It’s not about “standing up for yourself”
When I googled “how to get what you want at work,” everything was about how you can’t get stuff without asking for it. Or about how you need to stand up for yourself.
At first that annoyed me a little — because asking for things is like the last 5% of getting what you want. And then the more I looked at this blank doc thinking about what I wanted to say, the more frustrated I got.
Because when all the advice out there is about “standing up for yourself,” this is going to happen:
Person will read advice that says “stand up for yourself”
They stand up for themselves. And I don’t want to devalue this, because it’s hard. It means doing new and uncomfortable things. Difficult conversations. Confrontation. It takes courage.
But because they haven’t done the groundwork, which is 95% of getting what you want, this person is going to get a “no.” Depending on how much or how little foundation they’ve laid, they might get absolutely bulldozed.
This person hasn’t gotten what they wanted. Plus, they’ve taken a hard, brave step and been metaphorically slapped for it. They’re probably less likely to ask for what they want again.
In some situations, it might even continue:
The person isn’t discouraged. They have strong convictions, so they keep standing up for themselves.
BUT! They still aren’t laying the foundation. Asking is the only tool in their toolbox. They might have a patient manager; they might not. Either way, they’re going to get labeled as “difficult” — and everything is going to get harder for them as a result.
Every so often it feels like advice trickles through the professional world and becomes appreciated as a universal truth. There are no universal truths. You should stand up for yourself, except for when it’s not the best way to get what you want. You should never say the first number in a salary negotiation, except when you should. You should take actions in ways that maintain your morality and self-respect in the context of your situation, while also getting you closer to achieving your goals. Maybe that one is universally true.
Holding on too strongly to frameworks hurts people by having them act in ways not in their self-interest.
Making an ask is an important skill, but it’s the last step in a string of steps towards getting what you want. When all the emphasis is on the ask, the advice becomes “stand up for yourself” (which is also an adversarial framing).
Really, the advice should be “you are responsible for getting what you want.” And then there’s a whole other playbook you can follow.
The enormous caveat! If you’re being treated like shit, you have a different type of decision to make.
Any time I write about taking responsibility for getting what you want, I feel like I have to stress this — people don’t have a right to treat you like shit. If you are regularly being yelled at, ridiculed, mocked, threatened, harassed, or any other pattern of shitty behavior, that’s a different sort of standing up for yourself.
At that point you have a different type of decision to make:
Is there enough value in staying in your position to justify making an investment in fixing your situation? It’s easy to say “no one has the right to treat me this way,” and I would agree with you — the question is whether you think it’s worth enduring their behavior or using subtler methods to change it because there are long-term benefits to the short-term frustration.
You can find a way to leave. You can always leave if you want to. There’s no shame in it. It doesn’t mean you weren’t strong enough or that you left anyone behind. It just means you’re leaving.
I think the popular advice in these types of situations is that you should just leave. I also think that — although that’s true in a lot of cases — there are real and difficult scenarios where staying is the better option.
Earlier this year, I advised a friend that I thought they should leave their company. I saw a questionable pattern of behavior and a potentially unhealthy culture of targets that seemed likely to create intractable problems of exactly the sort I describe in my “you can leave” article. The friend was working weekends to get materials to his boss before their one-on-ones, and in every conversation they seemed stressed.
Well, I was wrong!
This person didn’t take my advice. They were able to masterfully manage up and change their relationship with their boss, which led to them crushing their targets and being able to hire people for their team — it was the step that took them from individual contributor to first-time manager, a leap that’s one of the enormous early hurdles in growing a career.
The point is that these are incredibly personal and individual decisions.
You have the power to make the decision that’s right for you. I’m about to share some thoughts on how to get what you want, and I’m pretty directly arguing that “standing up for yourself” isn’t (primarily) the way to do it.
But I wanted to be clear that I’m not saying anyone has the right to treat you poorly, or that — if they are — you should just be cool with it.
Before you stand up for yourself, you want to make your thing the obvious thing
At a quarterly business review (QBR), my boss stood up and presented our marketing strategy to every manager in the company. At the end of his talk, he had slides about “big bets” — what if we tripled our investment in a particular area, or took a risk on a major campaign. He gave three examples of bets he’d consider.
Our VP of Product piped up: “if you had to pick one of those three bets, which one would you pick.”
I don’t think he’d expected the question, because wow! Talk about being put on the spot. But I loved his answer — “I’d triple the content team. Content is working for us.”
That was my team! That meant going from managing one person to managing four, the largest team I’d ever managed at the time. Huge career opportunity. I applauded, which got a pretty good laugh from the room.
There’s a version of this story that looks like “wow, he was so lucky that content was the pick of the three.” That’s not the story as I see it. This was a pivotal moment in my career, and even though chance plays an element in everything, I’d done a ton of work to stack the odds in my favor.
By the time my boss stood up in front of most of the company and said he wanted to triple my team, these things had already happened:
Organic traffic to our blog had increased from 8,000 per month to ~28,000 per month
I’d put together a ton of documentation related to our strategy (docs and slides), and presented them to my boss — he knew exactly why we were taking our approach, and why it was working
On top of that documentation, I’d put together an approach to scale content impact. It very deliberately started from current results, the approach we’d use to scale those results while also serving the content needs of other teams, and a breakdown of the execution of that work (literally in terms of hours per task). While I presented this deck, he said — before I even got to the slide about resourcing — “it sounds like we just need to hire more people.”
I also did the stuff in this article, although less competently than I’d do today.
The point is that I didn’t go in and say “I need you to hire me four more people,” but I also didn’t leave the decision entirely up to fate. My boss knew he could work with me, knew I could get results, knew I could do it while helping our product team launch products / channel sales team sell to partners / legal team (at that point external to the org) write about GDPR.
The decision to grow the content team was extraordinarily de-risked.
How convinced is the person you need to convince before you make an ask?
In some ways that’s what every article on Diamond Pencils about, and it’s a complicated topic, so I won’t go through a whole list of ways to do this here. “How to get what you want at work in 2022” is a pretty good list to get started with.
There are a few specific ideas I’d like to call attention to (none of which have articles yet, sorry!):
You have to present a model of why your ideas will work. The more you can say “this will work because of these underlying principles,” and paint that picture for other people, the more people understand why what you’re saying is smart and will get results. Show the thinking, not just the recommendation.
Improving the flow of information is the fastest (not necessarily easiest) way to shift people to your perspective. If you know what’s right for the business but people don’t agree with you, the only possibilities are 1) you’re wrong 2) everyone else is an asshole or 3) they don’t see what you see. When smart execs join a new team, communication channels are one of the first things they work on.
Sometimes your ideas are good and people just can’t picture the outputs like you can, because you’re closest to your work. There are situations where the best thing to do is just run with it — make a small version of what you’re talking about, do parts of the project in secret, run the analysis/survey, do the customer calls yourself, and then people will want to use it once you have some of it built. This is situational and I need to write about it more, but it can be a good idea to do spec work that no one asked for.
All this, plus a simple one you can do right now. My friend Sean Blanda (currently VP of Content at Crossbeam) says that you need to have a “wall of praise.” Collect any time someone, internally or a customer, says positive things about your work.
Share it when it happens, and then keep it in one place so that you can overwhelm people with all the amazing things people say. There’s no substitute for other people saying good things about you.
Beware universal advice
I once tried to get a friend of mine a job at my company (not in my department), and I asked what salary range would be interesting to them. What came out of their mouth was a “it depends on XYZABCDEFG.” Maybe you had to be there; it was very clear the moment that this meant “salary advice says not to give the first number.”
And I was like “HEY! We’ve known each other for years! I don’t care what some other department pays you — but if you and I can get on the same page about it, I can start laying the groundwork to get you a bigger offer.”
This piece is partially about laying the groundwork to get the stuff you want before you ask for it. It’s also partially about rejecting any advice that says “always/never do/don’t do [this thing].” Including my advice.
Advice is a conclusion that comes from a principle applied generally across situations. When you take advice, you should be applying the general principles to your specific diagnosis of your situation, so you can decide on the course of action that gets you what you want even if it breaks the “rules.”