When my first daughter was born, I considered naming her Nola. But as my sage (and handsome!) husband pointed out, her nickname was going to end up being No. And that seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. No one likes the sound of a “no.”
We all know by now that setting clear boundaries at work—in other words, saying no—is key to our wellness and self-preservation. But still, it’s hard to resist the urge to be a hero. You want to be the one your boss can count on, and that means saying yes to everything.
But what if I told you that saying yes to everything was the lazy person's path and that a regular and strategic “no” is the way to maximize the value you deliver? Would you buy it?
Define your boundaries at work with clarity of purpose
Truth is, your company invested in you. It decided at some point that something important needed to be done. So, it set aside a salary, produced a job description, found, met, and onboarded you. That’s a lot of dollars invested.
Having clarity of purpose and the discipline to stay on track is the hardest work of all.
Your job, in turn, is to maximize their return on that investment. And the way to do this is to stick to your purpose—to focus on what you were uniquely hired to do. Having clarity of purpose and the discipline to stay on track is the hardest work of all.
Now, I live in the real world. Sometimes there’s an emergency—something’s on fire, and you need to jump in to help put it out. Or sometimes, we need to earn a few points with someone who has asked a favor. Or maybe, what’s being asked of us is something we can deliver in literally minutes. Or the request is a challenge we’ve been dying to get our hands on. In these scenarios, use your judgment. Sometimes letting a "yes" take us off-purpose is the right thing to do. But this should be the exception and not the rule.
Today I’m talking about the moments in which we know that saying yes takes us away from the work that should be commanding our focus and attention. And yet saying “no” feels straight-up icky.
How to say "no" without being a jerk
So, how do we manage the “no” without being the workplace jerk? The answer is … with grace. There is a whole spectrum of responses that lie between "yes" and "no." So let’s dive into the subtlety—otherwise known as the art of saying "no" without using the word.
Let’s walk through a few scenarios we’ve likely all encountered. We'll identify a response that both respects your boundaries and keeps you in the zone of heroics.
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