Reducing Noise, Boosting Signal: Learning to Say No More Often

A senior product leader in a large company reached a breaking point recently.

What might be described as burnout emerged as the inevitable consequence of not being able to say no to the barrage of incoming requests and tasks that she found in her inbox each morning.

Colleagues received replies to email inquiries invariably in the hours between midnight and 5am, as this was the only time during the hectic day when replies could be composed without interruption.

Scheduling meetings became nearly impossible as her calendar looked like a brick wall every week. And yet, despite the back to back meetings from early Monday morning until late in the evening Friday, very little was accomplished week over week. It was demoralizing.

How had it come to this? She’d been excited about this job when she started. It was the chance to have a big impact, to make a difference. Clearly, there was something not quite right in the story. But was the fault in the organization or was it in herself?

Essentialism

As you progress in your career, the demands upon your time will increase. It is critical to be able to discern which tasks are essential, which should be delegated out, and which should be politely declined altogether. Unfortunately, most leaders struggle with this balance, with how to say “no”.

But saying no to the noise is necessary for career growth and leadership development. We recently talked about distractions in Finding Your Purpose. You may recall, as Greg McKeown points out in Essentialism, “if you don’t prioritize your life, someone will do it for you.” 

Meeting requests, emails asking for a reply, invitations to networking events, and so on, are all arriving in our inboxes each day. Do you have time for all of them? Of course not. You will have to choose. But how do you decide what is important and what is not?

How To Say No

Why is it so hard for some of us to say no? In another recent piece, Overcoming Internal Barriers, we talked about deeply ingrained habits that seem impossible to change. Saying no, for many, is one of those barriers.

Most leaders are hard-working, responsible people. We don’t want to let anyone down. We don’t want to disappoint our colleagues and teams. Unfortunately, that desire to be of service, when it is coupled with a lack of a sense of purpose and weak personal boundaries, can all too often result in our saying “yes” to everything—well beyond our actual capacity!

Thus begins the steady slide into burnout.

We must focus our efforts around a sense of purpose. We must rediscover, or develop anew, a set of concrete boundaries to protect ourselves and our time. Boundaries doesn’t mean being rude or uncooperative. It simply means that you have the respect and care enough for yourself to not allow yourself to get over-extended.

Organizational Essentialism

An organization also needs to be able to say “no” to the inessential as well. We’ve all seen the organizations that can’t, how dysfunctional they are, how frustrated and harried everyone seems who works there.

A healthy organization will have a clear and simple vision, and a strategy that it employs to achieve its business goals. For a strategy to be effective, it needs to be very clear about what the company will NOT do as much as what it will do. This might be in terms of a particular target market segment, a specific customer problem, or a specific technology. But no company can do everything, so it is critical to be able to focus on a key strategic path and ignore all other possible paths.

Large batches of work are common in most organizations, even as they are a prime cause of shipping delays, reduced quality, and cost overages. From Donald Reinertsen’s classic Flow: Principles of Lean Product Development (Reinertsen, 2009), we learn that cycle time (the time from when a product begins to be developed until it is shipped to a customer) can be reduced by using smaller batches without throttling demand or adding capacity.

Work-in-Process (or “WIP”) Limits are a good technique for organizations to remain focused only on the essential tasks. A WIP Limit is an explicit agreement among members of a product development organization (team, department, etc.) that a specific process, or step within a process, will only allow a set number of work items to enter that process at a given time. All other items must wait until an item in process is completed, freeing up a space for the next item. The set number is variable and depends on the particulars of the product and the team. The point is that everyone agrees not to take on more work at the same time.

For WIP limits to be effective for your organization, you have to be honest about your team’s or your organization’s capacity. In just the same way, you personally have to be honest about your own capacity. And that means being able to say “no” to all but the most essential tasks.

It can be hard at first to say “no” if you’ve really become habituated to taking on all work that comes to you. But if you can start practicing now, over time it will become easier. You’ll get more done, and it will be more of the right stuff too! That will be better for you and your career, as well as your organization.

Boosting signal, cutting through the noise, requires you to learn to say “no”.

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Want to learn more? Check out our Mindful Leadership Accelerator, where we work with leaders on these and other techniques, now accepting applicants.