Workplace advice: Courageously confronting your boss can entail personal and professional danger. The danger, however, likely lies in how you approach it.
What happens when you imagine marshaling your courage and telling your boss or someone important that he’s made the wrong call? Do you fear retaliation or making a problem situation worse?
If speaking the truth to power feels as risky as jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, you’re not alone. Courageously confronting authority can entail personal and professional danger. The problem, however, isn’t speaking the truth; it’s how you speak it. You can’t march in with verbal guns blazing, making aggressive “got ya” statements. Instead, you need to earn the right, avoid hit-and-run collisions, act as a partner, provide facts and prepare to be challenged.Whom do we allow to tell us what we don’t want to hear? Those we trust.
Keep your focus on issues, actions and behaviors rather than assumptions. For example, you might say, “We spoke for 40 minutes, and you never asked how this impacted me,” rather than, “You don’t care about my feelings.”If you’re raising a touchy issue and don’t want the discussion to end in disaster, remember to observe how the other person takes what you say. By doing so, you’ll be able to calibrate if you’re getting through or if their eyes have filled with tears or glazed over with anger.
You may even play charades, thinking it easier to rely on nonverbal hints and subtle innuendoes to get your message across. Regrettably, you’re not that good an actor. Others rarely receive the message you hope they would. Instead, when you suppress your feelings, your frustration and anger simmer into a toxic brew that eats you up inside or bubbles up.Lynne Curry writes a weekly column on workplace issues.
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