsessed with tone of voice, so we worked a lot on tone of voice as well as body language, facial expressions, all of those things. And there was a huge change. So at the beginning of the survey, there was about 50% use of the new technology. We got up to 81% in six months.
Amber Clayton:
Wow.
Heather Hansen:
That was a big change. And it was in large part because the beliefs had changed of the team members around the technology. So it was really rewarding.
Amber Clayton:
So I'll ask a follow-up on that one. What was the fear of this particular change with the technology? Of course, AI, we hear that, and some people think it's going to take over our jobs.
Heather Hansen:
It's so clear that you work in HR because I will tell you that the leaders that I worked with, they thought that the biggest problem was going to be that it was going to be a hassle and time-consuming to learn it. That's what they thought the team's issue was. That was not what the team's issue was. The team's issue was fear that it was going to take over their jobs or make their jobs less fun. So that is what we had to address. If we hadn't done the work that we did, the leaders would've been talking about it's not going to be a hassle, it's not going to take up too much time. The team would've been like, "We're not worried about that anyway." So instead, the story was, these are the ways this is going to make your job more fun. These are the ways that it's going to give you the ability to tap into your creativity, your communication skills, your innovation skills, your smarts, the things that you bring to the table anyway. And that's what got the team on board.
Amber Clayton:
Mm-hmm. I feel your energy. Do those leaders have the same energy level that you did?
Heather Hansen:
I have a lot of energy on this topic. So that's part of it, is finding something that people have energy around. That's why tone of voice is so important. So people, when they come to work with me, they think that the important thing's going to be body language and facial expression. But there's a study out of Yale that says that you can tell more about a person's emotion from their tone of voice than their facial expressions and their body language combined. And that makes sense because as kids, we're taught to smile even if we're not happy and stand up straight even if we're feeling not so confident. But you can't really hide your emotion and your tone of voice. So part of the work with the leaders or the people who are to communicate the change is to find out what gets them excited. What about this is actually going to instill their belief? Because their tone will reflect their belief or lack thereof. So a lot of that is the mindset work that I do.
Amber Clayton:
Basically you're doing a session with the leaders in advance of actually having the conversations with the employees.
Heather Hansen:
Yes. And I do the same thing with them, like telling them the story and the evidence, which might be different. Every jury is different. At first the jury is my leaders. I also am certified as a hypnotist.
Amber Clayton:
Oh, goodness.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah. So sometimes we do a little bit of hypnosis about being in full belief when people have imposter syndrome or they're super stressed about it, and that's helpful as well.
Amber Clayton:
I'm scared of hypnotists.
Heather Hansen:
Oh, you are?
Amber Clayton:
I am. I'm not scared of you, but it's like I've always had this fear that someone's going to hypnotize me and make me do something really embarrassing in front of a bunch of people or tell stories that I just don't want everybody to know.
Heather Hansen:
A lot of people feel that way. It is not like that at all. And then when you see that on stages, the people who raise their hands are people who are willing to do some of those crazy things. But in general, do you meditate at all?
Amber Clayton:
I don't.
Heather Hansen:
Okay. So in general, hypnosis is just meditation with a goal.
Amber Clayton:
Okay.
Heather Hansen:
So it's pretty-
Amber Clayton:
That makes it sound much better.
Heather Hansen:
It's much more boring than you think it is.
Amber Clayton:
That makes it sound better. Well, I often hear people saying that they need to be their own advocate when it comes to especially their own health. When you mentioned that, I just know I hear that all the time. You need to be an advocate for yourself or an advocate for your family members. How might these tools apply to a scenario like that when you're trying to advocate for yourself, not necessarily in the workplace, but just in general?
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, it's really important in general, across all aspects of life, but let's focus in on the health thing. I defended doctors for 25 years. I saw when things go wrong, and I also do know really well how to advocate to healthcare providers. I think the first thing to understand is see the situation from a healthcare provider perspective. They're really in a rush. They're overwhelmed with the electronic medical record. And this is not to say that that excuses when they're short or not paying attention, but that's a way to understand them. So one of the things I recommend is, if you have a list of questions, email them to your provider ahead of time and then bring them written to your visit. Always bring someone else with you because it's very stressful and you just aren't as good of a listener as you think you are when you're in these more stressful situations.
And then you've just got to be a little bit more aggressive, especially it's a little bit generational. My mom and dad are going through some health things right now, and they're sort of like, 'Well, it's whatever the doctor says goes." So I have to be the one to step up to the plate. But what you have to understand is, also, what is a provider's biggest concern is litigation and it's also negative reviews. So you might want to say, "I don't want to give you a negative review. I'm not looking to sue, but I do need answers." Because now you've let the doctor know, "I have power too." And it sort of allows for an equalization of that power dynamic that sometimes still occurs especially with some of the older physicians who see themselves as sort of, "I'm the boss and you are the follower."
Amber Clayton:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I definitely had to work with doctors who had many, many years of experience, and I've had to say, "Do I need to call a lawyer?" And I hate to go that route, but that's what I had to do in my particular situation. This was years ago.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, I mean, I love doctors, I've represented them for 25 years, but they also, it is so rote for them to do surgeries that they don't always remember, that for us, it's a one and only hopefully, something that they do a hundred times a day. And I really worked to remember that in the courtroom. Because for me, I tried hundreds of thousands of cases, but for each doctor, it was a one and only. So I really worked to not only see that from their perspective, but also to consistently remind them the way you feel in this courtroom is the way that your patients feel in your office and your operating room. So extend them the same courtesy, and hopefully that made a difference.
Amber Clayton:
It sounds like it did. So you mentioned bringing somebody in and helping to be an advocate in the healthcare setting. What about in the workplace setting? Obviously if you're an employee and you want to be able to approach your manager about something and there's this fear that either you're going to get shot down or get in trouble or retaliated against, something like that, what kind of recommendations would you have for that individual?
Heather Hansen:
I think you need to know what the culture is there. I don't know that I would necessarily bring someone else in. I think a lot of it is really not only knowing what it is that you want and believing in it, it's that whole energy of your body when it comes to it. You really want to believe that it's not only good for you, but it's good for the organization. And then you want to also prepare for it ahead of time by thinking about the cross-examination questions, seeing it from your boss' perspective. Where are the problems with your argument? Where are the problems with the thing that you want to do? So that you can speak to those objections even before they come up.
There's a lot of ways to prepare for advocating, and when you're an individual preparing to advocate to your boss, you really want to see things from his or her perspective. And then if necessary, and it all depends on the context, if we're talking about something that's problematic, then you may need to bring in someone else or someone from HR perhaps to advocate for you and with you. But generally, I think that ganging up on someone is not the way to start. It's a little bit different in health care because that person's usually there just to listen and take notes and ask questions that you forget. But in work, it's a little bit different, and a lot of it depends on the culture.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I was thinking about this situation, and we've had people who have called in about this where their employee is trying to advocate for themselves to work from home full time. So when you go to the employer, you obviously just don't want to say, "Hey, I want to work full time just because it's better for me, shorter commute." You want to be able to go in there and say, "This is beneficial for you also, because now I can work this shift. You're saving money on electricity," or whatever the case may be. You might have an extra cubicle for somebody else to come in and work.
Heather Hansen:
So good. I mean, that's a perfect example of seeing it from the boss' perspective and also to say, "I've been keeping track, and I'm this much more productive when I'm allowed to work from home. On the days that I work from home, I get this much more work done because I'm not commuting." Anything that you can do. The evidence piece, and I talk about this in my work, you collect and create evidence. So collecting evidence would be Googling what organizations let people work from home and sort of looking in the world to see what supports your argument. Creating evidence is actually working from home and looking at all the ways that benefits your boss and then showing how you've actually done it. Creating evidence is always usually a little riskier because you're putting yourself out there, but it's also evidence that has a little bit more weight.
Amber Clayton:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you're putting more research behind it. You're putting more thought into it, about how it's going to be beneficial to you, but also how it's going to be beneficial to your employer. So I find that to be a win-win.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, an employer doesn't care that you can do your laundry. You know what I mean?
Amber Clayton:
They don't care?
Heather Hansen:
No, unfortunately. But that's a lot of times how people advocate for themselves, where they're like, "I really want to be able to do my laundry and watch my kids," and that's not the best way to do it.
Amber Clayton:
Okay. Okay, great. Well, any recommendations on how to approach leadership regarding changes? Is there a particular approach that you would recommend?
Heather Hansen:
Yeah. I mean, again, I think that you really want to get curious. And if you can't, in my courtrooms, I couldn't turn to the jury and say, "What am I missing? What's the problem? What am I not saying? How are you hearing this?" But usually at work, you can. So not only try to assume what the leader is seeing or wanting or what their pain is, but actually asking them. What is your biggest worry? What is your biggest concern? And then speaking to that. That is huge.
A lot of the work that we do is shifting perspectives. What's another way of looking at this? What's another way of looking at this? And then it's the storytelling and the evidence to support the story. A lot of the things that you just mentioned, Amber. It's looking at how does this affect the bottom line. How does this affect the overall culture? How does this affect the overall implementation of this technology? Really looking at the evidence that supports the story. And then you get to that whole, when you're talking to your leader, you want to seem as confident and full of belief as you can.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about the phrase that people would say, you've got to speak the language of your CEO or speak that language.
Heather Hansen:
It's so true. So in the courtroom, there's a saying that if I say one word that the jury doesn't understand, they don't even hear the next 10 words I say. And that makes sense to me. My cases are about osteomyelitis. If the other side gets up and says, "This is a case about osteomyelitis," I see the juror's eyes get big. They're like, "I told these lawyers I don't know anything about medicine." There's no way that they're hearing what he or she is saying. So it really is important to be aware of the words that you use. Are the words that you're using the same word that your jury uses? The more that you can do that, the more likely you are to win.
Amber Clayton:
Yeah, it sounds like it. Now I'm thinking about the word jury, and every time that I go into work now, I'm going to say, are they my jury?
Heather Hansen:
Yes, they are. One of the things that I need to make sure I say when we're talking about this is, a jury is not there to judge. Because in my work, I also talk about our inner jury. A lot of times people automatically assume that's the judgmental voice. But a jury isn't there to judge. A jury is there to listen and choose what to believe. So your inner jury is listening to the negative voices in your head that say, "You're too old. You're too young. You're too dumb. You're too smart. It's too late." And hopefully a positive voice that's saying, "You can do this, it's never too late. You're the perfect person." And then your inner jury is choosing what to believe. It's the same thing, when you go into work, everyone is potentially a jury who's choosing whether to believe the story that you want them to believe or the story in their heads or the story that a teammate is telling. So you really want to be aware of them in that way.
Amber Clayton:
I feel like you're talking about me, the jury in my head.
Heather Hansen:
Yeah, we all have one.
Amber Clayton:
Yes. So how can organizations create a culture that continuously supports and encourages advocacy?
Heather Hansen:
I think it's simply to embrace the word. I have been pretty stubborn about that word, because a lot of times leaders have said to me that word makes me think of lobbying or unions. One of the things that people often say, and I get it, I see it from their perspective, "I don't want my employees to act like a bunch of trial lawyers," because trial lawyers get a bad rep. But they've got to understand that this is a skill that will serve them. If everybody learns to do this well, they become more compassionate, they become more curious, they become more credible. They become much better at building beliefs, which supports the bottom line, because it's important in sales, it's important in leadership, it's important in service of the customers. So embracing this idea and training the skills that rest below it is really the best way for leaders to make sure that this happens.
Amber Clayton:
Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
Heather Hansen:
Thank you for having me, Amber. It was great talking to you.
Amber Clayton:
And thank you for joining this episode of Honest HR.
SHRM VO:
This podcast is approved to provide 0.5 Professional Development Credits, or PDCs, towards SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP Recertification. Enter this PDC Activity ID into your SHRM Activity portal to claim your credit, 26-32K7A. Again, the PDC Activity ID is 26-32K7A. Please note, this code expires January 1st, 2026.