Why does saying “no” feel so difficult? Whether it entails setting and managing boundaries or reinforcing prioritization (making smarter choices and/or therefore not taking work on), saying no is really tough.
It gets tricky because we have a natural desire to please others. Whether it's "No, I don’t want to", “I can't today", or "Yes but it comes at a cost", a lot of us worry about upsetting the other person. We're scared because we recognize the possible impact on our careers and how others perceive us. We also don’t want to be that person (we all know them, they’re quick to shoot stuff down, brainstorm killers, Negative Norms). And yet, what if those people are onto something? How many times have you had a super busy day and then, out of nowhere, you’re asked to take on another task? You know you don’t have the time, you know it’s going to impact other deliverables, you know the quality of your work is going to slide, but you say yes anyway.  

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, "overburden" refers to making someone or something work too hard, or carry, contain, or deal with too much. Context switching, on the other hand, involves the mental strain of shifting attention from one task to another frequently. Studies have shown that context switching can significantly reduce productivity by as much as 40%, as reported by the American Psychological Association. This constant multitasking not only makes you less efficient but also impacts how deep and creative your work can be. For more details on context switching, check out our previous blog post “Don't teach your people to think. They don't need that!”. We’ve also covered this in one of our other blogs “How Multi-tasking Sneaks up on Teams”. The short story is that the more we try to juggle, the less effective we are overall and the longer it takes to finish anything. This is why it's crucial to understand how to say "NO."  

Visible work allows us to say “No” skillfully

Imagine the well-known scenario where your leader asks if you can take something on in passing. Whether it’s your day-to-day functional leader, or your Product Owner, there is a cost associated with taking on more work. Not only does it blow up the sprint plan if you take this on without taking something else out (if you’re operating in Scrum) putting your sprint goal at risk, but it also sends a message about the validity and value of your backlog overall.

Even if you’re not operating in Agile ways of working, there is much to be said for having a well-organized, maintained and prioritized list of work that is visible. Hint- this is how you’ll be able to say no without the nonsense! The visibility of it allows us to be explicit in showing the tradeoffs we are making if we take on something new and make those conversations easier to navigate. Also, saying no sometimes just isn’t possible, but when we have a clear strategy, when we know our priorities and can speak to the impact of taking on unplanned work at this moment, we can provide clear choice to our leaders as to how much they want to push the issue. You might find that surfacing that information into the system takes away the need for you to say no anyway.  

Many leaders and teams we work with acknowledge that they struggle with prioritization, but few of them realize that it’s one of the biggest challenges they have. We know that we can just ask people to say no to their teams or leaders without fearing real or perceived repercussions, but when we work with the teams we support, we hide the vegetables and make it impossible for things that don’t fit the strategy or organizational goals to be taken on. Whether it’s building out a new prioritization model to meet your needs, aligning on a vision with leadership to support the prioritization you already have, or crafting decision making criteria for those outlier situations when the prioritization model doesn't quite work, we love supporting your people and teams to deliver the results that matter. If you’re looking to sneak in a “no” a little bit more skillfully, give us at IncrementOne a call!