Not being able to identify valid differences in assumptions
Not communicating well enough make 1 and 2 easy (View Highlight)
The nice thing about work (as opposed to other things in life) is that it’s governed by a pretty simple rule:
If your company isn’t profitable after some period of time, everyone loses their jobs. (View Highlight)
Remember that no matter how much you disagree, you’re both better off if your company wins. (View Highlight)
So instead of thinking “Which one of us is going to defeat the other?” let’s tweak the question just a bit.
How about: “Which of our positions is most likely to help our company win?” (View Highlight)
Perhaps it’s about bringing our respective skills and context to solve the problem that helps our company win. Perhaps some elements of A and some elements of B are both useful. Or perhaps my concerns about A or your concerns about B help us push the final idea to be stronger. (View Highlight)
There is a much bigger work adversary out there than your biggest work adversary: it is your biggest competitor looking to crush you, or it is a market that just doesn’t care. (View Highlight)
If you ever find yourself:
Taking 20+ minutes to compose a 2-sentence Slack response
Taking 1+ hour to respond to an e-mail
Raising your voice in a meeting
It’s time to use the the magic incantation:
Let’s continue this tomorrow (View Highlight)
But constructive disagreement is a good thing. In fact, it is imperative for teams that want to get the best results. And it is one of the most empowering skills one can learn, because it enables your voice to be heard and have impact. In the process of writing my book, “The Making of a Manager,” I put together a framework to break down the process of resolving a disagreement into these five steps. (View Highlight)
The first step to disagreeing well is to know where you stand and why. (View Highlight)
Before doing anything else, see if you can complete this sentence: “I [don’t agree with/don’t think we should do/don’t like] X because…” (View Highlight)
This step is optional, but it’s so simple and effective you should always consider it. Before putting stating your disagreement loudly, see if your position resonates with a few trusted confidants. For example, say your team is making a decision to ship X. You’re worried the user experience is confusing. Pick another colleague or two whose opinion you respect and say, “Hey, I’m worried X is too confusing to be shippable. What do you think?” (This also can work well with your manager.) (View Highlight)
If everyone tells you you’re overreacting, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or that you shouldn’t speak up, but at least you’ll be prepared for what the most common responses are. (View Highlight)
If you hear that your position does indeed resonate, you’ll go in feeling more confident in stating your position, with folks who can back you up if need be. These perspectives might also make you see something new or differently. (View Highlight)
Once you know your position and have run it through the gut check, you might be tempted to straight up declare your position in a meeting or via e-mail. Resist this. (View Highlight)
In fact, the most effective way to have a conversation about a decision is to lay out all of the options or perspective on the table. (View Highlight)
Instead, take a step back and say, “Here are all the proposals for initiatives we should fund” (of which X is one.) Or, if there aren’t other initiatives and it’s just a yes or no on X, say, “We need to decide whether or not to fund X. Here are the reasons why we should , and here are the reasons why we shouldn’t .” (View Highlight)
The reason you want to frame up all the options is threefold. First, it makes it easy for everyone (including the decision maker) to know what they are deciding between. Second, it forces you to understand and empathize with the other side(s) because you can’t describe all the options objectively and convincingly if you don’t. Third, you come across as more objective and trustworthy if you do this. (View Highlight)
Remember that you can always prepare a deck or write an e-mail to explain all the options as well as the pro/cons of each option. If you find yourself overwhelmed by how to win an argument, remember this step, which is essentially just doing research. Everyone should be able to agree on the framing, even if they have different opinions about what option they would choose. I find I always feel more in control if I can take a step back and enumerate every possibility on the table, like I’m approaching a fact-finding project. (View Highlight)
Once you have all the options or perspectives laid out, the next step is to figure out what assumptions would make reasonable people prefer Option A over Option B, or vice versa. For example, say you and your team are deciding which features to include in the MVP of your product. You think feature X should be included, but your teammate doesn’t think so. Why is that? (View Highlight)
It may be that you think feature X is important for marketing. You think its inclusion helps tell the story of why your feature is awesome, and will attract people to use the product. Meanwhile, your teammate doesn’t think it will be used often (because she has data that indicates very few people will actually use feature X.) (View Highlight)
You may actually agree on the facts: — X helps marketing, but X won’t be used much. And you can still disagree about the conclusion — should we include X in our MVP? — because your root assumptions are different. You may think marketing is very important, or that X has a disproportionate ability to improve marketing outcomes, or that X’s cost isn’t high. Maybe your teammate feels marketing isn’t important, or X isn’t that critical to marketing, or X is going to be very costly. Which of those is it? (View Highlight)
The more specific you can be about where exactly your assumptions differ, the easier it is to figure out what to do. Sometimes once you isolate the disagreement, it becomes obvious how you can find the truth. (Like if the disagreement is that you think X is cheap to build, but your teammate thinks X will be expensive, you can go deeper with the engineering team to get a more accurate estimate.) Other times, you realize you just have a different philosophy, which is fine (maybe you think marketing is critical to the success of your product, but your teammate doesn’t think so), in which case, go to the next step. (View Highlight)
Once you have framed the options, extracted the differences in root assumption, and still can’t agree, swiftly escalate the decision to the appropriate decision-maker, making sure to include all the stakeholders and the agreed-upon framing. (View Highlight)
Escalation isn’t bad! Once you’ve followed all these steps and you have a robust framing of the options, you should feel very comfortable escalating. A decision being made when all the perspectives are well-represented and clearly laid out is an excellent thing, because everyone will feel that the process was fair. (View Highlight)
