Don't Get Your Coworker to Agree with You
But you are a smart and socially conscious human being. You know that you can’t just go to Kara’s desk and tell them “Kara, the icon is wrong.” Kara would get defensive and argue for the the icon. I never understood this logic. How is Kara being offended a smart and socially conscious decision? A better way to handle criticism is to ask for people's opinions and not get defensive.After reading couple of negotiation and similar articles, I started to try and reason with people with carefully crafted questions to guide them towards my goal. But the end result always is that once people realize what I am trying to do, have them remove an icon, they get defensive irrespective. And then argument ensues.The only way I found around this was to build trust. And it takes time, you cannot arrive at a company and start a discussion with Kara. Small talk about family etc helps build some trust. Or if systems fails and resolving it without shaming the original developers helps too. This obviously is not perfect because the time you spend building trust, you are also acquiring issues. But it helps in long run.