Saying NO at work
In talking to my coworkers and the people that I mentor, I often get asked how can I say no politely, especially when I am being asked to do something by a manager or an important stakeholder. Especially when we are starting out in our career, it can be a daunting task to “just say no” because we want to be seen as team players, people that can handle anything, we want to show we have ownership over our projects, we are the go to person. However, doing so when we don’t have the bandwidth or even the knowledge to get things done will get you in deep waters. You’ll end up feeling overwhelmed, you’ll be working overtime just to keep up and ultimately this will impact your quality of life and mental health.
To be honest, saying no is an important skill to master in your career . Being able to say no and still maintain the working relationship is as much a key to your growth as the ability to say yes. Stay tuned to the end to figure out what is my number one trick to saying no when you are dreading it. And I’ll even throw in the advice my very first manager at Amazon gave me.
“You have to choose”
This is by far my favorite approach to use when you’re discussing things with your direct manager or with leadership. These types of situations generally don’t give you a lot of room to negotiate since technically, the person making the request is in charge of you, they are your boss. However, I’ve found over the years that it’s useful to give them perspective on your current workload, what you are working on and ask them to choose between the tasks as to which is more important. The idea here is to present them with a tradeoff of tasks of various priorities and make them choose between them. Managers are also people, as I always say, so it’s good to make sure that it hasn’t slipped their mind just how much you have to do. So you’ll say things such as:
Yes, I can take this on, however this means I drop the accounting report. I don’t have time to do both by the deadlines. Are you okay with this tradeoff?
Yes, I can do it by the end of this week. I’ll have to move the presentation slides to next week. You’re fine with this tradeoff?
Yes, I can get the numbers for the report but then I need to skip the meeting with legal. Is that something you can cover and then brief me?
To avoid some of these situations, especially when you are discussing with your line manager, it’s important to cover your work during the weekly 1 to 1 meeting. I have an entire video on this which I will link right here. This ensures that they are always reminded of the topics you cover and what the general priority is.
“Yes but maybe not…”
This method is what I like to refer to as “negotiating down”. You are saying yes on the surface but then you are using that to enter into a negotiation on the parameters of how this task will be done and when. For example, given any task you can say “Yes but…”
Are you okay with getting only the data for the cars segment? So I can finish in time for X meeting
Are you okay to move the deadline to next Friday so we can get all the numbers?
Are you okay with only a writeup and not a presentation? Otherwise I can’t make it
Are you okay to have half this done by the end of the week and we continue next week?
As you can see, the goal here's to give options to the person making requests that ultimately leave them with a sense of you saying yes, but also not overcrowding yourself with work. You are negotiating the terms and conditions into something that is manageable for your workload and knowledge.
There are two main elements in these answers to pick up on. First, you’re segmenting the problem into smaller pieces already. Secondly, you’re already letting them know that refusing the segmentation will cause a delay.
If they still insist that you need to do the task in full, it’s time to try the first approach. Let them choose between what they want done or ask your manager to intervene and help prioritize the tasks.
Asking for more details
To be perfectly honest, this approach of asking for more details or, to be more specific, asking for more justification, works best in avoiding work from other peers but we can also employ it to work with leadership. The crux of the matter is in asking the requestor to explain why it’s important to have this done. You will ask them questions such as
What do we gain from doing this? How did you come to these numbers/conclusion?
What is the outcome you want to get from this?
How do we know that this is the right thing to do?
Why am I or why is my team the right owner for this?
Isn’t there a better alternative?
This is a method that can be really useful for all my fellow peers out there that are bursting at the seams with ownership and bias for action, ready to jump into any topic. If this is you, your natural inclination is to also think that answering these questions mentioned above is also your job. Let me argue that perhaps it’s not on you to get these answers, but rather it’s on the person asking the question to either already have them or to go get them. Think of this as doing the necessary diligence before spending money on resources to do something. In the larger scale of things, this can buy you time to give an answer on whether or not you’ll take it on AND give you ammunition for your argument to not take this on. It’s a win-win.
Buy yourself time
Last but not least, here is my best advice for handling a request when you want to say no but you’re just not sure how to approach it: buy yourself some time. This is also a very useful technique when you simply don’t understand how complex the problem is and you want to avoid signing up for a behemoth of a task. Say things such as:
Let me consult my calendar and get back to you
I need to check my workload, I’ll message you by the end of the day with a response
I have to discuss this with my team before accepting
I’m rushing to finish some work right now, can you send me an email about this so I can evaluate the task?
Doing this has a lot of benefits. First, you actually get more time to understand if you have the bandwidth to do this without getting yourself into an 80h work week. Secondly, and this is a perk for all my introverted friends, it removes the pressure to say no to a person’s face as you can follow up later on, with better constructed arguments as to why you’re not taking the task. And third, if we do have to mention perception management! Looking at the situation from the other person’s perspective, you’re not saying no, you’re saying you’ll look into it and come back to them. The attitude from these answers is still collaborative so you’re maintaining the professional relationship with this person.
Lessons from my first manager
To close out the post I want to talk a little bit about the advice I got from my manager when I first joined Amazon. I call Amazon my first job even though I had about 6 months of work experience when I joined but I was definitely bright eyed and ready to roll up my sleeves, thinking I was so fortunate that “Amazon wants to work with me”. You could say I was a “corporate baby” at the time that didn’t know any better, which I was. This is why I really appreciated the advice my manager Chris gave me on my very first day. He took me out to lunch, to welcome me to the team, and when we were done eating he looked at me and said
“There will always be more work.”
I think I looked at him bewildered so he knew he had to give more details so he continued by saying (I’m paraphrasing of course)
“There will always be more work, it never ends. So if you want to work 50, 60 , 70 hours per week, we can find work to give you to fill those hours up. But then, that volume of work will become what is considered the baseline for your performance, which means you’re signing up for those hours in the long run. Be mindful of that when you agree to take on more things.” .
This advice really stuck with me because I didn’t really expect my own manager to tell me not to take on more work .While I think it did take me a few years to really understand how to navigate it in practice, I feel very fortunate that he told me that. And I it’s important that I pass it now onto you. Hopefully, it won’t take you as long as it took me to use it.
In summary, always make sure that you are not taking on more work than you can handle and always remember that saying no is not a bad thing in itself. You simply have to master how to say it.
If you want to read more about this topic, here are some resources to help you along:
How to Say No to Taking on More Work
How (and When) to Say No to the Boss
That’s it for today, folks
Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
