What's the best way to say no?
In every career, there are times when saying no to an additional project is met with pushback. What's the most effective way to - politely! - say no once without needing to repeat yourself or burn bridges?
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Answers ( 1 )
Something that I read in a book about career success many years ago addressed this situation. It was pointed out that traditionally, many organizations overload their top talent because they consciously or unconsciously avoid giving tasks to less competent workers. This leads to the best and brightest in a company becoming overloaded with no extra pay to go with it. Soon, the best workers decide to find a better deal elsewhere where they will be paid better or asked to do less. Organizations often overload and chase away their best workers in this way.
Today we have numerous supervisors who consider workers to be interchangeable cogs and excuse having constant turnover in workers as part of doing business. They are ignoring the cost associated with hiring new employees and the eventual damage to the company‘s reputation. It eventually catches up to them.
Create a list of all of your current tasks and responsibilities. A chart or timeline (digital or on paper) is preferable, but it could also be a simple list of weekly items, committees, long term projects, etc.
When approached, you respond with something similar to the following: “If you take a look at this, you’ll see that my time is being used at capacity. Which of these would you prefer to assign to someone else?” Frequently your superior will realize the value of all the work you are accomplishing find someone else who isn’t as profuctive.
If they decide to reassign one of your job functions, immediately afterwards follow up, sending a cheerful email stating “Thanks for stopping by today. I understand that you will be reassigning the filling out of TPS reports to allow me the time and energy to clean the guacamole out of the employee fridge that accumulates each week. I am looking forward to switching to this new task. I will be happy to train whoever takes over the TPS reports if you would like me to.” I’ve found that without a digital “paper trail”, administrators will make deals and forget to (or never intend to) keep up their end of the bargain. If the fertilizer hits the fan later, it can’t be claimed that you just shirked your old job duty for no reason.
If they demand that you simply “squeeze it in somewhere”, state that you’ll do so, but the task will be done slap dash and one or more of your other tasks will be impacted as well. If they don’t go find a new sucker to dump it on and insist, smile, agree, and follow up with an email that thanks them for stopping by, that you understand that your new duty is XYZ, and that you will attempt to do an acceptable job at it and try to keep the negative impact on your other job duties as small as possible, but that you can’t guarantee it. As I stated earlier, I’m sure I could do a great job with this if you reassign one of my other job duties, but I’ll do what I can.
Smile, use upbeat words, but spell things out. If things build up to a problem down the road, you have these documents to establish facts. Many administrators like to do things verbally so that they can rewrite agreements, deny that conversations took place, and in other ways force actions to be taken while trying to dodge responsibility for them. Put things in writing, and make backup copies of emails that document anything that might lead to an issue in the future.