Ways to say no
A simple framework to manage up
Saying no at work is hard, especially when it relates to more work assigned to you.
We’ve largely been conditioned to do more at work, because there’s a belief that will bring a promotion or more compensation. At some point, though, your plate is full.
Most likely you’re reading this because you need to say no to something, and your straightforward no is not working.
Why can’t you just say no?
To be clear, you can just say no. Nothing is stopping you.
My experience, though, mirrors Will Larson’s, “Folks who communicate no effectively are not the firmest speakers, nor do they make frequent use of the word itself.”1
Why? While the framing of an ask is hopefully straightforward, the answer of no is unfortunately ambiguous.
Do you mean?2
No, not right now. I have too much work.
No, this work is not my job. It’s another person’s job.
No, I don’t have the skills to do this work.
No, the ask shouldn’t be done by anyone in our company.
So your no is not honored, because it invites more questions about what you mean. Unfortunately that’s not the only headwind.
An Appendage of the Machine
Organizations setup systems to direct work into queues for people to do—marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, projects, tasks, reports, etc. As a consequence, work allocation is often impersonal. The systems assign more work to people, and at some point that person needs help, so they become a supervisor and get involved in the assigning it to you at the last step. Thus they are often not empowered to refuse the work either.
So they often invoke various reasons to explain the circumstances that “we are in together.”
Teamwork is often invoked as a reason to not say no. In either case, you know that your no is going to potentially require someone else to do more work, and many people think “they can be a team player and handle one more thing.” However, many of these people eventually discover they’re doing 90% of the work and getting 10% of the compensation.
Economic cycles are also often invoked. During down cycles and layoffs, more work is allocated to fewer people. During growth cycles, more work is allocated to fewer people until hiring must happen, and often then, it’s a lot of work to hire people. These things are true, but they are not your problem to solve.
On top of it, the sales culture of “overcoming objections” has been taught widely enough that it invades management practices of many companies. Even the most reasonable and accommodating work places have been persuaded that it’s fine to “just ask,” even if it’s repeatedly and emphatically asked to people saying no.
Last of all, saying no repeatedly is tiring for most people, and the power dynamics of work are such that repeated refusals “will be remembered.” So workers learn to just stop refusing more work.
Seize the Means of Production
Your employer is buying your time.3 Recognize this. Act like a business. Determine if your main customer is making reasonable asks of what you agreed to sell to them.
If the asks are reasonable and inside your normal offerings,4 then the conversation should be an easy yes.
But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. You are likely needing to say no to someone.
Human labor, through all its forms, … is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation
The secret is that you can say no, and people will accept the no if it doesn’t sound like no. It needs to sound like something else.
Alternative Phrases to “No”
I’m going to provide a wide variation of different options, but my general approach is validate the work in stages:
Necessity: does the work actually need to be done?
Fitness: am I the right person for the work?
Priorities: how important is the work relative to other work?
Readiness: is the work is ready for me?
Necessity
Crucially, the first and most important and the main driver to getting the information you need to help you negotiate this path is by asking why—several times.
"By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." ― Taiichi Ohno
Understanding why this work needs to be done sometimes yields:
it doesn’t need to happen because it’s not valuable
it’s already being done under another name
it’s already be done
Recognizing any of these above cases will get you rewarded by good management. Qualifying work to be done is work in of itself, and organizations value not wasting resources.
Here are some questions to do this:
Why does this need to be done?
Why does it being done help the organization?
What would happen if we didn’t do it?
What is the outcome we’re expecting?
How will this work impact the business?
Fitness
Sometimes you’ll be asked to do work that’s “not in your job description.” Generally speaking, many employers attempt to get around this by tagging on a clause “other duties as required.” You can hide a Death Star of duties in that phrase.
But many organizations are large, and work isn’t always routed to the right place.
I appreciate you thinking of me. Help me understand how you think the work is aligned to my role?
I’m happy to hear what you’re trying to accomplish, and I’ve love to get the right people to do this for you.
Who have you already spoken to about doing this? Why did they suggest we partner here?
Have you had a conversation with others about this? I'm curious as to what they said about it.
Priorities
We’re now fairly certain the work should be done and done by you—or at least someone like you. Now there’s the question of relative importance. Let’s talk priorities.
Priorities are not a task list. They should be a list of list than 10, preferably less than 5 things to do. Priorities exist to help you sort through tasks so as to properly weight tasks to get done.
Generally lead with existing priorities: “Here's our current priorities. Is this list a good one?”
Once you get agreement that you list is good, you can discuss the new ask. Here are some prompts:
Help me understand how this ties to one of these priorities.
Where do feel this falls in our priorities?
How will this bring a bigger impact against our priorities?
Why will does this deserve greater attention in relation to our priorities?
Notice my prompts don’t yield control of the work decision over to the other person. Many work environments involve multiple managers5 who contradict each other’s asks. And they attempt to resolve it by using the workers to make the decision and “do both” instead of having a conversation about “who loses.”
Rather than your time and mindshare be the forcing function, redirect the conversation that you are here to help accomplish what helps out the organization, and invite them both into the conversation to see what outcomes they need.
To be clear, you want to gently force that conversation to happen so that you’re not the bag holder for how your hours were spent when the budget runs out, and by budget I mean your work week of 40 hours.
Readiness
Once we pass priority, you’re basically going to do the work. You’re just implicating negotiating timing now.
Even then sometimes you’ll be asked to do work that’s fundamentally unready. It’s underspecified, ambiguous, or missing required materials.
“I’m concerned that the outcome of this work is not identified.”
“How will another person know this work is done?”
“Do I have access to [x]?”
“Have we already bought [y]?”
“Where is [z] so that when I’m ready I can switch over to it?”
Sometimes these readiness questions will re-open some of the higher-level questions of necessity, fitness, or priority. That’s fine. The point is to save you 5 hours of work with a 5 minute conversation.
Final Thoughts
You’ll note that while many times in the above questions you can the other person to effectively say no for you. And you never had to say no.
Instead you are getting the other person to have a conversation about the work with you, and you are genuinely helping them many times shape the work with your questions.
And if it gets to the end, and it’s more work for you to do—that’s ok. But now you have made a joint decision about what that means for your other work now, which is the outcome you want anyhow.
An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
This list is by no means complete to be clear. Just illustrative of the ambiguity inherent in stark refusal.
Sure, in theory, they’re also buying your productive output. But unless you still work on a piece-work system, they’re buying your time.
And yes, I include normal offerings in your estimate about your ability to get the work done in 40 hours per week.
This is sometimes called a matrix organization.