# Workplace Surgery: Disagreeing with your boss in a meeting - **Episode:** [123](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/123.md) (2024-08-27) - **Type:** workplace-surgery - **Tags:** workplace-surgery, disagreeing, boss, meeting, communication - **Time:** 29:37–35:01 (start 1777s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/123?t=1777](https://truthliesandwork.com/123?t=1777) --- [29:37] Leanne Elliott: Yes [29:37] Al Elliott: Okay, so this person writes, how do you handle disagreeing with your boss in a meeting? I've got some strong opinions, but I'm not sure if it's okay to speak up or if I should just nod along and keep my thoughts to myself. I don't want to come across as confrontational or worse, jeopardise my relationship with my boss. So would it be better to bring up my thoughts after the meeting, or should I try and handle it right there in the moment? Am I being weak by not bringing them up? Am I being a bit defensive and strong by trying to muscle in on the meeting? Leanne, this sounds like a bit of a tough one [30:09] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, this is a really tricky one, isn't it? Because you don't want to be disrespectful to your manager, and you don't want to potentially do anything that's going to have negative repercussions on you. I think the key here, my first thought would be to go to your manager one-to-one and just have a general conversation around it, that when you're— I'm in a meeting, if there's something that I disagree with, how do you want me to constructively challenge that idea, politely challenge that idea, and then provide an example. So for example, you said this in the meeting yesterday, I actually thought this was a better approach, this was why. In the future, how would you like me to approach that type of constructive feedback? and see how your manager reacts. Hopefully you've got a great manager who's going to be really open to that. If you don't have a great manager, then you might have to prepare yourself that, that there'll be a bit of defensiveness about that. But I think as long as you're very polite, very constructive, um, go with an example, hopefully your manager will respond in, in a positive way. If you do have a great manager, um, or indeed a great team that you get on with, one thing that can be really helpful for teams is to agree these expectations, agree these behaviors. How do we constructively challenge each other if we disagree? How do we question an idea to dig deeper and find a more refined solution? And it's questions like that that you'll ask and answer as part of an exercise to create a team charter. And that can seem a really formal way of dealing with what should be quite an organic human interaction experience. But actually, it's understanding those rules and expectations that It means that we can be our authentic selves. We know how to respond in a situation where we think something's not right. And over time, allows us to really embed those desirable behaviors so they will become more organic, they will become natural. And that's culture. Because as we know, the definition of culture, our favorite definition of culture, is it's defined by the worst behaviors tolerated. Right now, the behavior that's tolerated is you being silent. Because you're not being given a framework to talk about how to disagree constructively in that type of environment. If you're silenced, you're going to suppress your opinions. That's going to mask some of the thoughts that you have, potentially mean that you don't bring your full authentic self to work. You're going to lack that sense of belonging over time, and you could disengage and leave the company. So, something really simple is, if there's any managers listening, something really simple in terms of agreeing how do we constructively challenge each other can actually prevent a whole domino effect of potential future disengagement. So, that would be my thoughts. Have that one-to-one conversation first. I wouldn't suggest that you challenge your manager in the meeting initially. I would go to them with that and see what they say. And, If you don't feel comfortable going to your manager one-to-one, if you really don't have that relationship, maybe just get a couple of your colleagues together and say, how do you think we should, um, we should do this if we, we disagree with each other? Just starting the conversation about how that, that should be done would, would be a good start. But my thought would be is if you can have that conversation with your manager first of all, that would be the best place to start [33:26] Al Elliott: Brilliant as always. Um, there's also something which— a phrase which I would have thought 2 years ago before I started doing this Leanne, uh, that it was a bit of a faff word, a bit of a buzzword, but now I've learned that it actually means something. Psychological safety. Um, if you feel like you can't, you can't speak up and disagree, then that means, generally speaking, that you're— you haven't got the psychological safety in your workplace. Um, which might be fine if all you're doing is pushing emails between each other, or perhaps doing a little bit of creative or something, but it would be really serious if you were in, say, medicine [33:58] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [33:59] Al Elliott: Because then if you disagreed with your boss about a treatment plan, for example, and you didn't feel like you could say anything, that could potentially be quite dangerous. So obviously we don't know what, what area or what type of business you're in, but the fact is that if you've not got the psychological safety to, to say that you disagree with something, then it could be much more than just a team charter. The team charter could probably help massively, but it sounds like it might be a little bit more endemic than that, and it might be time to, to think a bit more about that phrase psychological safety. Yeah [34:30] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, I think at this point it's, it's not knowing, isn't it? It might be that you have this conversation with a manager and you find out, you realize you do have psychological safety. But these things are intentional. And it's the same for any manager listening, thinking, of course people have psychological safety, they know that they can tell me anything. Do you actively encourage them to do that? Do you give them a framework to do that? Do you give them a platform to do that? Without that intentionality, sometimes people don't know they've got psychological safety. And, and by not knowing they have it, Effectively, they don't have it. So yeah, good point on that, Al [34:59] Al Elliott: Are you ready for question number 3, Leanne?