 Learning safe ways to challenge at work can be career defining. Whatever your position, companies want and need for all of their employees to help improve what the company delivers. When you are an employee with good ideas and the courage to share them without upper setting managers and colleagues, you gain respect, appreciation, job security and likely future promotions. Even the most insecure and ungrateful managers want to have better solutions to current problems. How you share your ideas and solutions is the difference between being loved or hated by your boss. One of the secrets to stand out at work is not to play it safe and stay silent. Learn five safe ways to challenge at work and give feedback to your boss. Firstly, challenge in service of achieving business goals. Second, avoid being right. Third, ask questions to provoke thinking. Fourth, provide alternatives and options, not problems. And fifth, seek to raise up, not put down. Implement each of these and how to stand out at work, challenging your boss and giving feedback to your manager all become a lot less scary. Towards the end I touch on a couple of important ways anyone at work can produce good and valuable ideas to improve what the company does. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here, enhance our training shares, people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as a video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first safe way to challenge at work is to challenge in service of achieving business goals. When you make your active challenge about helping your manager and your team better achieve business goals you massively derisk your action of challenging. You clearly link the reason you're speaking up to why what you're communicating is good for your team and the business. Link your idea to time saved, costs saved, revenue gained and all the other benefits your business needs to compete and be successful. Bosses hate individuals challenging them or making their lives harder so the individual gains personal benefits or avoids effort and work. Do not put personal fears desires or insecurities ahead of benefits for the group when challenging at work. An example of linking a challenge to a clear business benefit. I see the benefit of the process change that you are proposing. Would you mind if I share an alternative approach which I think will save the team even more time, further reduced costs and builds on your original proposal. The stronger the benefits for the manager team and business the stronger the argument for selecting your idea solution or proposal. Make what you propose compelling when challenging at work. Always link your challenge or alternative idea to how it will improve reaching business goals set for the team or business. Do not frame your proposal in terms of your benefits. When giving feedback to your boss particularly if it is negative link in the business reason why you are providing your boss with a feedback. The second safe way to challenge at work is avoid being right. When challenging your boss providing them with alternatives with incremental improvements with ideas that you can both discuss together. This approach is a lot less confrontational than flat out disagreeing with them. When discussing alternatives with your boss you can work on persuading them the benefits of what you're proposing. Never frame your challenge or position as being the right way the right decision or the best solution. This is an effect saying I am better than you or my idea is better than yours. This is a sure way to get your bosses back up and for your challenge to be dismissed without being properly considered. When challenging you might start communicating your idea like this. Achieving the goals that you're proposing will be a really good for the team. Have you considered what will happen if we can't get the funding we need before the 20th of June? Wait for their response and answer. I have an alternative solution that should mitigate this risk may I share it with you. When challenging your manager or giving feedback to your boss avoid statements like if firstly I don't agree with you or I don't see how that will work or I have a better approach and or it would be a mistake too. Avoid being right when persuading your boss to take a different route which has better business benefits. There is rarely right and wrong in business. Much more common are better or worse alternatives routes and options. When giving feedback to your boss avoid positioning your feedback in terms of I am right and you are wrong. Talk about the pros and cons of what your boss did and suggest alternatives. Talk about the reactions you observed or the comments you overheard. Avoid positioning what you say as being right. The third safe way to challenge at work is to ask questions to provoke thinking. Asking questions is a lot safer than sharing your opinion or making statements when challenging others and in particular sensitive or insecure managers. Asking questions is a great starting point when you don't have a strong trusting relationship with the other person yet. Say when you start working with a new manager. Asking the right type of questions is important when challenging others. A couple of suggestions. If firstly make your questions open, they are ones that it's hard to answer with a yes or no. Secondly start your questions with what or how rather than why. Third, use your questions to get your manager thinking about a specific problem. Fourth, use follow-up questions to lead them to your proposed solution. The aim of asking questions is not to tell them your solution. Your aim is to help them come up with a better solution or to reach the same solution that you've worked out. Asking questions is a much more subtle way of challenging your boss. A couple of questions that I might ask if my boss was proposing a set of actions that would be more costly and take longer to reach a stated goal than one I had spotted. Firstly, have you considered alternative options that use a cheaper, simpler product than XYZ? Second, would it be helpful to get Greg to pop around and discuss this project with you? I thought he managed a similar project last year and delivered it quicker and cheaper than the current plan suggests. Third, is there anything stopping us doubling the staff available on step three, which appears to be a bottleneck and costs us an extra week? Asking questions is a safer way of challenging your boss or giving feedback to your boss than sharing your opinion or making statements. The fourth safe way to challenge at work is to provide alternatives and options, not problems. If you make statements like this is not going to work, you're effectively handing a bigger problem to your boss. This is not going to help them or impress them. You are 10 times better off by providing alternatives. For example, I've spent some time thinking through your plan and I've spotted a couple of problems that you may already know about. I've also worked out some alternative actions which avoid these problems. I'm really keen to discuss these with you. Providing alternatives avoids a right or wrong discussion. And it also leaves the power to decide which route to take with your boss. Ensuring your boss has to choose rather than being pushed into a corner reduces the threat of challenging your manager. Challenge in a safe way at work by providing alternative solutions or options rather than disagreeing without helping. The fifth safe way to challenge at work is to seek to raise up, not to put down. To successfully challenge your boss and for them to listen to you and take in what you're saying, it is vital that you don't embarrass them, make them look silly, make them feel stupid or any other negative consequence of your action. Praise in public and criticise in private is another good rule to follow. Wherever you can choose a private setting to challenge your boss or when giving feedback to your boss. A private setting minimises making them look bad in front of others or highlighting their mistakes. No boss wants to be undermined by their team members. Do not intentionally put your boss down under any circumstances. You're doing so is likely to damage your relationship with them and your job prospects with it. Before challenging colleagues or your boss, you take a few seconds to check your reasons for doing so and make sure your aim is to honestly help them or contribute to a better solution to the current problem. We're now going to go on to how to spot some valuable ideas to improve team or business performance. Every employee has the opportunity to save time no matter what you do. Saving time means that you can spend more of your time on other tasks, which in turn means you deliver more in the same time and therefore in the same cost. Every business would like to reduce their costs. Seven different ways to save time are firstly stop doing unnecessary or low value tasks. Secondly understand the why behind what you're being asked to do. You'll prioritize problem solve and organize yourself quicker as a result. Third communicate better so both parties are clear from the start, reducing follow-up questions and delays. Fourth finish one task before moving on to the next. Fifth improve processes to reach the same goal but in less time. Sixth diplomatically so no more often to low value tasks and requests and seventh automate wherever possible. If for example small tasks and excel through to much larger system-based solutions and you'll be able to find loads more opportunities than we've listed here. Nearly every employee can also find opportunities to reduce cost for an organization. If five other more challenging opportunities are firstly increasing revenue, secondly increasing efficiencies, thirdly improving processes, fourth reducing risks, fifth pleasing customers. Not everyone will have opportunities to look for improvements in all of these categories. Actively look for opportunities and you will find them even in the best run companies. So in summary practice safe ways to challenge at work and giving feedback to your boss are in my experience very career enhancing. Your boss wants better solutions to current problems and challenging what is being proposed is a key element in reaching better solutions. Additionally every boss wants more honest and balanced feedback. We all need feedback to get better yet the higher you go in management the less useful feedback you get. Five safe ways to challenge at work and give feedback to your boss are firstly challenging service of achieving business goals, secondly avoid being right, third ask questions to provoke thinking, fourth provide alternatives and options not problems and fifth seek to raise up not put down. If you have any questions on five safe ways to challenge at work and giving feedback to your boss please leave them in the comment section below and I will get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.