How Learning How to Say No Can Advance Your Career
Learning how to say no can actually help us become more strategic in work
If you’re like me, learning how to say no to projects and work in your job does not come easy. I’m a natural people pleaser, I want to do great work, and I want to feel like I’m making meaningful contributions to my team. This mindset has served me well, and gotten me access to opportunities and projects just for having the right attitude and work ethic.
However, it’s also gotten me in trouble because I’ve overcommitted and missed deadlines, let down my teammates, burned out due to overwork, or submitted work that was suboptimal in quality. As a result, I’ve learned to evolve my mindset when it comes to managing my workload and saying yes or no to requests.
Learning How to Say No The Hard Way
I learned this the hard way when I started off my career. Being a management consultant is a constant learning loop because of the apprenticeship model, meaning that there is usually someone around to coach or teach you how to do things.
This means that the more you can learn, the more work that you can take on. This is a win-win for your direct supervisor because the more workstreams and tasks they can trust you to do, the more it frees them up to work on other things. Since I was fresh out of college, at the time, my mindset for the work I was doing was very much like school - listen intently to the instructor (my manager) to understand the syllabus and the tests (my workstreams and tasks) study up for them and then when it came time to do them do them extremely well. In many cases, this worked well - I was able to get Straight A’s on many assignments and tasks, and I got to take on more and more work.
The challenge is that at some point, there is only so much you can take on at any given time. An instructor is relegated to three 50 minute classes a week for 12 weeks, but work, especially client service work has much more ambiguous boundaries. And unless you learn to set boundaries for yourself, it’s very easy to continue taking on work without abandon, either because you don’t know your limitations, you’re trying to prove yourself, or you feel obligated to say yes.
One particular project I worked on I got a chance to work with a manager and a partner who I really working with. I was excited to work on the project because of the type of client, but also because I was working with people that I deeply respected and admired. I not only wanted to do a good job, I wanted to make sure I went above and beyond to show them that I was incredibly capable.
As a result, when they asked me to take on responsibilities that seemed like a lot more than I could handle, I immediately said yes at the opportunity. However, within a few weeks of the project, it was clear that I was in over my head. I had bitten off more than I could chew, and was too proud to ask for help. I wanted to demonstrate that I knew what I was doing and that I was a team player, and quite frankly, I was insecure about having to ask for help, or to come across to others like I didn’t know how to do certain things. There’s a reason they call consultants “insecure overachievers!”
As a result of saying yes to more work without being more thoughtful about what I signed up for, I had a number of different challenges:
First, there are only so many hours in a day, and since some of these tasks were new to me, it was taking me a long time to do them. This meant that things were taking longer, and I had two options: work more hours, or ask for help. I chose the former, which meant I was staying up far later than the rest of the team to do my work, which my manager started to notice.
Second, I was also becoming the bottleneck on my team. Because it was taking me longer to do things that had dependencies on other people, I was also starting to delay some of the other teammates who were relying on me for parts of my work so they could do their work. This meant that they were getting delayed waiting on me.
Finally, I had no margin, or slack in the system to use for my work. While consultants are expected to work effectively and efficiently, some types of work do require significant amounts of brainstorming, writing, analyzing and thinking. These things take time and space. Because I was so backed up, the tasks in particular which required me to think more deeply were so time compressed that the work quality was not up to par.
The good news was that eventually, I came to my senses and went to the manager to ask for help. Sidenote: (This is also why the concept of psychological safety is so important. Even though I was embarrassed, I knew my manager well enough to have the confidence and trust to tell the truth and speak openly.)
Together, we spent time working through some of the challenges and figuring out what I could address, what I needed some more coaching and help with, and what we could get some of the other people on the team to take on.
Eventually, as a team, we worked through the challenges and finished the project. During additional feedback conversations with my manager, we spent some time talking through strategies and tactics for managing requests for work, how to say no diplomatically, and also how to structure your work days so you can feel empowered and energized to get work done. These lessons served me well the rest of my time as a consultant, and I often found myself sharing them with other consultants who struggled to manage their workload and learning how to say no in a culture that often prioritizes saying yes. They also came in handy as a product marketer, where because I was in a cross-functional role, requests for help and support large and small would come in from all over the company.
6 Tips For Saying No To Advance Your Career
If you work in a cross-functional role where you are constantly getting requests, if you feel you have a hard time saying no to others who ask for your help, or if you are struggling to find time and feel overwhelmed by the constant amount of work that you have, here are a few tips about how you can reframe these challenges, learn to say no, open greater opportunities for career success:
1)Say No so you can say Yes
One of the biggest mindset shifts was acknowledging that by being able to say no means that you can say yes to other things. When doing workshops with companies, one exercise I like to do is to have everyone open their to-do list and their calendar and to identify the last time they said yes to something that they later regretted, and then to estimate the amount of time they spent on that particular request. I then ask them to brainstorm one task or initiative they would have rather spent time on instead. It’s often a great “aha” moment for people to understand that sometimes saying no actually helps you get more of the right things done. It’sa mindset shift, but when you do it, you can find things that you are truly energized to say yes to.
2)Align your “yes’s” to strategic priorities
This is not a huge revelation and hopefully you are already trying to do this, but I know I always wanted to do this but often struggled in execution. One day one of my managers at Salesforce made this hit home when during our 1:1’s. As Product Marketers, we got requests all the time from all sorts of stakeholders (ex: sales, customer success, customer support, product managers, etc) At the end of the quarter, my manager asked me to go through the list of projects I was working on and asked me how many of these projects were things I was working on that I wanted to work on versus things that she, or another stakeholder requested I worked on. The result of the exercise showed that I had basically said yes to 70% of the requests that she or someone else asked me to do. Someone might look at that and say “what a great worker!” but the point she made was that even as a more experienced product marketer she was not perfect and often passed down requests that weren’t always aligned to the business. If all I am doing in my job is triaging requests that she is making to me it probably means I’m not being strategic in the work that I am doing. Furthermore, she really encouraged me to push back, not because she likes conflict, but in doing so, it would actually get me to think more critically to make sure I was doing the highest value work.
3)Build margin time
Raise your hand if this is you - someone asks to meet with you and you tell them “yes of course, just find time on my calendar!” - odds are, your days end up filling up with back to back meetings with no time in between. This was my life for the majority of my career, and I know it is for many knowledge workers, especially those in large companies. One of the reasons why I performed subpar on that project was I did have a number of deliverables that required me to write clearly, which requires time to actually think. When you have constant meetings or are in triage mode responding to emails or messages, you don’t have any margin to think. Furthermore, when you stuff your calendar, you never build in any time for any emergent opportunities that might arise, or strategic projects you might come up with.
You’re constantly playing defense when you should be finding time for offense. A really simple hack is just to block time in your calendar. But more strategically, this is about understanding that in our always-on world of work, the work, demands, and requests are always going to be there, and it's very hard to “get ahead” to get downtime.
4)Find your “A+” projects
A few years ago, a bunch of NBA analysts noticed something interesting about Lebron James. After reviewing tapes of his games they noticed that he was finding ways to rest even when he was on the court in the middle of a game. For example, instead of running back on defense when he knew someone was going to score, he remained where he was. Some might call this being lazy, but when pressed on it Lebron talked about how this was a purposeful strategy to manage his energy.
"It's just trying to save pockets of energy throughout, especially the second half, when I know it's going to be a possession game," James said. "I try to save pockets of energy when I know I'm going to be needed”
Lebron understood that during crunch time, his team needed him to be on his A+ game, so he conserved energy at various points in order to be locked in when his team needed him most. The lesson here is that you can also do the same thing. Unless your superhuman, it's hard to be on your A+ game all the time (just ask Lebron James) Sometimes, that means giving a B+ or B, but that also means you can be intentional and strategic about when you do want to lean into an A+ effort for a task, project or workstream.
I’m not asking you to intentionally do a horrible job, rather, to be honest about what you can do and what you can give, based on your energy and priorities. This is hard, especially if you are an overachiever, have perfectionist tendencies, and take pride in your work. But here’s a quick thought exercise - do you think that everyone around you is always giving their A+ effort on every single thing they work on?
5) Remember No doesn’t mean no forever
As a career coach, one thing I like to remind clients of when they get the news that they aren’t moving on is that no doesn’t mean “forever” it just means that it’s a no for right now. As an example, I got rejected by Salesforce 3 times before I spent 5 years working there! When handling requests, especially from other people or teams, you can say no to someone right now, but offer to do it down the road. Perhaps you can visit the request the next quarter, or once you clear a major milestone. Another way to frame this is to offer what you can do right now, which may be a significantly less version of the request. That way, you can still be helpful, while also managing your own needs and priorities.
6)Find Your $10K Work
One framework that has helped me is Khe Hy’s $10,000/hour work. According to Hy, “$10,000 per hour work is the process of identifying your highest leverage activities and committing a small amount of time to them each day.”
While you may not literally be doing $10,000/work the framework is helpful toward thinking about how you are spending your work day, and what value are you getting out of the things that you are working on. Using this framework, I began identifying the tasks that I was doing that tended to yield lower value and those that yielded higher value. While there are always things we have to do in our jobs because that is just how things work, we all do have some agency and autonomy to structure or work and our days. Finding the time to do the highest value work, which in turn can help you advance your career, say no to more things, and ensure you are working on the highest leveraged activities.
Learning how to say no is an important career lesson that often is learned the hard way. However, doing so allows you to find ways to add even more value to advance your career while also giving you more time to work on the things that matter most.
Additional Resources on How to Navigate Saying No in the Workplace
Khe Hy’s concept of 10,000 work is a great framework for understanding how to work on the highest value activities in your job and to free up your time and energy. This is a great episode on some of the traps of productivity, and how to find 10K work in your daily life.
Rob Cross has studied cross functional teaming and productivity for many years. In this article (dated but still relevant) Rob goes into detail around the common traps that people create for themselves into thinking that they are being productive, and what they can do to avoid them. This is especially helpful to those who work in cross functional roles
6 Tips For Better Cross-Functional Collaboration (Medium)
Shameless plug, but I was asked to write a post on Medium about some of my own experiences with managing priorities when working cross-functionally. I shared some of my tips that I’ve learned from some of the best cross-functional team members I’ve worked with, and hope you can apply them in your work
How to Say No at Work Without Feeling
I recognize that me telling you to just say no is a lot easier said than done. Furthermore, its also true that some groups of people often get penalized more for not saying yes to things. Here are some tactical examples of how you can offer to say no if you’re struggling with doing this on your own
What have you said no to lately? Do you have any suggestions for how to say no to say yes? Respond with the comments or email me directly!
Have a great week,
Al