Metadata
- Author: anastasija
- Full Title: How to Give Pushback to Leadership
- Category:#articles
- Document Note: Простые и дельные рекомендации - как говорить “нет” руководству.
- Document Tags: leaddev LeadDev Outline
- Summary: Pushing back against leadership is sometimes necessary to protect a project’s success. It’s important to choose your battles wisely and communicate your concerns clearly and respectfully. If you do face rejection, accept it gracefully, as it shows you were engaged and aware of potential issues.
- URL: https://leaddev.com/communication/how-give-pushback-leadership
Highlights
-
Before pushing back, you should ask yourself what would happen if you did try to make it work. If the answer is “the code would be a bit awkward,” or “we’d have to do more maintenance work later on,” you’re probably better off communicating that and proceeding with the project. (View Highlight)
-
If you’re a technical professional, pushing back on things that are impossible or prohibitively hard is an important part of your job. Saying yes to everything neglects that duty. Agreeing to do the impossible will make your leadership happy in the short term, but they’ll be much less happy when you fail to deliver. (View Highlight)
-
Do your research first If you’ve decided you need to push back, you must first find out who you’re pushing back against. Often, you can directly ask your manager where a specific problematic requirement is coming from. Is it your direct manager or product manager’s plan, or the strategy of a department, or a hard legal requirement, or your CEO’s idea? All of these require different approaches and different levels of effort. (View Highlight)
-
Write out your pushback assuming it’ll be read by managers who are a layer or two more senior than your direct manager. That means documenting your ideas concisely, with less technical detail, and as neutral and unemotional as possible. Think of it as: it’s not me against you; it’s us against the problem. The worst thing you can do is paint management out as the enemy and yourself as the hero blocking a bad decision. (View Highlight)
-
It’s very important to provide multiple alternatives. Giving just one alternative can come across as if you’re telling your leadership team what to do. However, it’s also important to mention which option you’d prefer, since often your leadership team will want to make their decision quickly and keep moving. Nobody likes hearing “We can’t do X” and having to figure out what that means on the spot. It’s much better to say, “We can’t do X, and that means we can instead do Y or Z – I recommend Y.” (View Highlight)
-
Managers usually have enough experience with projects to know that something always goes wrong. If they don’t hear any problems from their senior engineers, they can get suspicious that nobody’s paying enough attention. (View Highlight)
📂 Articles | Последнее изменение: 28.01.2025 18:44