5 Safe Ways To Challenge At Work And Giving Feedback To Your Boss
Learning safe ways to challenge at work can be career defining. Whatever your position, companies want and need for all their employees to help improve what the company delivers. When you are an employee with good ideas and the courage to share them without upsetting managers and colleagues, you gain respect, appreciation, job security and likely future promotions.
Even the most insecure and ungrateful managers want to have better solutions to current problems. How you share your ideas and solutions is the difference between being loved or hated by your boss. One of the secrets to stand out at work is not to play it safe and stay silent.
Implement each of these safe ways to challenge and how to stand out at work, challenging your boss and giving feedback to your manager all become a lot less scary.
At the end of this article, I touch on a couple of important ways anyone at work can produce good and valuable ideas to improve what a company does.
5 safe ways to challenge at work and give feedback to your boss
- Challenge in service of achieving business goals
- Avoid being right
- Ask questions to provoke thinking
- Provide alternative and options, not problems
- Seek to raise up, not put down
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The first safe way to challenge at work is to
Challenge in service of achieving business goals
When you make your act of challenge about helping your manager and your team better achieve business goals, you massively de-risk your action of challenging. Clearly link the reason you are speaking up to why – what you are communicating is good for your team and the business.
Link your idea to time saved, costs saved, revenue gained and all the other benefits your business needs to compete and be successful.
Bosses hate individuals challenging them or making their lives harder so the individual gains personal benefit or avoids effort and work. Do not put personal fears, desires or insecurities ahead of benefits for the group when challenging at work.
An example of linking a challenge to a clear business benefit:
“I see the benefit of the process change you are proposing. Would you mind if I share an alternative approach which I think will save the team even more time, further reduces costs and builds on your original proposal?”
The stronger the benefits for the manager, team, and business, the stronger the argument for selecting your idea, solution, or proposal. Make what you propose compelling when challenging at work.
Always link your challenge or alternative idea to how it will improve reaching business goals set for the team or business. Do not frame your proposal in terms of your benefits.
When giving feedback to your boss, particularly if it is negative, link in the business reason why you are providing your boss the feedback.
The second safe way to challenge at work is avoid being right
When challenging your boss, provide them with alternatives, with incremental improvements, with ideas which you can both discuss together. This approach is a lot less confrontational than flat out disagreeing with them. When discussing alternatives with your boss, you can work on persuading them the benefits of what you are proposing.
Never frame your challenge or position as being the right way, the right decision, or the best solution. This in effect is saying I am better than you, or my idea is better than yours. This is a sure way to get your boss’s back up and for your challenge to be dismissed without being properly considered.
When challenging, you might start communicating your idea like this:
“Achieving the goals you are proposing will be really good for the team. Have you considered what would happen if we can’t get the funding we need before the 20th June? … [Wait for their answer] …. I have an alternative solution that should mitigate this risk? May I share it with you?”
When challenging your manage or giving feedback to your boss, avoid statements like:
- “I don’t agree with you”
- “I don’t see how that will work”
- “I have a better approach and …”
- “It would be a mistake to….”
Avoid being right when persuading your boss to take a different route which has better business benefits. There is rarely right and wrong in business. Much more common are better and worse alternatives, routes and options.
When giving feedback to your boss, avoid positioning your feedback in terms of I am right, and you are wrong. Talk about the pros and cons of what your boss did and suggest alternatives. Talk about the reactions you observed or the comments you overhead.
Avoid positioning what you say as being right.
Ask questions to provoke thinking – The third safe way to challenge at work
Asking questions is a lot safer than sharing your opinion or making statements when challenging others, and in particular sensitive or insecure managers. Asking questions is a great starting point when you don’t yet have a strong trusting relationship – say when you start working with a new manager.
Asking the right type of questions is important when challenging others. A couple of suggestions:
- Make you questions open – ones that it is hard to answer yes or no to.
- Start your questions with “What” or “How” rather than “Why”
- Use your questions to get your manager thinking about a specific problem
- Use follow up questions to lead them to your proposed solution
The aim of asking questions is not to tell them your solution. Your aim is to help them come up with a better solution or to reach the same solution you have worked out. Asking questions is a much more subtle way of challenging your boss.
A couple of questions I might ask if my boss was proposing a set of actions that would be more costly and take longer to reach a stated goal.
- “Have you considered alternative options that use a cheaper simple product than XYZ?”
- “Would it be helpful to get Greg to pop round and discuss this project with you? I thought he managed a similar project last year and delivered it quicker and cheaper than the current plan suggests.”
- “Is there anything stopping us doubling the staff available on step 3 which appears a bottleneck and costs us an extra week?”
Asking questions is a safer way of challenging your boss or giving feedback to your boss than sharing your opinion or making statements.
Provide alternative and options, not problems
If you make statements like “this is not going to work” you are effectively handing a bigger problem to your boss. This is not going to help them or impress them.
You are ten times better off by providing alternatives. “I have spent time thinking through your plan and I have spotted a couple of problems that you may already know about. I have also worked out some alternative actions which avoid these problems. I am really keen to discuss these with you.”
Providing alternatives avoids a right or wrong discussion and it also leaves the power to decide which route to take with your boss. Ensuring your boss has to choose rather than being pushed into a corner reduces the threat of challenging your manager.
Challenge in a safe way at work by providing alternative solutions or options rather than disagreeing without helping.
Seek to raise up, not put down – The fifth safe way to challenge at work
To successfully challenge your boss and for them to listen to you and take in what you are saying, it is vital that you don’t embarrass them, make them look silly, make them feel stupid or any other negative consequence of your action.
Praise in public and criticise in private is another good rule to follow. Wherever you can, choose a private setting to challenge your boss or when giving feedback to your boss. A private setting minimises making them look bad in front of others or highlighting their mistakes. No boss wants to be undermined by their team members.
Do not intentionally put your boss down under any circumstance. Doing so is likely to damage your relationship with them and your job prospects.
Before challenging colleagues or your boss, take a few seconds to check your reason for doing so and make sure your aim is to honestly help them or contribute to a better solution to a current problem.
How to spot valuable ideas to improve team or business performance
Every employee has the opportunity to save time, no matter what you do. Saving time means you can spend more of your time on other tasks, which in turn means you deliver more in the same time and therefore cost. Every business would like to reduce their costs. 7 different ways to save time:
- Stop doing unnecessary or low value tasks
- Understand the why behind what you are being asked to do – you will prioritise, problem solve and organise yourself quicker as a result
- Communicate better so both parties are clear from the start, reducing follow-up questions, delays etc.
- Finish one task before moving on to the next.
- Improve processes to reach the same goal but in less time
- Diplomatically say no more often to low value tasks and requests
- Automate wherever possible – for example small tasks in excel through to larger system based solutions.
And you will be able to find loads more.
What is Valuable to Businesses
Nearly every employee can also find opportunities to reduce costs for an organisation. 5 other more challenging opportunities are:
- Increasing revenue
- Increasing efficiencies
- Improving processes
- Reducing risks
- Pleasing customers
Not everyone will have opportunities to look for improvements in all these categories. Actively look for opportunities and you will find them, even in the best run companies.
Understanding and using financial data is another very useful way to spot opportunities for improvement, to increase business performance. Learn how to read financial data – take a look at our Essential Finance for Managers course.
Challenging others at work in the right way is very beneficial to you, your reputation, and your career. It takes quite a bit of courage to put your head above the parapet and question your boss, managers and even colleagues.
When you ask good questions and challenge in service of helping the team and business, bosses, managers and colleagues start listening. You stand out from the majority that don’t learn this skill. You also get to add a lot more value to the business, because some many follow what is currently been done.
Learn the skills, build your courage and challenge carefully at work.