Talking to your boss is scary, they uniquely have the power to determine the future of your career. If you look smart you might get a new responsibility, if you look dumb you might derail your future. This pressure makes people do dumb things. Some get obsequious, trading any ability to look competent for compliments. Others get silent, losing the massive power that comes from relationship building. Fortunately there are four rules for how to talk to senior leaders which will serve you all the way from your first boss to when you are a CEO emailing your investors.

The Four Keys

If you follow these four rules, you will almost certainly be in the top 1% of your peers in the game of communication. No rules can fully eliminate the threat of your ego, but I have found these to be a fantastic starting point:

Push Away Credit

Pushing credit onto other people is one of the most paradoxical elements of communication. For some reason, giving others credit makes you look better than if you take it on yourself. Someone who can give credit to others looks like a manager, like a person who can be trusted with other people’s careers. It also makes you look not self-interested, that you are going to do what’s best for your team and the company.

Happily Take Blame

Taking blame is the single most powerful way to defuse tension and to show maturity. It’s impossible to look at someone who is gravely taking responsibility and not see someone who deserves more of that responsibility. There are companies where you are best served by ducking blame at all costs, but you shouldn’t work at them.

There is also a great personal power in taking blame. When you accept 100% of responsibility for a situation (even when you may have only contributed 1% to the failure), you implicitly grant that next time you have the power to make it not happen. When you push the responsibility on others or make excuses, it establishes that you lack the power to not see it happen again. This is a powerful shift even just in your own psychology.

This can be done too far, you should not hate on yourself or your work gratuitously. However wrong you may be, if you are excessively negative about what you work on people will have a tendency to believe you. Be good and know you are, but also take any blame you can get your hands on.

Insist On Ultimate Success

Not every initiative or attempt will be successful. When one doesn’t work, you should accept responsibility and state it clearly. You should never, however, allow the implication that you or the company can’t be successful eventually. It should always be very clear that you are already in the process of making another attempt, and that you have an infinite well of persistence to throw at the problem of necessary.

Remember that every boss is continually asking the question: “is this handled, or do I need to step in.” You always want to advertise that while you may not know everything, there can never be any doubt about your willingness to step up, and that you have no doubt of eventual success. Optimism is a powerful weapon.

Provide Options, Not Arguments

Junior people take strong positions (often based on limited information), and fight for them. Senior people understand that they never have all the information, and they will never know the right thing to do. Experience teaches you we are all guessing based on what we know, and a different path might always be more successful. Rather than fighting for your perspective, take in as much information as you can, and present options. You should absolutely advertise which option you favor, but you should not become a crusader for it, or it will be believed that you shouldn’t have a position of responsibility if your idea isn’t adopted.

When two people are arguing, it is easy to see both of them as emotional combatants who should be taken with a grain of salt. One of the most powerful communication tools we have is to create situations where our opposition look more out of control than we are. This delegitimizes what they are saying, and even their very ability to sit at the table. The only way you can take advantage of these opportunities is to be balanced in your speech and to scrupulously avoid any heated communication. If you show you can take their position just as easily as your own, and accept it might be right, you will both avoid conflict and be seen as someone who could be the manager yourself.

This is not an appeal to have no conviction, moving with the wind. People who double talk, giving different answers to different people or based on what’s popular, are always eventually discovered and discounted by the organization. Have an opinion, but don’t trick yourself into believing it’s more than just that, an opinion.

In any organization there are two kinds of people: managers, and those who have to be managed. Many of us move between these two states during our career, or even during a single day. When you demand things, you are someone who needs to be managed. When you present options, you are a manager. When you act in your own interest, you need to be managed. When you act for the company, you are a manager.

For The Good of All

These simple tools can work in the most fraught communication. For example, if you are asking for a raise you could say “I need $20k more or I’ll leave.” Or you can say “I’d like to work towards making $20k more over the next year. What can I be doing to make that happen for myself? Can you help me do the right things to make that a reality? I’m ready to work.” Same message, but one is creating a situation which needs to be managed, the other is presenting a tremendous opportunity for a junior person to be shepherded to new successes.

Ultimately these skills should be used for only one purpose, to improve the quality of the company and its products. It can be tempting to believe that work-product alone is enough to see that will happen, but the mediocre people who lack those abilities will instead focus on managing communication and controlling narriatives. It behoves you, as someone with the skills necessary to help make the company successful, to use some of those same skills to drive the company in the right direction and fill it with the best possible people.