6 Smart Ways to Disagree With Someone Respectfully
What a world it would be if we all agreed on absolutely everything. But, as you already know, that's just not reality.
We all have our own thoughts, opinions, and values -- which means disagreements can be pretty common, especially in the workplace.
However, there's a big difference between just disagreeing and disagreeing respectfully. The first will likely cause hurt feelings and only add fuel to an already tense fire. But, the second? That approach can lead to new ideas and a much more productive discussion.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to get so wrapped up in your own beliefs that all common courtesy goes straight out the window. So, as a friendly reminder, here are six key tips for disagreeing with someone -- respectfully, of course.
1. Focus on Facts
A strong argument is one that uses facts over opinion. But, that can be difficult to remember when you're in the middle of a disagreement.
However, a respectful -- not to mention compelling -- disagreement is one that prioritizes logic over your emotions about the situation. So, don't forget to place your emphasis on the reasoning and information supporting your disagreement.
Not only will that make you much more convincing, but it'll also make it clear that this isn't personal.
2. Don't Get Personal
Speaking of getting personal, it's something you want to avoid at all costs when disagreeing with someone -- particularly in a professional setting.
Obviously, that means you shouldn't put down the other person or attack his or her ideas and beliefs. That's not at all helpful or productive.
Instead, focus on illustrating why you feel the way you do. Remember, your goal is to effectively present your ideas -- not to just poke holes in the other person's.
3. Recognize the Good
Yes, you're disagreeing with this person. But, rarely is a suggestion so bad that you can't find a single nugget of wisdom hidden in there somewhere.
Before launching right in with your argument, it's best if you can preface it with something that you like about that person's original suggestion -- and then use that as a launching point for your own idea.
For example, something like, "I definitely think you're on the right track in saying that we need to improve our customer response time. But, what if we did it this way instead?" shares your idea in a way that's friendly and collaborative -- and not at all accusatory.
4. Remember to Listen
There's a trap that's all too easy to fall into when you find yourself in the middle of a disagreement: Rather than actively listening, you're just sitting there waiting for your chance to respond.
Unfortunately, conversations where you're completely tuning the other person out are never productive. So, remember to actually listen to the points your conversational partner is presenting. You might be surprised -- you could end up finding an even better solution that way.
5. Use "I" Statements
Which one of the following statements sounds more harsh and critical?
"You always come up with these big ideas so close to the deadline that you only make things harder for everybody."
"I see where you're coming from, but I'm concerned we might be getting too close to the deadline for major changes."
Chances are, the first one made you recoil just a little bit. This example is an adequate representation of why it's best to use "I" statements when disagreeing with someone. It's just another subtle way to illustrate that your disagreement isn't a personal attack.
No, effectively disagreeing isn't all about sugarcoating what you're trying to say. But, making even this small effort to soften your language can make a big difference in how your message is received.
Perhaps one of the most important pieces of respectfully disagreeing with someone is knowing when you need to just call it quits and move on.
No, it's not always easy to swallow your pride and walk away -- particularly when you feel strongly about your side. But, sometimes it's the best thing you can do.
Disagreements are inevitable. But, there's definitely a wrong way and a right way to present your own arguments.
Implement these six key tips, and you'll be able to disagree in a way that's effective, professional, and always respectful.
Unlike previous research, it uses empirical evidence rather self-reported data to show that airy, communal spaces do not a buzzing, collaborative environment make.
Ethan Bernstein, an associate professor of organizational behavior, built the research around a real-life renovation at the headquarters of an unnamed Fortune 500 company engaged in a “so-called war on walls.” He had employees wear people analytics badges that track (but do not record) conversations through anonymized sensors, which gave the professor and his co-author data they could compare against changes in online communication. (To minimize the effects of outside factors, their research took snapshots of two three-week periods that fell at that same point in different business quarters, one before walls were banished, and one after.)
In two studies, the researchers found that conversations by email and instant messaging (IM) increased significantly after the office redesign, while productivity declined, and, for most people, face-to-face interaction decreased. Participants in the first study spent 72% less time interacting in person in the open space. Before the renovation, employees had met face to face for nearly 5.8 hours per person over three weeks. In the after picture, the same people held face-to-face conversations for only about 1.7 hours per person.
These employees were emailing and IM-ing much more often, however, sending 56% more email messages to other participants in the study. This is how employees sought the privacy that their cubicle walls once provided, the authors reason. IM messages soared, both in terms of messages sent and total word count, by 67% and 75%, respectively.
The second study compared dyads, or conversational partners, among 100 employees on the same floor of the building. It found that people who sat near each other spoke more to those in their pod of six or eight desks when they were no longer in cubicles. Overall, however, face to face exchanges decreased.
Humans are not like insects
The authors call the social withdraw they captured in data a “natural human response” triggered by a change in environment, but they acknowledge their findings contradict an established theory about collective intelligence. When forced to share space, humans behave much like swarms of insects. This has appeared to be true in a range of contexts, the authors note, citing studies involving the US Congress, college dormitories, co-working spaces, and corporate buildings.
However, as far as we’re aware, hornets and wasps are not as psychologically and socially complex as people. For instance, they do not regularly switch between their front-stage self and back-stage self, managing the impression they’re making, per a longstanding theory about humans.
People are better at rote tasks, rather than creative ones, when we feel we’re on display, and part of our mind is therefore preoccupied by social pressures, Harvard’s Bernstein has suggested. Knowing that others are watching us limits the degree to which we might creatively solve a problem, and therefore be more productive, according to a study he conducted with factory workers. “Do I look busy?” becomes more important than “Am I doing my best work?”
Importantly, the new study also found that when spatial boundaries disappeared, employees didn’t simply take their usual in-person exchanges online. Rather, they began emailing more with some people and communicating less with others. In other words, an open office can reconfigure employee networks, which obviously can change the way teams work.
Social media versus social offices
Bernstein believes the new study reinforces an existing argument that says intermittent social interactions, rather than constant ones, optimize our ability to work out complex problems. Spatial boundaries, he writes, help people “make sense of their environment by modularizing it, clarifying who is watching and who is not, who has information and who does not, who belongs and who does not, who controls what and who does not, to whom one answers and to whom one does not.”
Keeping an eye on all of these things in a sprawling, open space can lead to overload, distraction, and poorer decisions.
It’s perhaps a bit strange we haven’t adapted better to this, in an age that has many of us openly sharing vast portions of our lives on social media. But as Bernstein once told workplace strategy consultant Leigh Stringer, in an interview on her website, “We want people to follow us online, but not necessarily motion-by-motion in the office.”
To figure out whether or not you really want to meet a goal you’re not meeting, clear fifteen minutes a day in your calendar. Tell yourself one very small thing you can do in that fifteen minutes to move toward meeting that goal. And see if you do it.
Why this tactics works:
1. You can’t meet big goals without breaking them down. A to-do list works best if it’s full of specific, manageable things you can do to move one, small step toward the very big goal. After breaking down the goal into items on a to-do list, you notice that worthy goals require sustained focus over a very long time.
2. Self-discipline is what creates change. And self-discipline snowballs. For example, people who write lists end up using lists, and people who use lists get more done. But also, if you balance a book on your head for ten minutes a day, you are more likely to do pushups for ten minutes a day. Because self-discipline begets self-discipline — even if it’s something silly.
3. People don’t want to accomplish the goals they set and don’t meet. I set aside fifteen minutes every day for a week and did nothing. Each day I told myself to do something different with the fifteen minutes. And each day I did not do the something different. So I decided I’m revealing to myself my true goal: to be depressed.
So I laid on the sofa with the dog for 15 minutes a day. And remember the part I told you about snowballing? Well that snowballed into two hours. That’s about as long as I can be in the mode of sleeping on the sofa in the middle of the day before the kids start to worry I’ve lost my ability to function.
I wonder if other people’s kids would start to wonder much earlier. I wonder if maybe it’s a litmus test of one’s parenting to see how long you can sleep on the sofa in the middle of the day before the kids think something is wrong.
Wait. An aside: if my kids look back on these posts and think I was a bad parent, they should know that I do understand that the purpose of parenting is love. To the future daughter-in-law, twenty years in the future, who is telling my son that his mother fucked him up and she is not coming to Passover anymore because of family dysfunction: this is a record to show I understood what my job was and I did it. And also, wait until you have kids and see how hard it is to express love in a way that is not overbearing.
One of the ways I learned how to see the goal I’m not meeting is by coaching so many people who want help with the goal they are not meeting. Which is, like, almost everyone.
Probably the most common goal not being met is career advancement. Many people think their careers should be advancing no matter what. But in most cases the person doesn’t really care if their career advances, they just think they should care.
The other way I learn how to see the goal I’m not meeting is to look at people who are not meeting the goal I want them to meet. Tonight that is Melissa.
Then I moved to Swarthmore and she stopped doing it. She told me to use all the pictures she edited that I didn’t use. But I do not view this as a tongue-to-tail thing where we are eating the whole cow before we butcher a new one. I view this as a one-pancake-left thing where it doesn’t feel good to eat when you know you’re taking the only one that’s left. People like a choice of pancakes. That’s why restaurants serve a stack.
But the real problem is I don’t want to look at all the pictures of our life at the farm. I get sad every time, and then I never write. So I don’t care that there are a lot of photos I did’t use.
At first I was pissed that Melissa isn’t hearing how upset I’ve been. But the goals I set for Melissa should not be goals if she’s not meeting them. Just like the goals I set for myself should not be goals if I’m not meeting them.
So I am posting all the pictures of our move from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania. I had no idea we would never go back to the farm. I feel ill and anxious every time I look at these pictures. I want the whole day out of the photo queue. So I’m putting it on the blog. I’m taking steps to meet my goal. This is the way I can move forward.
Melissa will tell you these pictures are evidence that she is right and there are plenty of pictures for me to choose from. But I see it as evidence that O’Hare is a patchwork of memorable ceilings that all make me sad.
And what is this picture? Even if you can’t identify this as the floor in Terminal C, you can identify this as the face of a dog that portends ominous doom.
If only I had paid more attention to the dog.
But really what would I have done differently? Probably nothing. I’m not the type to second-guess my decisions. One of the only times that still happens is when I flip through photos to add to my post. Now there are no more photos that makes me sad waiting in the queue. I used them all right here.
It’s my small specific step to move forward. And I’m taking action, because not being sad about what we lost when we moved is a goal that’s important to me. All the other goals; I guess I don’t want them as much I want this.
True story: I once walked headfirst into a pole on my way home from work. I can't blame the darkness (the sun had only just begun to set), and I can't blame my vision (I'd recently gotten new glasses).
True story: I once walked headfirst into a pole on my way home from work.
I can't blame the darkness (the sun had only just begun to set), and I can't blame my vision (I'd recently gotten new glasses). But I can blame my iPhone, whose vibration had lured me into staring at its crisp bright screen. The text I was responding to was not worth the heart-shaped bruise that I shamefully covered in makeup the next day.
Until my ridiculous injury, I had laughed at stories about the dangers of "walking while texting." I'd eye-rolled at reports of painful "iPhone neck" from leaning over tiny screens. And I'd never taken the idea of social media addiction seriously.
So I did some digging: I pored over scientific studies and talked to researchers who specialize in psychology, sociology, addiction, and statistics. A few experts were emphatic that social media addiction is real and should be added to the DSM IV, long considered the diagnostic bible for psychologists. Others hedged their bets and said more studies were needed.
But the conclusion I gathered was the opposite of what I've been hearing in the news. Social media and smartphones are not ruining our brains, nor will either become the downfall of a generation.
The vast majority of the large and well-designed statistical studies on smartphones and the brain actually suggest these technologies are having little to no effect on our health and well-being. And in some cases, the availability of social media and phones may be a power for good.
'The lowest quality of evidence you could give that people wouldn't laugh you out of the room'
That's because most existing studies on social media's effects suffer from the same problems that have plagued the social science field for decades.
For one thing, many of the studies are too small to carry a lot of statistical power, Przybylski said. Researchers also often go into a study with an agenda or hypothesis that they hope their study will support.
Przybylski has attempted to replicate some of the studies that suggested there's a strong tie between social media use and depression. When he used larger sets of people in a more well-controlled environment, he failed to find the same results. Instead, he's foundeither no link or a very, very small one.
"People are making expansive claims about the link between well-being and tech use, but if this was displayed on a Venn diagram, the circles would overlap one quarter of one percent," Przybylski said. "It is literally the lowest quality of evidence that you could give that people wouldn't laugh you out of the room."
Last year, Przybylski co-authored a study published in the journal Psychological Sciencein which he examined the effect of screen-time on a sample of more than 120,000 British adolescents. The researchers asked teens how much time they spent streaming, gaming, and using their smartphones and computers. After running the data through a series of statistical analyses, it became clear to Przybylski that screen-time isn't harmful for the vast majority of teens. In fact, it's sometimes helpful — especially when teens are using it for two to four hours per day.
"Overall, the evidence indicated that moderate use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and may be advantageous in a connected world," Przybylski wrote in the paper.
Even when it came to those positive results, however, Przybylski said the significance of the effects they observed was tiny.
"If you're a parent and you have limited resources, the question becomes: which hill are you going to die on? Where do you want to put your limited resources? Do you want to put it into making sure your kid has breakfast or gets a full night's sleep? Because for those activities the effects are three times larger than they would be for screen-time," Przybylski said.
Once you see a few examples of phone-obsessed behavior — a whole family staring silently at their phones while eating a restaurant, say — you tend to notice it more wherever you go.
This may be partially a result of the phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Essentially, you see one event that supports an idea you already have, then because you are hyper-aware of these types of activities, you find more examples that appear to confirm that idea.
It's a bit like when you begin shopping for a certain kind of car — a Honda Civic, let's say — then suddenly notice that everyone appears to be driving a Honda Civic. In reality, that model hasn't gotten more popular overnight; you're simply primed to notice them.
"A lot of the research is bound up in these problems," Przybylski said. "Our concerns or panic about a new thing" — in this case, social media — "guide how we do the research and interpret the results."
Distorted, negative viewpoints have likely influenced the research on a host of new inventions and activities throughout history.
Unfortunately, paying attention exclusively to social harms makes us blind to the ways a new technology may be help us. In the case of social media, such biases can take attention away from other more serious problems.
"It's important to think about all the things we're not talking about here. We don't talk about things like privacy, advertisements, who owns your data, and all this stuff that's actually important. So actually it serves the interest of larger companies to be debating things like screen time and usage. When you bring it all together you have a big dog and pony show," Przybylski said.
Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California Irvine, specializes in studying new technologies and adolescent development. She told Business Insider that social media may be having some positive effects on teens and young adults, but many people are not paying attention to that research.
"The digital world hasn't created a new species of children. Many of the things that attract them to things about social media are the same things that attract them to other activities," Odgers said. "There are a lot of good things that are happening with social media use today and there's been a really negative narrative about it."
A large review of 36 studies published in the journal Adolescent Research Reviewconcluded that instead of feeling hampered by their screens, teens are chiefly using digital communication to deepen and strengthen existing in-person relationships. The authors concluded that young adults find it easier to display affection, share intimacy, and even organize events and meet-ups online.
Similarly, the authors of a 2017 review of literature on social media and screen time published by UNICEF concluded that "digital technology seems to be beneficial for children's social relationships" and that most young people are using it to "enhance their existing relationships and stay in touch with friends."
Kids who struggle to make friends in person may even use digital tools to "compensate for this and build positive relationships," they said. A small 2018 study of British teens in foster care supports that idea — it suggested that social media helped young people maintain healthy relationships with their birth parents, make new friends, and ease the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Other research, including a small 2017 study of Instagram users aged 18-55, suggests that teens also turn to platforms like Instagram as a means of exploring the world and dreaming up potential adventures — a category of people the researchers classified as "feature lovers."
"Feature lovers want to see something that's exotic or unique; they're looking at Instagram and they're thinking, 'take me to China or Alaska or some place I can't afford to go,'" T.J. Thomson, the lead author of the study, told Business Insider.
You're probably not 'addicted' to Facebook or Instagram
Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty
The researchers behind these studies emphasized that social media and smartphones are not so much an "addiction" as a novel, attention-grabbing platform for enhancing existing activities and relationships.
In other words, social media has similar impacts on the brain as lots of other types of activity — too much or too little can be linked with negative impacts, while moderate use can have positive results.
"Claims that the brain might be hijacked or re-wired by digital technology are not supported by neuroscience evidence and should be treated with skepticism," the authors of the UNICEF review wrote.
Addiction is a complicated but serious problem that neuroscientists have yet to fully understand. It typically stems from a cache of interconnected factors that include our environment and our genes. As a result, classifying our nearly-universal reliance on digital tools as an "addiction" simply isn't fair to the people whose lives have been torn apart by things like alcoholism or drug use.
A chief characterizing factor of addictive behavior is that use of a given substance interferes with daily activity so much that people can't function normally. Studies suggest that social media, by contrast, is often used to enhance existing relationships, and does not decrease real-world interactions or cause uniform harm.
Research does indicate, however, that people who may already be predisposed to depression and anxiety could suffer more as a result of using these types of "compare-and-despair" platforms.
"People who use social media alone likely aren't getting their face-to-face social needs met," Michael Kearney, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. "So if they're not having their social needs met in their life outside of social media, it makes sense that looking at social media might make them feel even lonelier."
There are plenty of simple, healthy ways to address these risks without resorting to harsh measures like breaking up with your smartphone. I, for one, no longer text when I walk.
“There’s a huge degree of overlap between what executives want and what workers want,” Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield said at the 2018 Wharton People Analytics conference in Philadelphia.
“There’s a huge degree of overlap between what executives want and what workers want,” Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield said at the 2018 Wharton People Analytics conference in Philadelphia. Knowledge workers, in particular, share a common vision for how they’d like to work: “People want to move quickly and feel engaged,” he explained. “To operate in alignment and have the autonomy to make decisions.”
In a keynote conversation with Professor Mae McDonnell, an expert on organizational design and a professor of management at the Wharton School, Butterfield discussed how his responsibilities as a CEO have led him to explore the wider factors that often leave people feeling disaffected, disenfranchised, or alienated at work.
Everyone, he contends, is looking for the same foundations to their working life. They want to be trusted, and to be able to trust the people they work with. They would like to be respected, and work with people they respect. They want to have clarity around the goals and priorities, and to understand how the outcomes will be evaluated. To the extent these conditions are absent, they will become unhappy because, in addition to these prerequisites for healthy work, they also want to feel effective, productive, and like they are having an impact.
Tools alone won’t fix issues inherent to an organization’s culture or team dynamics, but they can be helpful to leaders in shedding light on common breakdowns and pitfalls, and they can spark ideas for how people can work together more efficiently and achieve more meaningful results.
You can watch the full session below, but here’s a look at a few key takeaways from Butterfield and McDonnell’s conversation.
Professor Mae McDonnell: Can you talk about how Slack fits in with the shifting nature of work and articulate its value?
Stewart Butterfield: The simplest articulation is that it replaces email inside your company. But there’s more to it than that. Email isn’t just a series of messages typed in boxes, stacked on top of one another.
Most of the information in your inbox is composed by machines: There are receipts from purchases, password reset links, newsletters you’ve subscribed to, notifications about new comments or updates on documents — it’s actually a window into all the work that’s happening throughout an organization. It’s where contracts are negotiated. It’s a file storage system. It serves a bunch of roles, none of which are particularly suited to the medium.
Slack is a collaboration hub across the company. Messages and conversations are organized into channels, which can be broken up by broad functional groups and projects. There can be channels for teams, projects and goals, office locations.
By their very nature, channels increase transparency — and I like to say that with a big asterisk, because transparency is often defined, in the business context, as bosses and leaders being more forthcoming. In this case, we literally define transparency as the opposite of opacity: People can actually see what’s going on in different departments and working groups in a way they couldn’t with email, because emails are addressed to individuals, or mainly received individually.
Take the process of closing a deal as an example. It’s incredibly complex and involves a lot of participants, from sales to legal to engineering. When I wanted an update on how work with Oracle was coming along, which is one of our biggest accounts, I didn’t have to ask anyone. I just went into the dedicated #accounts-oraclechannel and I could see everything that’s been happening.
Channels have opened my eyes to the importance of alignment and clarity for people. Now someone in engineering who may not be involved with the account on a daily basis, but might be working on a feature that’s blocking a customer deployment, can go into a channel and get context behind requests and understand the potential impact of their actions. They’re not just getting a message into their inbox, dropped from the top.
MM: So, to riff on this idea of access to information being important for employees to learn and navigate complex situations, how does Slack mitigate the risk of information overload?
SB: I would say it attenuates the effects more than mitigates the risk. The nature of an organization is that it produces a lot of information. Depending on the organization’s size, the volume of information can increase by orders of magnitude — from 10 to 100 to 100,000 times more. But you don’t have to read all of it. It’s not being pumped into an inbox. With Slack, you have choice. There are channels you can elect to join or view as you see fit. We give people tools, like notification settings and comprehensive controls, so they manage what they need to see.
We’re also working deeply on search, not just in terms of the retrieval of documents, files, and messages that you already know exist. We also look at search in terms of searching for topics that you’re interested in and surfacing people who might be experts in those areas within the company, then pointing you towards the channels where they’re having those conversations. There’s a lot we can do by having this really large corpus of information to draw from.
To the extent that we are able to offload those capabilities that computers are so good at, and that human beings are fundamentally lousy at — like comparing a hundred million things all at once and finding things that are similar or remembering everything perfectly forever — we’re all better off.
MM: What do you think is Slack’s role in enabling corporate culture?
SB: I think Slack is a very powerful instrument for affecting the kind of change that leaders across the organization, not just executives, want to see happen. Because of the increase in transparency, the anti-pattern of management — which is “I withhold information as a means of exercising power or control in the organization” — becomes more and more difficult.
Imagine there’s something big happening: There’s an acquisition, a change in suppliers or organizational design. What you want in those kinds of cases is a higher degree of alignment, more clarity. If people have questions, you don’t want there to be a lot of uncertainty. You want people to hesitate less while taking more effective actions. So you want decision-making to be enabled at all levels and for people to feel empowered and autonomous.
In that sense, Slack is a very effective way to get people the information that they need, but it’s also an effective place to put information so that the right people and decision makers can participate.
I hope that the net impact for organizations that move from email as their primary means of communication to Slack is that, whatever the cultural goals or aims that they have, they’re easier to achieve as a result of using our product.
MM: What are some of the ways AI and machine learning will empower workers in the future versus extinguishing their jobs?
SB: There was a time when “calculator” was both a job title and a computer. Benedict Evans, an investor in the Bay Area, wrote this essay where he has a couple of stills from the 1960s movie The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.
Jack Lemmon’s character works at an insurance company, and he has an electromagnetic adding machine on his desk and a typewriter, and there are all these people pushing carts and handing him sheaves of papers. He literally reads over data, does some calculation, types up the results, then hands it off to someone else. The whole floor operates like a worksheet. And what is he? He’s a cell on a spreadsheet.
Nowadays, insurance companies probably employ just as many people, but once you give them actual spreadsheets, they can do a lot more things: Financial planning and analysis becomes a subdiscipline. You can do all this kind of sensitivity analysis with the modeling that wasn’t possible before.
Similarly, I remember when it became mandatory to start buying calculators and bringing them to math class, when before that we were focused on long division to solve complex math problems. But suddenly we could do trigonometry on our calculators and we could move up the stack in terms of the kinds of calculations that we were performing and the kind of math we were expected to do. I think we’ll see much more of that.
