It's very easy these days to lose your life to work. With the demands that most companies place on their workers these days more and more people are finding themselves travelling more and spending more time at the office. While this is occasionally inevitable, it is important to keep work in balance with your personal life. Its a trap that many young people fall into, and I fell into myself, the misperception that the greater the volume of work you produce and the more people you try and please the faster your rise in the company will be. While it may sometimes appear that this is the case, learning how and when to say no can actually be a more powerful tool in building a career than saying yes all the time.
The problem with "yes" is that it has diminishing returns, the more you use it the less valuable it becomes. If you get known as someone that always says yes there are four things that will follow.
1 - It's human nature to take the simple option so your level of work will increase as people will ask more things of you.
2 - The quality of your work will decrease as you become overloaded, in particular follow up actions and deadlines will start to be missed, which will not be good for your reputation. This will lead to the importance of the tasks trusted to you will decrease.
3 - When you are seen as an 'easy touch' and the person to load any unpleasant task on, people respect for you will drop. While they will still like you and probably even give you good feedback or ratings, they will not see you as someone to move up the ladder.
4 - Your quality of life and your personal relationships will suffer.
A powerful skill to learn is how and when to say no to tasks. Absolutely key to this is you need to be working hard and well to even contemplate turning down a task and have a reputation for doing so. This is not something to try your first month on the job, you need to have a base level of respect before you can start knocking back extra work.
When. There are no absolutes but there are some general guidelines. You should allready have a fairly full plate, this is not a guide to avoid work, just to keep in under control. If the task is not directly part of your role it is easier to turn down; if the task is scheduled for an after hours time that conflicts with other plans you have; if the task has other ways it could be done that have less impact on your workload; if the person giving you the task is trying to foist onto you work they should be doing. All of these are examples of when would be a good time to push back.
How. It is not wise to give a direct no as this does not always go down well. The technique is to agree with the person that it needs to be done, explain why you can't help them at this time, let them know that you are willing to help them meet the objective. For example if someone asks you to stay late after work to put together a report for a meeting they have the next day when your daughter has a recital that night. Tempting as it may be, the wrong thing to say is "Do your own drudge work you stinking weasel!". Try someting like "I'd love to help, unfortunately I have commitments tonight that I cannot cancel, is there another way we can get the information ready for you?" It's polite and not a direct refusal, you have offered to still help but opened a negotiation on terms. This is not guaranteed to get you the result you are after but pushes back in a respecful way that leaves an opening for negotiation if you have misjudged the situation. Its also left room for the other person to back down without losing face. It is also ok to agree after the person has negotiated for a while, even though you have neded up doing the task the other person ahs had ot work for it and consider your needs in the process.
The idea is not to push back on everything, but to protect your personal time and the quality of your work. You will find that saying no occasionally will generally increase your level of respect in the office. It is a skill that is valuable but also one that can take a bit to get the hang of so use it sparingly until you get the hang of it. There are a few occasions where it is rarely wise to push back:
- When the task is being given to you by your bosses boss or higher. If you are being given a request from this level it will generally be more than just a task, it will also be an opportunity to prove yourself in some way.
- Use it sparingly on your own boss.
- If everyone else in your team is going to be involved in the same task, especially if it is after hours, consider what jokes might be made while you are not there.
- If there is an actual crisis.
- If there is a real potential you could be blamed for any negative fallout from the task not getting done.
- If the task is to fix up a problem you created.
