How Do I Give Feedback to My Boss?

Beatriz Solano: You're listening to Office Hours. I'm Beatriz Solano. How do you tell your boss they are wrong without damaging your career? I asked three people who are now the boss. Daniel Oyelaran runs a landscape architecture studio in Birmingham. Signe Holm is a partner at a branding agency in Oslo. And Andrés Quintero leads a product design team in Bogotá.

Andrés Quintero: I'll say up front: I've been both the junior and the boss who got it wrong.

Beatriz Solano: Daniel, how should someone tell you you are wrong?

Daniel Oyelaran: Early and in private, with the consequence spelled out. Not what I did wrong, but what will happen because of it. A junior once told me the planting plan I had signed off would die in the first dry summer because the soil report showed heavy clay. She brought the page from the report. I changed it that afternoon.

Signe Holm: The worst version is in front of the client. Even if you are right, now I have to defend myself or lose face. I can't really listen at that point.

Beatriz Solano: What about something more subjective, like a design direction?

Signe Holm: Bring an alternative, not just an objection. Last year a designer disagreed with my typeface choice for a ferry company. She made two pages with her option and two with mine and put them side by side on my desk. Hers was better. We used it.

Andrés Quintero: And use evidence when you have it. In product work, we have numbers. One designer showed me that my onboarding flow lost thirty-eight percent of users on the third screen. Hard to argue with that.

Beatriz Solano: What if the boss doesn't listen?

Daniel Oyelaran: Write it down afterwards, politely. Short email: following our conversation, here's my concern about the clay and the replanting cost. It's not a threat; it's a record. If it goes wrong, nobody can say you didn't flag it.

Andrés Quintero: Then let it go. You have raised it. If you keep raising the same point every meeting, people stop hearing everything else you say.

Beatriz Solano: Has disagreeing ever hurt anyone on your team?

Signe Holm: Only once, and it was tone, not content. Someone wrote in a group chat that the direction was embarrassing. The content was fair. The word was not.

Beatriz Solano: Any advice for the junior who is nervous?

Andrés Quintero: Ask a question instead of making a statement. Have we checked how this works on a small screen? It gives the boss room to find the problem.

Daniel Oyelaran: And remember that most of us want to be told. Being wrong in private is much cheaper than being wrong on site.

Beatriz Solano: Daniel Oyelaran, Signe Holm, Andrés Quintero, thank you. That's Office Hours.