422 | How to disagree with senior leaders without being confrontational
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Why do we stay silent when senior leaders say something wrong?
You're in a meeting, a senior leader says something that you know is incorrect, but the thought of disagreeing with them or telling them that they're wrong makes you feel super anxious, so you decide not to say anything. Then someone else in the room raises the issue and gets credit for it, and you leave the meeting wishing that you had the courage to bring it up. If you've experienced Experienced this situation, today's episode is for you. Today I'm going to teach you a simple way to disagree with senior leaders without coming off as adversarial or confrontational. This is going to help you bring your full voice and your full expertise into those rooms so you can get credit for the leadership that you bring.
By the way, if you're new here, Welcome. I'm Jess. I'm a prior McKinsey consultant and a current New York Times featured podcast host. I'm a leadership and executive coach for professional women, and I am here to help you build confidence and find your voice as a leader. One of the best ways to thrive and get ahead in the corporate world is to know how to disagree in a way that. It somehow doesn't feel like disagreement to the other person. I'm going to teach you how to do this using a framework that I call the Tater Framework. Tater stands for T-A-T-R, pronounced Tater as in tater tot so that it's easy for you to remember. This is a framework for disagreeing in a way that feels collaborative. The T-A-T-R in the Tater framework.
Framework stands for thought process, agreement, trade-off, recommendation. And I'm going to teach it to you step by step using a fictional work scenario. So here's what I want you to imagine. I want you to imagine that you work in HR and your company is in process of adding new HR software. Now let's say you're In a cross-functional meeting where everybody's talking about this new software, and a senior leader in the meeting shares a suggestion that you know is a bad idea. They say something like, Hey, what about this other software? It looks a lot less expensive than the one that we're using. Why don't we switch to that one? Now you know that this less expensive software. might look better on the surface, but behind the scenes, these cheaper softwares end up being more expensive because they lack the features that you need and they require lots of manual work.
Now, in a situation like that, if you were to jump out and disagree with the senior level stakeholder and say something like, That's a bad idea. The software seems cheaper on the surface, but once we roll it out, it's actually going to be more expensive. There's a good chance that the stakeholder might get defensive or might feel frustrated. As humans, even when we're wrong, we don't like to be told. That we're wrong. And this is the tricky thing about speaking up in corporate. Sometimes you have to tell senior leaders that they're wrong in order for you to show up effectively as a leader, but you can't make them feel like you're telling them that they're wrong. And that's what the Tater framework solves.
So the FERS part of the Tater framework, the first T stands for thought process. As soon as your stakeholder shares the incorrect suggestion, you want to invite them to hear your thought process. So you would say something like, I'd love to walk you through my thought process, or I'd love to pause on that and share some of my thoughts. This is called framing. Framing is just where you tell everyone what you're about to say before you start speaking. speaking. It's a great way of getting the floor and getting everyone to listen to you. And it also helps your audience have context for what it is you're about to share. Then you get to the meat of the Tater framework, which is the A, which stands for agree.
You're going to ask yourself. Where do I genuinely agree with the stakeholder? And you are going to lead by talking about what you agree with them on. So, for example, you might say something like: Our main priority right now is to get this new software rolled out quickly and to minimize the costs that we incur.
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2 chaptersSpeakers
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