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Advising someone is a slightly different skill from taking advice from someone, and those are both slightly different skills from building consensus among equal
by tbrownaw 4y ago
Advising someone is a slightly different skill from taking advice from someone, and those are both slightly different skills from building consensus among equals.
Hierarchies have different lines between "things I can change" and "things I can't change" for different positions. Arguing with your boss over something that's in their "things I can't change" bucket is maybe not so useful.
> If you're in a position of power, it's your responsibility to make sure that people working with you don't need special skills to disagree with you or with other people on the team!
Or alternatively, to make sure they have opportunities to acquire those skills.
- a_puppy 4y ago> Or alternatively, to make sure they have opportunities to acquire those skills. I think it depends what level of interpersonal skills we're talking about. If we're talking about baseline interpersonal skills like "being polite" and "understanding the other person's position before disagreeing with it", then I agree it's appropriate to hold the less-powerful person responsible for acquiring those skills. But some of the tips in this article are more advanced, next-level skills that can be difficult to develop. And even with these skills, there's no guarantee of success if the more-powerful person is too egotistical. A failure mode I've seen is that the less-powerful person is actually being polite and reasonable, but the more-powerful person's manager doesn't want to hold them accountable for their egotism, so the manager says the less-powerful person needs to work on their interpersonal skills instead. (Related: https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/ https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/)