Mike-O-Matic

Excellent (and well-timed) post at Mr. Angry’s blog today.  Titled When is Workplace Discretion the Better Part of Valour, it describes some ways of handling prickly situations at work in which you need to stand up against a particular proposal without becoming a corporate casualty.

Although Mr. Angry describes situations where it doesn’t work so well, I really liked his former manager’s advice:

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong unless you can tell me what’s right.”

“Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.” 

This is advice I always try to follow in my own working life, because I find it gives me added credibility and lets me frame things in a more positive light.  You can say things like “your solution has some merit, Rufus, but I think we can take it a little further still.  How about…”

One of the bigger challenges I have seen when it comes to these types of situations is that quite often the organization is structured in a way that the people who would raise objections are never actually put in a position to say anything.  Decisionmaking happens behind closed doors or above a particular point in the management tree, and by the time people are told to implement the bad solution, they don’t have any effective recourse.  They may be able to push back to their immediate manager, but their manager would need to then push back even higher up, and that isn’t always feasible.  Attempting to circumvent the structure can land you in deep water as well, since your boss might not enjoy you talking to their boss.

It is unfortunate that organizations can be dysfunctional by design, but it does happen.

Til next time.

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