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What to Do When Your Boss Is Wrong

Featured Author:

Renee Weisman

Renee Weisman, owner of Winning at Work, charted new territory as one of the first woman engineers, managers, executives and working mothers in the male-dominated semiconductor industry. Over her 40 years in education and industry, she learned to make gender differences work for her — and teaches others how to do the same. She is a frequent speaker at corporations and conferences around the US. She teaches classes tailored to enhance women in their careers and to enable male managers to better understand how to capitalize on the differences between men and women in business. She is the author of Winning in a Man’s World, Advice for Women Who Want to Succeed and the Men Who Work with Them.

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More articles from this author:

• 5 Reasons We Love (Or Hate!) Our Jobs
• What To Do When Your Customer Is Wrong
• 35 Tips for Working in Your Workout

We’ve all been there. You’ve been handling a client, solving a problem, preparing a major presentation, planning a critical marketing meeting, and your boss or supervisor disagrees with your approach. The boss tells you how to do it, and you are convinced that it won’t work.

What do you do? Do you cave in and do it his or her way knowing it is going to fail? Do you plunge ahead with your approach, knowing he or she won’t like it?

Neither answer is good for your career or for your business. So, how should a hard-working, talented, and dedicated employee respond?

How you approach this prickly problem has a lot to do with the relationship between you and your supervisor and with your experience base, but there are some basic questions to answer that may help you break the loggerjam. I am assuming in this discussion that there is no harassment issue or other underlying problem and that you both disagree, perhaps strongly, on the right approach.

Question number one: Have I done this before? Is there evidence that would support my position?

Question number two: Is there evidence that supports your boss’s position? If you consulted with other experts in the field (without telling them you are in disagreement with your boss) which approach would they favor?

Question number 3: Can you both be right? Is there some compromise you could make that would take the best of both of your approaches?

After thinking this issue through, you may be more willing to change slightly but what about your boss? Is there a way to get him or her to budge? Yes, if you do it right.