How (and how not) to disagree with your manager

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

It’s an inevitable situation: you have your heart set on some piece of work and your manager tells you it’s deprioritized.

Or you discover that your manager has decided that your team should shrink so another team can grow. Maybe your manager is just telling you that they don’t agree that you should promote one of your team members this cycle, or that you can’t promote as many people as you want to. 

Whatever the decision, disagreements with your manager are bound to happen. When they do, it can be very stressful. It’s tempting to just tell yourself that you can’t fight the boss and give up, saving yourself the trouble.

There are times when that is the right call. But most good managers don’t just want you to shut up and fall in line every time they ask for something you don’t agree with. The trick is figuring out the most productive way to handle that disagreement to drive the best outcome, without creating unnecessary strife between you and your manager.

Step One: Determine whether your manager is the decider or the messenger

The first thing you need to figure out is whether this decision was actually made by your manager, and whether they could change it or not if they wanted. 

If you are trying to promote half of your team and your manager tells you that you can only promote two people, it may be that they have a limit imposed by their boss (in fact, it probably is). 

This is often the case with decisions related to policy. If the company decides to push for a return to the office, it’s unlikely that your manager can change that decision, even if they wanted to. 

Your boss may have some power to interpret these policies, and some discretion in how they are implemented. In the case of a 5% layoff, for example, your boss probably has some ability to direct where the cuts should come from.

It doesn’t hurt to advocate for your team in these cases, but pay attention to the cues that might tell you when to stop arguing and fall in line. These are sometimes as direct as your manager telling you that the decision has been made, to a more subtle redirection when the topic comes up, or giving you non-answers to your questions and arguments. 

Don’t waste your energy fighting your manager when they couldn’t change the outcome even if they wanted to.

Step Two: Try to understand the reasoning

When you’ve decided that it’s at least possible for your boss to change their mind, you should make sure that you understand the decision in the first place. When your boss changes your roadmap, it is rarely for no reason at all. Every time I have pushed for roadmap changes on my teams, it has been the result of one (or more) of the following:

1. The team has not been successfully executing against their commitments and the stakeholders/customers are so unhappy that we need to show a change that addresses their concerns.
2. The business conditions have changed and the current roadmap no longer reflects the most pressing concerns; the growth we thought we needed to handle isn’t coming, or the value of the current projects is less than the predicted value of a different investment, or there is immediate need to support delivery on a higher-priority workstream and this team could be part of that.
3. Similar to #1, the team has major reliability issues that are not being fixed, and I have lost patience with promises that the fixes are coming and want to redirect to focus on these issues.
4. Occasionally, this happens because I have just become the manager of an area and, having reviewed the current roadmaps, I think they do not reflect the right investment areas and need to be adjusted

With the exception of #4, managers don’t usually change roadmaps out of the blue. There are almost always reasons for the change. Sometimes those reasons are actually a case of the manager as messenger. They may simply be reflecting what the CEO, head of product, or other decision-maker has communicated to them: that the team needs to change focus, or else risk being reorganized or eliminated. 

Take time to ask questions and understand their reasoning before arguing to change the decision.

Step Three: Negotiate

It is important to figure out what is driving this decision, because you have more power than you probably realize. Most senior managers don’t want to change the work plans for teams out of the blue and over the objections of the team’s manager – it’s a huge pain to force a decision onto an unwilling team. 

If you don’t agree with the direction and share this with the team, the risk of fallout can be anything from the team dragging their feet, to not changing drastically enough, or even people quitting.

This means that you can probably ask for something in return in order to smooth things along, and understanding the reasons behind the decision will help you know what to ask for. Instead of fighting your manager, or giving in to them completely, you can choose to make the most of this situation. This is the time to negotiate.

Is there anything you think would make this change easier on the team? Perhaps your manager would be willing to give you a short period of time to close out an immediate deliverable before pivoting to the new work. Or maybe you can scope the new roadmap to be more appealing to your team. 

You are likely to get something in return for making this easy on your manager, so think about what you could ask for that would improve the outcomes for your organization.

• If your team isn’t executing well, maybe you need more people, or you need to have fewer items on your todo list.
• If the business needs to change investments, is there anything salvageable in the current roadmap? How can we best hype up the new work to the team so they are excited about the opportunity to contribute to the new important initiative?
• If you’re struggling with reliability issues, maybe you need to bring in some specific reliability experts to help your team execute better. 
• If the manager is new and trying to rebalance investments, make sure you have given them all the data on the value of the current investments, and use this as a chance to get to know them better and learn what they look for in a team. You may realize that this manager values quick wins over long-running big bets, and by reprioritizing work, you can satisfy them without completely killing the roadmap.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, remember that your manager is probably not making this huge change on a whim. Pick your battles, negotiate, and see how you can make this a win for both of you.