* In a healthy team, you ideally shouldn't need special skills to disagree with someone more powerful than you.
* But it's very common for teams to have some degree of egotism and dysfunction, so these are useful skills in practice.
* But on the other hand, this article normalizes that egotism and dysfunction; it implies that the less-powerful person is responsible for working around the more-powerful person's ego, instead of the more-powerful person being responsible for keeping their ego in check.
So even though it's useful advice for the individuals reading it, it subtly erodes the culture of the industry as a whole. And I want to push back on that. If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
There’s a difference between what should be and what is. Taking your ball and going home isn’t necessarily the right path.
Case in point: I was working as a contractor and SME for a big organization where the senior leadership was disconnected from reality for reasons that don’t matter. I don’t give a hoot about the culture. I’m there to do a job, and if I’m successful, my company probably gets more business, and we do something really amazing. If I fail, it costs me money and political/reputation capital.
As is often the case, the issue was that perceptions and misunderstanding caused the issue. Once we were able to relate the issue in the right way, most of the disconnect went away.
People are people and you need to play to their needs. Many executives are very insecure, for example, and have a bunch of tools at hand to detect and eliminate threats. We’ve evolved to do this… kids will appeal to mom, dad, grandpa in different ways to achieve the same ends.
> There’s a difference between what should be and what is.
Yes. For example, ideally less-powerful people should have great interpersonal skills and would always phrase their insights in exactly the way that more-powerful people prefer to hear them. But in reality, they don't always have that level of interpersonal skills. So in order for more-powerful people to hear the important information, they need to be open to hearing it in ways that aren't exactly how they'd prefer to hear it.
> Taking your ball and going home isn’t necessarily the right path.
Yes. For example, if a manager is offended by how one of their employees raised a disagreement, criticizing that employee isn't necessarily be the right path. A better path might be for the manager to swallow their ego and listen to the concerns that are being raised.
> People are people and you need to play to their needs.
Yes. For example, less-powerful people are people, and more-powerful people need to play to their needs in order for the team to operate in the most healthy way.
To put it a different way: In healthy organizations, people with more power are expected to have better interpersonal skills, and to work well with less-powerful people who have merely average interpersonal skills. But in some organizations, powerful people are egotistic and less-powerful people are expected to work around their egos. These organizations don't function as well; average employees often don't have the special interpersonal skills necessary to work around a boss's ego, and so e.g. good ideas get lost because the boss doesn't want to hear them. If you're unfortunate enough to be an employee in one of those organizations, then the skills in this article are certainly valuable to know. But if you're a person with the power to influence the culture of an organization, you should avoid creating that kind of culture.
Advising someone is a slightly different skill from taking advice from someone, and those are both slightly different skills from building consensus among equals.
Hierarchies have different lines between "things I can change" and "things I can't change" for different positions. Arguing with your boss over something that's in their "things I can't change" bucket is maybe not so useful.
> If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
Or alternatively, to make sure they have opportunities to acquire those skills.
> Or alternatively, to make sure they have opportunities to acquire those skills.
I think it depends what level of interpersonal skills we're talking about. If we're talking about baseline interpersonal skills like "being polite" and "understanding the other person's position before disagreeing with it", then I agree it's appropriate to hold the less-powerful person responsible for acquiring those skills.
But some of the tips in this article are more advanced, next-level skills that can be difficult to develop. And even with these skills, there's no guarantee of success if the more-powerful person is too egotistical. A failure mode I've seen is that the less-powerful person is actually being polite and reasonable, but the more-powerful person's manager doesn't want to hold them accountable for their egotism, so the manager says the less-powerful person needs to work on their interpersonal skills instead. (Related: https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/)
People will never be perfect, and being able to work with that is an important skill. Besides, most of this material is basic good communication that can be applied with anyone. The stakes are just higher with your boss than your peer.
> If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
The people that already agree with this don’t need to hear it, and the people that don’t will never listen if you try to tell them (that enormous ego).
My experience is that people in technical jobs (like many people on HN) work on teams where facts and logic dictate how things are done. People are free to speak their minds as long as they say reasonable things. I think this is the case because work like engineering tends to have clear requirements and you can more easily argue about how to meet them.
I've worked more and more with non-technical teams, where the end of the goal of the work is not as clear cut. On those teams, people speak up less and authority by title is a lot more important. I think this is because there is not necessarily a right or wrong approach to a lot of the things they work on (or at least they don't see it that way) so arguments are less logical and feel more like ego trips or power struggles.
This may not be 100% accurate, but my main point is that technical people probably don't have a clear picture of this power struggle scenario from the pov of non-technical people. It's just a very different work environment.
I feel you, totally. I also feel the same about many many other subjets, revolving around 'mordern' corporate culture.
Take recruitment, for example: if the candidate has the required degrees, experience and skills, recruiters or companies don't need to go through loads of interviews, tests, forms to fill, and so on. Candidates don't need to play guess games, find out what exact word or sysnonym they're expected to say/write, resort to sacrifice to the gods /s, etc.
>But on the other hand, this article normalizes that egotism and dysfunction; ...
If the advice is useful then the egotism and dysfunction are already normalized and your conflicted reaction is more about justifying denial than anything productive.
Tbh I read ops advise almost like an endorsement for a self defence course. Bigger, stronger people shouldn’t punch us in the face and take our things — but they sometimes do, so you should learn how to hold your own.
I'm finding that more and more I'm just starting to agree with people in power because I've realized that in the end it's not my money on the line anyway and arguing just isn't worth it.
You want to use Redis as our primary db? Great idea, boss. You think tests violate DRY and you don't want me to write any? Sir, you're a genius.
In the hydro electric power industry I work in I find that only people paid to have the responsibility and liability for the results of decisions are the ones that make them. If a call has environmental impacts, or safety of human life is in question people are
Pretty quick to kick that problem up the chain and then those folks hire some expert that can be sued if they are wrong.
> I find that only people paid to have the responsibility and liability for the results of decisions are the ones that make them
This is it really. You can't have responsibility without control over the things you are responsible for. People both below you and above you have to accept that. And "real" responsibility comes only from bearing liability for bad outcomes. Even if formal organizational lines prescribe differently, this is where the real boundaries will lie and to the extent there is any discrepancy it will manifest as organizational dysfunction.
I think its a key thing for junior staff who want more autonomy to realize. If you really do want to influence decisions your first step on that pathway should be to pay it forward on commitment and responsibility front. If you don't want to take responsibility its fine, but realize it puts a fundamental limit on your autonomy.
Sometimes it is best to let your employer shoot themselves in the foot. It is often less stressful than arguing with them. I've certainly heard "I don't pay you to think" and "we'll do it my way because I say so" more than a few times. By the time I reached 25 or so, I just decided to roll with it because I was there to get paid and not to win any battles.
I was in a position in my last role of being the voice of reason after my boss who was performing that role left.
The problem is some leadership truly wants to touch the hot stove, and eventually if you keep saying "don't touch the hot stove".. you're the "doesn't let me touch the stove guy".
So sometimes you have to let people touch the hot stove.. as a treat.
> letting other people shoot themselves in the foot
Failure is a great tool for learning. How bad will these foot injuries be, given that we'll probably only have two chances to _really_ learn something?
Terrible way of thinking. Just saying yes is a sign that you’re not mature enough to communicate your disagreement tactfully and clearly.
Also, besides being the one to suffer the implementation of a terrible decision, you will most certainly be blamed for when things eventually blow up farther down the line.
That sucks. You’re the one maintaining the code base so you’ll be the one who suffer when something like that explodes. Do you think boss will take responsibility for making bad architecture decisions?
My approach is to explain first, and do it my way anyway in case of hard disagreement. If boss disagrees with that what’s he gonna do? Do the job himself? Maybe he’s the boss but I’m in charge of the code base and architecture.
Yeah .. sadly that is true in majority of workplaces.
The right boss will keep their ego in check and ask: “what do you think? Do have any reservations?” It is also desirable to argue about something: back and forth “but what about this”.
But you will need to find boss and place like that. Not very common
Exactly. It's your companies money at stake and by keeping the boss happy I get to take a part of that money home with me. It is a financial transaction in the end.
Plus I get to see the downsides of another crappy approach and in the end I learn even more than doing things tHe RiGhT wAy.
That is the best we, that are not decisive, can do. You present different options, show pros and cons but someone above you want to do it his way? No problem, just give me this on a paper and take responsibility for the decision, boss.
Terrible article. Unfortunately, publishing in such a popular magazine normalizes the behaviour and makes people think this is how you have to behave in the business world. You have to treat all people with the same dignity. If you are having to treat powerful people differently, you need to look hard at the place you are in and the kind of class divide it promotes. It's fucking 2022. You want to disagree with someone, just disagree. It's a professional space and it's all adults in the room. If someone needs psychological safety before they are disagreed to, I say they need psychological help.
I’m glad you only participate in companies and situations that appear to have evolved beyond egos and politics, but the reality is that most places still have these things and many people need the tools to navigate around them.
I found the article very helpful for communicating both up and down the power spectrum.
I had a direct report that desperately wanted to use Tailwind even though we already had a library of styled components already built without it. It took everything I had to keep the conversation positive while still disagreeing with him. Developers, in particular, can be divas and these tools are just as necessary in managing up as well as down.
The year is only an argument on 90s daytime talk shows.
> If someone needs psychological safety before they are disagreed to, I say they need psychological help.
What if somebody needs safety safety, because the person they're disagreeing with is more powerful than they are? Any "psychological" safety you're seeing here is people trying to muster up enough bravery to take a real risk for the possibly dubious reward of being right.
I'm not even making any moral judgements here. There are plenty of contexts where if you're going to act out on your disagreements with me, I'd prefer to find somebody either more tactical or more pliable to take your place.
> If you are having to treat powerful people differently, you need to look hard at the place you are in and the kind of class divide it promotes. It's fucking 2022.
> The year is only an argument on 90s daytime talk shows.
I'm not sure why you think it's an argument. When someone makes a statement, it's not automatically an argument.
In this case, that statement is a call to action. Take note that decades have passed and the culture has changed, which was articulated in the previous sentence.
In theory I agree with you. Unfortunately this is a very, um, privileged way of viewing this aspect of the world. A lifetime of selection bias clouds, wherefrom this strategy works for you, but would not if tried by an other.
How do you know it’s not the opposite? That a lifetime of telling yourself it would be rejected ensures you never take risky chances that can drive success?
Your assumption presumes just as much with similar effects.
Adults are mostly small children in larger bodies. Adults will sulk, throw tantrums, be petty, feel slighted, want to always be right, want to dominate etc.
It is adults that kill, rape, maim, hurt kids, start wars, torture etc.
I read the opposite from this article. Instead of being put off by a set of principles that should "only" be necessary when talking to a superior, I read it as a list of helpful principles that can be applied when disagreeing with anyone.
Like you, I agree that no special treatment should be given to people in a position of power. However, I see many of these things as sets of tools I can use to be more persuasive and likely to be heard by anyone I'm trying to discuss a difficult topic with.
> If someone needs psychological safety before they are disagreed to, I say they need psychological help.
I think the point where this was mentioned feels like the author was looking for an excuse to use the current buzzwords. And I don't think it really fits.
It's a feature of the environment whether and to what degree "permission to speak freely" is a thing or not. Nothing to do with psychological safety at all.
(Not that psychological safety is a good concept; the discussion I see is all about perception of being safe to disagree, which is very much putting the cart before the horse of whether or not there are actual repercussions for disagreeing.)
One can be right, but communicate it badly, leading to your case being rejected simply because you failed to present it correctly.
In all organisations there is politics (literally the combination of people) and those people matter. One can disagree while maintaining respect.
For example I once lobbied a supplier on behalf of a group of customers. The supplier agreed to our terms, but then presented _what we asked for_ in such an appaling disrespectful way that the group almost rejected it. It took a lot of work for me to convince them to look past the presentation to the actual content.
Personally I've had subordinates suggest things in useful, and less useful ways. I've had new hires come in, be with us a short time, and then proclaim (to anyone who will listen) that we're morons for not doing x or using y etc.
I've had others come and have a private conversation and ask about the reasons for not doing x, ot using y. Suggesting perhaps that it would be a step forward if we did etc.
New people bring value into our company. But sometimes they don't always yet have the full picture. We encourage feedback, but feedback presented in a respectful and constructive voice leads to more consideration than the opposite, regardless of the merits of the feedback.
Yes, all people deserve respect and dignity. And certainly it's on bosses to set a model for that (and I agree, not all do) - but it's certainly valuable for juniors to understand that commincating well "upstream" is key to getting change done.
And yes, there are places which will penalise you for feedback, no matter how well communicated. And that sucks. Such is life.
I haven't bothered to read the article, the comme ts tend to be more informative...
However, reality teaches us that there is no one size fits all solution for dealing with people regardless of the lower structure.
In a professional setting the key is to remain, well, professional. Even in that vein though you have to know the person and how you're perceived before taking on aome subjects. I've had some senior leadership where a suggestion from me was all it took to change course. I've had others that refused to accept 6 degrees for proof unless it was vetted through the right mgt chain. By that time all credit can be properly dispersed.
A lot of disagreements are arbitrary, emotional, lacking context, moreover, in any organization of human beings, public disagreements can amount to populism, narratives which doesn't help team cohesion. Depending on the issue of course.
To the extent that people are there to do their jobs and manage others, there's legitimacy in that authority, which comes with generally a wider and at least different purview.
Being a good player means respecting that reality.
The advice in the article is decent in helping people untie a bit of common issues from gripes, lack of perspective etc. and I would add strongly that one should probably take the disagreement in 'private' and not make it a public ordeal.
Most managers, when approached reasonably, will be good with at least the point of contention, if not resolving to the best outcome.
I wish everyone had the opportunity to manage others, and do so at least 2 layers up - it's an alternative universe up there and it's really, really hard. I think 'Director' is probably the hardest job in the company in many ways.
The calculus for most things is just different. Optimization in every corner is usually not the objective, and strategic issues start to enter in the decision making in a material way.
With that experience, people would be able to put things in context a lot better, which is a big challenge actually for front line people who often over or under appreciate the magnitude of the issue they're dealing with.
Then, approaching the 'disagreement' comes from a different perspective.
For most of my career, I would have said I wouldn't want to have my manager's job, it's just way too much fuss. Not only that, my experience in management has fundamentally changed how I hire people - 'getting along' in grey situations, where nobody is ever really going to always get their way, people are smart and passionate etc. is hard (for most) and a valuable skill. And personalities are different as well, some people are 'disagreeable' but that doesn't even mean they are 'disagreeing' with you even when it seems like they are! Figuring out how to do it while getting along is 1/2 the job.
The first mistake the article made was conceptualizing the org chart as a power ladder. Your boss isn't more "powerful" than you, in a lot of cases he isn't and relies on you and sometimes he/she is more powerful than you. It doesn't matter.
Don't waste his/her time. If you can do this, you've already cut out pretty much every unnecessary fumble.
I would have benefitted greatly from taking the author's principles to heart when my career began 30+ years ago. I tend to be destructively critical. It has not served me well.
The article makes a couple excellent points: 1) assure the listener that you both seek the same goal, 2) provide a solution, not just more problems.
Negativity alone is poison. If you don't have better ideas to replace the ones you shoot down, say nothing. Nobody likes troublemakers.
It also took me much too long to realize that most people enjoy debate far less than I do, especially those who need to act ASAP, like bosses.
It's not that people don't enjoy debate, it's that it's never just debate that's happening. Usually it's about attention-seeking, ego-feeding, controlling interactions, pleasure from ranting, and so on.
It's similar to people who claim that they "tell it like it is". We understand what it means in practice and what sort of personality type to expect.
You can disagree without being a troublemaker. Managers disagree amongst themselves all the time. Sometimes you have to disagree. Disagreeing doesn’t mean actively fighting things.
I once spent six months disagreeing with my own customer about the validity of a planning and the ability of our suppliers to hit the deadlines they were announcing. People were very happy I had insisted on contingency plans when it became obvious the project was indeed going to be late.
These articles make it sound like people waste many hours creating cases for disagreeing with someone with more role power than you.
It's really not that difficult to show the right amount of candor while being objective about the disagreement.
This doesn't have to be a game of chess where you overanalyze your every move. People will respect the fact you said something that might be the elephant in the room anyway.
The challenge is that these articles assume that you're working with vindictive egotists, and there's plenty of those in corporate America.
It's not that difficult if you've already developed the right instincts for how to do it. But many people haven't! They're immigrants who aren't quite familiar with American business norms, or they're neurodivergent and need guidelines for how to calibrate their candor, or maybe they just grew up in a strict household where their dad taught them to always defer to authority. If I'd read something like this it might have helped me skip a few unfortunate learning incidents early in my career.
Even worse, it normalizes being a vindictive egotist. People need to be grown up about feedback especially if they're in powerful positions. Not ok to be offended.
I'm pretty sure the target audience is people in toxic organizations and situations. Otherwise you wouldn't need advice and don't need to read something like this. I didn't need advice like this then suddenly after some turnover found my self in a situation where I was dealing with people that created this situation
Hofstede’s Power distance Index is different across cultures.
In North America it is generally quite low, and most managers become acutely sensitive to manipulative/sycophantic antics unless completely blinded by narcissism.
It also ties into management styles, and how staff treat each other. Generally, if people are jerks it is a defensive mechanism masking an insecurity about their role at a firm. Personally, I preferred the competent and bluntly honest over someone acting agreeable.. telling people what they think they need to hear.
My advice, Manage or be Managed by amateurs. Eventually someone needs to take fiscal responsibility, and bring down the hammer on liabilities.
This is why most CEOs I knew became rather prickly personalities after a few years if they liaised in managerial roles.
The book Crucial Conversations is quite good and deals with this. The author says to avoid the "Fool's Choice", which is "I can be honest or maintain a good relationship, but not both". The author's own one-sentence summary is "be 100% honest, and 100% respectful". Stated like that, I realized I could be honest in a smart way and not damage my relationships. Of course, sometimes we still end up not getting our way. I recommend this book.
I've also realized I should avoid any extraordinary efforts to "cover my ass" against abusive leaders. If they're going to be abusive, I don't need an ironclad defense to rub their noses in, I just need to get out. And I need not feel ashamed of not having that ironclad defense nor of reacting poorly to their aggression; like anyone abused by those in a position of power, I'm not at fault and need not be ashamed. Decent people will accept "we talked about this last month and you said..." just as well as they'll accept a written paper trail. This isn't to say never document things, but don't do it as a crutch for bad leaders; don't obsess about it, you shouldn't have to use it as a coping mechanism.
If you’re in a position of authority, and someone starts this level of obsequious bullshit, please put them at ease as soon as possible, then fix your culture. No-one should have to burn so much excess energy just to pipe up.
I always liked the meeting style where folks voice their opinions in ascending order of seniority. Someone told me this comes from Japan. I can’t confirm the origin but it’s certainly a neat way of defusing automatic deference to a senior voice.
Readit News
* In a healthy team, you ideally shouldn't need special skills to disagree with someone more powerful than you.
* But it's very common for teams to have some degree of egotism and dysfunction, so these are useful skills in practice.
* But on the other hand, this article normalizes that egotism and dysfunction; it implies that the less-powerful person is responsible for working around the more-powerful person's ego, instead of the more-powerful person being responsible for keeping their ego in check.
So even though it's useful advice for the individuals reading it, it subtly erodes the culture of the industry as a whole. And I want to push back on that. If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
Case in point: I was working as a contractor and SME for a big organization where the senior leadership was disconnected from reality for reasons that don’t matter. I don’t give a hoot about the culture. I’m there to do a job, and if I’m successful, my company probably gets more business, and we do something really amazing. If I fail, it costs me money and political/reputation capital.
As is often the case, the issue was that perceptions and misunderstanding caused the issue. Once we were able to relate the issue in the right way, most of the disconnect went away.
People are people and you need to play to their needs. Many executives are very insecure, for example, and have a bunch of tools at hand to detect and eliminate threats. We’ve evolved to do this… kids will appeal to mom, dad, grandpa in different ways to achieve the same ends.
> There’s a difference between what should be and what is.
Yes. For example, ideally less-powerful people should have great interpersonal skills and would always phrase their insights in exactly the way that more-powerful people prefer to hear them. But in reality, they don't always have that level of interpersonal skills. So in order for more-powerful people to hear the important information, they need to be open to hearing it in ways that aren't exactly how they'd prefer to hear it.
> Taking your ball and going home isn’t necessarily the right path.
Yes. For example, if a manager is offended by how one of their employees raised a disagreement, criticizing that employee isn't necessarily be the right path. A better path might be for the manager to swallow their ego and listen to the concerns that are being raised.
> People are people and you need to play to their needs.
Yes. For example, less-powerful people are people, and more-powerful people need to play to their needs in order for the team to operate in the most healthy way.
To put it a different way: In healthy organizations, people with more power are expected to have better interpersonal skills, and to work well with less-powerful people who have merely average interpersonal skills. But in some organizations, powerful people are egotistic and less-powerful people are expected to work around their egos. These organizations don't function as well; average employees often don't have the special interpersonal skills necessary to work around a boss's ego, and so e.g. good ideas get lost because the boss doesn't want to hear them. If you're unfortunate enough to be an employee in one of those organizations, then the skills in this article are certainly valuable to know. But if you're a person with the power to influence the culture of an organization, you should avoid creating that kind of culture.
Hierarchies have different lines between "things I can change" and "things I can't change" for different positions. Arguing with your boss over something that's in their "things I can't change" bucket is maybe not so useful.
> If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
Or alternatively, to make sure they have opportunities to acquire those skills.
I think it depends what level of interpersonal skills we're talking about. If we're talking about baseline interpersonal skills like "being polite" and "understanding the other person's position before disagreeing with it", then I agree it's appropriate to hold the less-powerful person responsible for acquiring those skills.
But some of the tips in this article are more advanced, next-level skills that can be difficult to develop. And even with these skills, there's no guarantee of success if the more-powerful person is too egotistical. A failure mode I've seen is that the less-powerful person is actually being polite and reasonable, but the more-powerful person's manager doesn't want to hold them accountable for their egotism, so the manager says the less-powerful person needs to work on their interpersonal skills instead. (Related: https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/)
The people that already agree with this don’t need to hear it, and the people that don’t will never listen if you try to tell them (that enormous ego).
I've worked more and more with non-technical teams, where the end of the goal of the work is not as clear cut. On those teams, people speak up less and authority by title is a lot more important. I think this is because there is not necessarily a right or wrong approach to a lot of the things they work on (or at least they don't see it that way) so arguments are less logical and feel more like ego trips or power struggles.
This may not be 100% accurate, but my main point is that technical people probably don't have a clear picture of this power struggle scenario from the pov of non-technical people. It's just a very different work environment.
Take recruitment, for example: if the candidate has the required degrees, experience and skills, recruiters or companies don't need to go through loads of interviews, tests, forms to fill, and so on. Candidates don't need to play guess games, find out what exact word or sysnonym they're expected to say/write, resort to sacrifice to the gods /s, etc.
Yet that's where we are right now.
If the advice is useful then the egotism and dysfunction are already normalized and your conflicted reaction is more about justifying denial than anything productive.
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You want to use Redis as our primary db? Great idea, boss. You think tests violate DRY and you don't want me to write any? Sir, you're a genius.
This is it really. You can't have responsibility without control over the things you are responsible for. People both below you and above you have to accept that. And "real" responsibility comes only from bearing liability for bad outcomes. Even if formal organizational lines prescribe differently, this is where the real boundaries will lie and to the extent there is any discrepancy it will manifest as organizational dysfunction.
I think its a key thing for junior staff who want more autonomy to realize. If you really do want to influence decisions your first step on that pathway should be to pay it forward on commitment and responsibility front. If you don't want to take responsibility its fine, but realize it puts a fundamental limit on your autonomy.
Edit: Maybe there isn't actually.
The problem is some leadership truly wants to touch the hot stove, and eventually if you keep saying "don't touch the hot stove".. you're the "doesn't let me touch the stove guy".
So sometimes you have to let people touch the hot stove.. as a treat.
Failure is a great tool for learning. How bad will these foot injuries be, given that we'll probably only have two chances to _really_ learn something?
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Also, besides being the one to suffer the implementation of a terrible decision, you will most certainly be blamed for when things eventually blow up farther down the line.
Outside of the tech hot areas, OP’s advice is the only one that will get you a salary.
My approach is to explain first, and do it my way anyway in case of hard disagreement. If boss disagrees with that what’s he gonna do? Do the job himself? Maybe he’s the boss but I’m in charge of the code base and architecture.
The right boss will keep their ego in check and ask: “what do you think? Do have any reservations?” It is also desirable to argue about something: back and forth “but what about this”.
But you will need to find boss and place like that. Not very common
Plus I get to see the downsides of another crappy approach and in the end I learn even more than doing things tHe RiGhT wAy.
I found the article very helpful for communicating both up and down the power spectrum.
I had a direct report that desperately wanted to use Tailwind even though we already had a library of styled components already built without it. It took everything I had to keep the conversation positive while still disagreeing with him. Developers, in particular, can be divas and these tools are just as necessary in managing up as well as down.
The year is only an argument on 90s daytime talk shows.
> If someone needs psychological safety before they are disagreed to, I say they need psychological help.
What if somebody needs safety safety, because the person they're disagreeing with is more powerful than they are? Any "psychological" safety you're seeing here is people trying to muster up enough bravery to take a real risk for the possibly dubious reward of being right.
I'm not even making any moral judgements here. There are plenty of contexts where if you're going to act out on your disagreements with me, I'd prefer to find somebody either more tactical or more pliable to take your place.
> The year is only an argument on 90s daytime talk shows.
I'm not sure why you think it's an argument. When someone makes a statement, it's not automatically an argument.
In this case, that statement is a call to action. Take note that decades have passed and the culture has changed, which was articulated in the previous sentence.
Your assumption presumes just as much with similar effects.
Adults re overrated.
Adults are mostly small children in larger bodies. Adults will sulk, throw tantrums, be petty, feel slighted, want to always be right, want to dominate etc.
It is adults that kill, rape, maim, hurt kids, start wars, torture etc.
Like you, I agree that no special treatment should be given to people in a position of power. However, I see many of these things as sets of tools I can use to be more persuasive and likely to be heard by anyone I'm trying to discuss a difficult topic with.
I think the point where this was mentioned feels like the author was looking for an excuse to use the current buzzwords. And I don't think it really fits.
It's a feature of the environment whether and to what degree "permission to speak freely" is a thing or not. Nothing to do with psychological safety at all.
(Not that psychological safety is a good concept; the discussion I see is all about perception of being safe to disagree, which is very much putting the cart before the horse of whether or not there are actual repercussions for disagreeing.)
In all organisations there is politics (literally the combination of people) and those people matter. One can disagree while maintaining respect.
For example I once lobbied a supplier on behalf of a group of customers. The supplier agreed to our terms, but then presented _what we asked for_ in such an appaling disrespectful way that the group almost rejected it. It took a lot of work for me to convince them to look past the presentation to the actual content.
Personally I've had subordinates suggest things in useful, and less useful ways. I've had new hires come in, be with us a short time, and then proclaim (to anyone who will listen) that we're morons for not doing x or using y etc.
I've had others come and have a private conversation and ask about the reasons for not doing x, ot using y. Suggesting perhaps that it would be a step forward if we did etc.
New people bring value into our company. But sometimes they don't always yet have the full picture. We encourage feedback, but feedback presented in a respectful and constructive voice leads to more consideration than the opposite, regardless of the merits of the feedback.
Yes, all people deserve respect and dignity. And certainly it's on bosses to set a model for that (and I agree, not all do) - but it's certainly valuable for juniors to understand that commincating well "upstream" is key to getting change done.
And yes, there are places which will penalise you for feedback, no matter how well communicated. And that sucks. Such is life.
However, reality teaches us that there is no one size fits all solution for dealing with people regardless of the lower structure.
In a professional setting the key is to remain, well, professional. Even in that vein though you have to know the person and how you're perceived before taking on aome subjects. I've had some senior leadership where a suggestion from me was all it took to change course. I've had others that refused to accept 6 degrees for proof unless it was vetted through the right mgt chain. By that time all credit can be properly dispersed.
A lot of disagreements are arbitrary, emotional, lacking context, moreover, in any organization of human beings, public disagreements can amount to populism, narratives which doesn't help team cohesion. Depending on the issue of course.
To the extent that people are there to do their jobs and manage others, there's legitimacy in that authority, which comes with generally a wider and at least different purview.
Being a good player means respecting that reality.
The advice in the article is decent in helping people untie a bit of common issues from gripes, lack of perspective etc. and I would add strongly that one should probably take the disagreement in 'private' and not make it a public ordeal.
Most managers, when approached reasonably, will be good with at least the point of contention, if not resolving to the best outcome.
I wish everyone had the opportunity to manage others, and do so at least 2 layers up - it's an alternative universe up there and it's really, really hard. I think 'Director' is probably the hardest job in the company in many ways.
The calculus for most things is just different. Optimization in every corner is usually not the objective, and strategic issues start to enter in the decision making in a material way.
With that experience, people would be able to put things in context a lot better, which is a big challenge actually for front line people who often over or under appreciate the magnitude of the issue they're dealing with.
Then, approaching the 'disagreement' comes from a different perspective.
For most of my career, I would have said I wouldn't want to have my manager's job, it's just way too much fuss. Not only that, my experience in management has fundamentally changed how I hire people - 'getting along' in grey situations, where nobody is ever really going to always get their way, people are smart and passionate etc. is hard (for most) and a valuable skill. And personalities are different as well, some people are 'disagreeable' but that doesn't even mean they are 'disagreeing' with you even when it seems like they are! Figuring out how to do it while getting along is 1/2 the job.
Don't waste his/her time. If you can do this, you've already cut out pretty much every unnecessary fumble.
Dead Comment
The article makes a couple excellent points: 1) assure the listener that you both seek the same goal, 2) provide a solution, not just more problems.
Negativity alone is poison. If you don't have better ideas to replace the ones you shoot down, say nothing. Nobody likes troublemakers.
It also took me much too long to realize that most people enjoy debate far less than I do, especially those who need to act ASAP, like bosses.
It's similar to people who claim that they "tell it like it is". We understand what it means in practice and what sort of personality type to expect.
I once spent six months disagreeing with my own customer about the validity of a planning and the ability of our suppliers to hit the deadlines they were announcing. People were very happy I had insisted on contingency plans when it became obvious the project was indeed going to be late.
It's really not that difficult to show the right amount of candor while being objective about the disagreement.
This doesn't have to be a game of chess where you overanalyze your every move. People will respect the fact you said something that might be the elephant in the room anyway.
The challenge is that these articles assume that you're working with vindictive egotists, and there's plenty of those in corporate America.
I don't have a naturally high EQ, I have to exercise it and constantly reflect. I'm middle-aged (I worked solo in my first career).
If I can reach 40 and still be learning social skills, maybe others here also could get better at:
> It's really not that difficult to show the right amount of candor while being objective
In North America it is generally quite low, and most managers become acutely sensitive to manipulative/sycophantic antics unless completely blinded by narcissism.
It also ties into management styles, and how staff treat each other. Generally, if people are jerks it is a defensive mechanism masking an insecurity about their role at a firm. Personally, I preferred the competent and bluntly honest over someone acting agreeable.. telling people what they think they need to hear.
My advice, Manage or be Managed by amateurs. Eventually someone needs to take fiscal responsibility, and bring down the hammer on liabilities.
This is why most CEOs I knew became rather prickly personalities after a few years if they liaised in managerial roles.
I've also realized I should avoid any extraordinary efforts to "cover my ass" against abusive leaders. If they're going to be abusive, I don't need an ironclad defense to rub their noses in, I just need to get out. And I need not feel ashamed of not having that ironclad defense nor of reacting poorly to their aggression; like anyone abused by those in a position of power, I'm not at fault and need not be ashamed. Decent people will accept "we talked about this last month and you said..." just as well as they'll accept a written paper trail. This isn't to say never document things, but don't do it as a crutch for bad leaders; don't obsess about it, you shouldn't have to use it as a coping mechanism.
I always liked the meeting style where folks voice their opinions in ascending order of seniority. Someone told me this comes from Japan. I can’t confirm the origin but it’s certainly a neat way of defusing automatic deference to a senior voice.