The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
Saying no to your boss can be tough, but it’s critical for your work-life balance and the success of your team. Having clear and useful boundaries at work can help make the ‘no’ conversation a whole lot easier.
I am constantly amazed at how readily my 6-year-old says no. Of course, there are the emotional machine gun “no, no, no, no” moments, but often she does it more artfully than most of us do at work.
“I can do that, but you also asked me to…”
“How can I do that and clean up my room?”
“Yes, yes, yes, just let me finish this first!”
There are many good reasons to say yes. If you can indeed do the additional work well, you’ll earn a great reputation and advance your career more quickly than your peers. You’ll at least have job security as the boss’s go-to person for tough situations. You will learn more from stretch assignments and might just have fun too.
The trick is figuring out when the benefits of saying yes, for good reasons or because of pressure and identity, begin to wear out and the downside of not saying no creeps in.
We develop team offsites where you can learn and practice these skills. When everyone on a team agrees on when and how to say no, your work becomes so much easier!
Build a psychologically safe relationship for work-life balance
Saying no to your boss is a big interpersonal risk. Maybe he or she gets mad at you. Perhaps your boss thinks you are less competent and starts to ask you to do less, slowly phasing you out. It can be a risky proposition, but people who say yes too much will inevitably start doing mediocre as they get stretched too thin and eventually burn out. That’s a big risk too. I promise your boss wants to avoid you leaving as much as you do.
Saying no to your boss can build trust!
We think Charles Feltman’s model of trust makes a lot of sense. One pillar of his model is reliability. If people don’t do what they say they will do when they say they will do it, it becomes difficult to trust them, rather quickly. Having trouble saying no can wreak havoc on your reliability. Hear Feltman explain this in this podcast episode.
Start with asking when and how to say no
The best way to know how to say no is to simply ask. Good bosses know they need to build psychological safety, so they will welcome this conversation. Ideally, it comes during your onboarding interview. We recommend creating a user guide for yourself and your boss during onboarding, and here’s a tool you can use to do so. In this conversation, you should clearly define what going over the tipping point in performance and satisfaction looks like for you and what your boss expects you to say. For example, if I spend more than one weekend a month working, find myself stressed out enough to snap at my spouse and kids, or feel like I am doing mediocre work, it’s time to have the “saying no” conversation.
Set some clear boundaries at work upfront
If you’re not great at setting boundaries, you’re not alone. Melissa Urban provides a useful framework in The Book of Boundaries. It’s critical to set boundaries early, even in the user guide conversation. To do this you’ll need to know your core values and priorities. Those might include promoting quickly or spending more time with young children. You might love working on weekends to get ahead or despise Saturday texts. Whatever you value, you need to know about it before you set boundaries, because it’s unreasonable to say you don’t want more work just because.
Here are some examples of boundaries you might want to set:
When and how to communicate
Don’t text, that’s for personal communication. Don’t reach out at all on the weekend, that’s my family time.
How much work you'll take
I won’t do more than two major projects at a time, or I won’t do administrative work and strategic work at the same time. I won’t check my email and try to be creative at the same time. Projects will get only 40, 50, or 80 hours a week. I just need a full day off each week, any day will do.
How people can talk to you
I love constructive criticism, but not personal attacks. Using that tone ends the conversation. If I am in a different room, please join me if you’d like to talk.
None of these requests are as cut and dry as we would like though. If you have a boundary of 50 hours a week and your boss asks for 53 for a special project, what can you do? Urban recommends setting up green, yellow, and red light criteria around your boundaries to help with this. Maybe 50 hours is green light territory. Yellow is 50-60. You’ll do it in critical circumstances, but not often. Red is last-minute additions past 50 hours or more than 60 hours. That’s when you have the, “I’ll stop working here if this happens conversation.” Building in the gray (or yellow area) can take some pressure off and help you navigate requests more reasonably.
Saying no, best practices
In my executive coaching program at Georgetown, we spent a full day on how leaders can navigate requests because they come up so often. Here are a few of the responses we learned to help with coaching leaders:
Sometimes, just saying no is OK. Try it!
It’s critical to know your key boundaries. Knowing your core values helps here. If family is a core value, then missing your kid’s sports events might just be a hard no. When you don’t know your values, it will be hard to stay firm under pressure.
Commit to commit.
“I am not sure if I can do that. Can I give you a firm answer by tomorrow at 3 PM?” Give yourself space to think. Do this even when you don’t need to sometimes just to practice responding instead of reacting.
Clarify the impact.
“I can do that, but I won’t be able to complete the other priority you gave me last week. What should I focus on first?” This can feel hard, but bosses don’t keep exact tabs on what you are doing all of the time. Particularly without a great performance management system, your boss might have completely forgotten about prior tasking. It’s the boss’s job to manage all of the priorities, so ask for help when you become overtasked.
Clarify the intent.
“I can do that, but it will be a really big lift for me and the team. What’s the most important outcome you are looking for here?” Often bosses don’t know what right looks like but they can spot wrong from a mile away. If you can coach your boss into giving you a clearer picture of right, you might be able to do all of the things in less time with a tool or expertise your boss did not know about. Instead of defaulting to “no,” ask for clarity.
Know your value(s) and goals helps you say no
You should say yes as much as you can. It’s also best practice to have a conversation with your boss upfront about when and how you might say no. This removes some of the emotional heat in the moment. Most importantly, knowing your values and goals can help you figure out when it’s ok to surge into the potential burnout zone. As a 25-year-old with no family, I said yes a lot. Now I say no a lot more. If you know where you want to be in 10 years (most people I ask have no idea), you’ll also know when saying yes to a stretch opportunity will get you closer to your vision. This work takes a lot of effort, and for now, triaging with some simple no’s to your boss could help you do the yes’s more effectively, build more trust, and have more time for what matters most.
