Being the collective champion entails representing your team’s interests while maintaining credibility with senior leadership. It’s about being the bridge between your people and the organisation’s power structures. 

Research by Steffens et al. (2024) reveals that effective identity champions operate across four key areas: 

Strategic Storytelling: They consistently frame team accomplishments in terms of organisational value, turning project completions into success stories and process improvements into competitive advantages. 

Resource Acquisition: They actively secure what their teams need to succeed, whether that’s budget, tools, or decision-making authority, rather than expecting resources to appear automatically. 

Protective Buffering: They shield their teams from unnecessary organisational chaos while ensuring important information still flows through, acting as a filter, not a wall. 

Upward Translation: They speak fluent “executive” when representing team contributions, connecting daily work to strategic objectives in ways that senior leadership can immediately grasp.

Van Dick et al. (2018, 2021) found that teams with strong advocacy leaders show measurably higher organisational commitment and increased willingness to go above and beyond their job descriptions. Why? Because people work harder when they believe someone is genuinely fighting for their interests. 

These teams also demonstrate enhanced resilience during organisational stress and improved perceptions of fairness. 

Advocacy behaviours build cumulative trust over time. Each successful intervention, each protected resource, and each recognised achievement strengthens the leader’s credibility both upward and downward. 

Steffens, N. K., et al. (2024). British Journal of Social Psychology, 63, 1658-1680.