How to disagree with your boss

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• How to disagree with your boss

• Avoid giving the silent treatment

• Wrangle your devices

• Happiness comes from you

• Bernard Arnault as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

How to disagree with your boss

Atlassian, which builds software focussed on teamwork, emphasises respectful dissent between colleagues in its own business. Dissent, disagreement, and debate are healthy within and between teams. It’s especially healthy for team members to feel welcome to challenge the opinions of their bosses. This is a creative way to deal with commercial opportunities and threats. It encourages innovation. And it leads to broad engagement by team members because they feel they have a voice in how things are run. In addition to choosing respectful language, the following three things will help constructive disagreement with your boss:

1. Choose time and place

Unless the topic needs to immediately be addressed, request a time that is convenient for your manager. Some topics are useful to discuss in a team meeting. Others will be better received one-to-one, to avoid some managers feeling their authority is being questioned before the whole team.

2. Prepare your arguments

Be succinct. Identify what are your main concerns with your manager’s reasons. You don’t need to have a solution to discuss a problem - but presenting a solution can help your manager explore alternatives. Seek right outcome, not being right. Be humble that your manager’s experience and knowledge may already have delivered the correct decision.

3. Accept your boss’ decision

On many occasions your manager will make the final decision because it’s their mandate. If you get their job in the future, then you will be able to make more final decisions. When your arguments have been heard, it is usually best to accept your manager’s decision and thank them for listening. By being gracious, we encourage people to listen to our future ideas.

COMMUNICATION

Avoid giving the silent treatment

Giving others the silent treatment destroys trust. In the workplace, we may be considered unpredictable and unreliable to collaborate with in the future. We may be considered immature or even manipulative. Clear, empathic communication is core to long-term trust in our jobs and broader lives. If we are not ready to discuss a topic, and we may have been wronged, we can communicate this:

PRODUCTIVITY

Wrangle your devices

Our devices and social media have been designed to be addictive. Attention is monetized. Our dopamine streams have been hacked. But we don’t need to be a slave to disruptive devices. We can wrangle them, take back our attention, and direct it to deep thinking. Few of us would answer a phone call if we were meeting with an important customer. Creating long-term value in our jobs depends on us similarly protecting our time and attention. And when we have finished working, we can recharge by directing our attention to family and friends and exercise and hobbies. It can be as simple as turning off our phones and putting them in a drawer for a couple of hours.

1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS

Happiness comes from you

The capacity to experience happiness ultimately rests with us. Other people can facilitate our happiness, but they can’t make us happy. We have multiple, simple things that are within our control, that we can do each day to encourage our happiness:

• Eat healthy food, exercise, and go to bed at a reasonable hour

• Remember what we are good at in our jobs and in broader life

• Protect our attention

• Be friendly

These simple practices set us up well for tomorrow. And the days after.

GET SMARTER

Bernard Arnault as career coach

Bernard Arnault is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). LVMH is the world’s largest luxury goods business. It has interests in fashion, wine, watches, and jewellery. Arnault’s net worth is almost US 200 million. Prior to his business career, Arnault completed an engineering degree at École Polytechnique. Some of his career wisdom: