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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

These articles make it sound like people waste many hours creating cases for disagreeing with someone with more role power than you.

It's really not that difficult to show the right amount of candor while being objective about the disagreement.

This doesn't have to be a game of chess where you overanalyze your every move. People will respect the fact you said something that might be the elephant in the room anyway.

The challenge is that these articles assume that you're working with vindictive egotists, and there's plenty of those in corporate America.

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It's not that difficult if you've already developed the right instincts for how to do it. But many people haven't! They're immigrants who aren't quite familiar with American business norms, or they're neurodivergent and need guidelines for how to calibrate their candor, or maybe they just grew up in a strict household where their dad taught them to always defer to authority. If I'd read something like this it might have helped me skip a few unfortunate learning incidents early in my career.

Even worse, it normalizes being a vindictive egotist. People need to be grown up about feedback especially if they're in powerful positions. Not ok to be offended.

Absolutely. The difference of a leader and a manager here is responding to disagreements.

My comment ITT is about our own ability to raise or lower the emotional stakes in a conversation.

I don't have a naturally high EQ, I have to exercise it and constantly reflect. I'm middle-aged (I worked solo in my first career).

If I can reach 40 and still be learning social skills, maybe others here also could get better at:

> It's really not that difficult to show the right amount of candor while being objective

I'm pretty sure the target audience is people in toxic organizations and situations. Otherwise you wouldn't need advice and don't need to read something like this. I didn't need advice like this then suddenly after some turnover found my self in a situation where I was dealing with people that created this situation

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