Employing Differences, Episode 86: Yes or No?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing Differences, the conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:16

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:20

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Yes or no?"

Karen: 0:29

So this is one of those questions that comes up a lot. And in fact, I think we answer it unconsciously a lot. "Would you do this thing? Here, get this done? Are you available for? Can we add this task? Can we do it this way?" And all of those are sort of yes or no questions. There might be a maybe or conditional in there. But ultimately, we're faced with yes or no. And for a lot of us, there is a cultural norm of"it's always yes." That I'm agreeable, and I'm helpful, and this is my worth, and if somebody asks me to do a thing, I have to do the thing. Or perhaps I have to say I'll do the thing, which may be different. But that sort of agreeableness as a quality. And I think what we're wanting to explore today is what happens if we really ask the question, "yes or no?" and look within ourselves for what is the answer that really is going to serve both us and the teams that we're on and the projects that we're working towards? And particularly, when is that culturally normed agreeable"yes" not really the right answer, and we should gather our courage and offer up "no."

Paul: 1:51

Yeah, this for me is really about in the context of requests. "Can you do this thing?" And sometimes that's a question that is really a statement. "Can you do this? And no isn't actually an option." But that is, to your point around agreeableness, often a trap. We're asked, and we've fallen into realizing that that request is actually a demand that it's a formality, that it's being put in the form of a question. And I think we then believe that every time that a request comes to us that it's not really a request, that no isn't an option. And that actually makes collaboration really hard. Because unless I know that you can say "no" to a request that I'm going to make, your "yes" isn't particularly meaningful to me. Because we get in all kinds of trouble when we say yes to things that we can't actually do. That we can't deliver. That we probably even knew at the time. You know, somebody says, "Can you take this on?" And we say, "Yeah, I can do that." And in the back of our heads, "We're going I have no idea how I'm going to do that." Chris Argyris had a technique that he talked about, which is the left-hand column technique. And the way that he would do this is he would say,"Imagine a conversation that you've had with somebody. And in the right hand column on your sheet of paper, this is divided in two, I want you to write what you said. And then in the left hand column, I want you to write what you thought, but didn't say." And I always imagined these conversations where the right hand column it says,"Yes." And in the left hand column, it says "No." I think we do get stuck there. And I think that has a real cost to it.

Karen: 3:49

So I think I want to turn to like some strategies for thinking through this. Because I know what happens to me is I tend to be in a "yes" mood until I get completely overwhelmed, I'm buried my to do list is just too much, and then everything's"no." And this is not the ideal way to go about the yes and no thing. I mean, going along,"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," and then, "No, no, no, no, no." doesn't put the right things in the right buckets. The no might be the right answer by the time I give it. But if I had done a better job of no earlier then some of those things that I really would have liked to do, or would have served me or would have served, my team might have been able to be yeses. So I think we want to pause here and just sort of ask ourselves when we are asking the question "yes or no," what are the times that we should give ourselves permission to say no? And I think there are a couple of frames to look within for that. One is if it's not actually going to work for me. I'm going to hate it. I'm going to get less motivated for the project. I'm going to start feeling resentful or angry. I just don't plain to have enough time. There's something about it that from my willingness, my ability, my availability, it may even be I can't. You just asked me to speak Chinese and no, that's never gonna work. Maybe I'm afraid to say, "I'm not a good speller, you don't actually want me to proofread this." If that's what you're wanting, for proofreading that I'm not your person. So there's there's all these reasons, but it may be really about me that I need to say no, because it doesn't work for me in any of a number of reasons. I'll pass it to you for another sort of category of when to say no.

Paul: 5:45

So one of the reasons that I will often think about like, why do I say no to a thing is that it's not obvious to me what the benefit of saying yes would be. It's like, why would we do this? I think that the yes or no, do I do this thing or not decision needs to be deliberate. Because we do default a lot to one or the other one. And when we noticed that we don't actually know why we would be saying yes what are we actually even saying yes to? I don't fully even understand what it is that would take and what it would result in? It's often not even that I will say no. I very rarely start answering requests with no. What I'll actually start by doing is start by listing my hesitations and reservations. So I won't say yes, if I have hesitations or reservations about what this will take, whether or not I have the skill to do it to your point whether or not it'll work for me. But I also don't want to say yes, until I know what we're actually expecting will result from happening from this. And so it's not always is that it's an automatic no but it's not yet a yes. It's not an automatic yes.

Karen: 7:05

Yeah. And I think you're leaning into the next place I go, which is if it doesn't work for the group. That I'm part of a system, and even if it would work for me... "Sure, that sounds fun. I've got it. Yep, sure I can do that thing." But when I think about it, it's not going to work for the project, for the team, for the system. And maybe that's what you're really talking about which is,"I can't do it, I can't do it well, or it's just not going to have a good impact. Like, I hear that you want me to do that thing. I don't think having that thing done is a good idea. I don't think it's useful." And I've had plenty of times that someone thought it would be a great idea for me to spend my time doing a thing that I didn't think it was worth anybody's time to do. Like, I just didn't think it was useful way to spend time, no good outcomes. And then the other thing that can come into play there is it's not going to be good for the group if I do that thing. Mine isn't the voice that should bring that work, or there's somebody else that has a better skill set here that's going to deliver better on that, or something ugly is going to happen around team dynamics if I step into this space, and it's going to be better if we let somebody else... I have a group I'm working with now that, you know, one person decided they'd step in and do a thing, somebody else felt like they at least should have been consulted and didn't get as consulted the same way. Feelings hurt like crazy. That might have been a good moment for that first person instead of having said, "Sure, I can do that," to have said, "Oh, I don't know that it's gonna work out well, for us if I do that. You know, I'm willing, but I don't know that that's the right fit." So really looking at that within the system from all of these different factors, is it actually going to work for me to do the thing that I'm being asked to do for the group?

Paul: 9:00

Yeah. One of the ways that I work through that and as I kind of mentioned this already when somebody asks, someone makes a request of me, I almost never say yes or no to start with. When a request comes, the usual thing is, "Tell me more about that." And what I want to know about is a couple of things. I want to know, what is it you're hoping will come out of this? Why is the request being made at all? Because it's probably, "Hey, I want to get this result. I'm hoping that it will have this benefit, it will do this thing." And I'll often ask, "Why are you asking me to do it? Why me?" Because that often allows me to discover what are you actually expecting me to do? What does that really look like? Let's get super clear. Because I think requests often come with very little context. When you ask when you ask a yes or no question, you usually lead with it. And then people say yes or no. But then you have so much more explaining to do about what they said yes or no to actually was. Or you lay so much context that by the time you get to the question, the person is like,"What are you even asking me to do?" It's easy to lose that in there. And so I think, in this idea of being able to say yes or being able to say no, we actually need to be super clear about what we are saying yes or no to? What is the actual request here that is either not yet revealed or buried in this mountain of detail?

Karen: 10:42

Yeah, yeah. And I'll add one more piece, which is to your point of context is that actually going to succeed? If I do the thing, will it have the results? There's the thing of whether or not I can do it, but also will it actually work? And there's, I think an awful lot of, "I've got this great idea, if you do this thing, then this and this, and this will happen." And if I'm sitting there thinking through it, and going,"Well, I could do that thing, but this and this are not the things that are going to happen as a result of that," that we can go back and have those better conversations. So I think what you're pointing to really, clearly is the value of the yes or no might actually be the conversation about it.

Paul: 11:31

It almost always is.

Karen: 11:31

Yeah, so that it's not just, "Yes, I'll do it" or "No, I won't" but can we stop and really strategize? These are the players we've got on the team. This is the skill set I bring, and the time and the capacity and all those things that I have not to mention my likes and dislikes, which by the way, are relevant to this question and what everybody else has, and the goals and the resources on board and all of the context around that. And if we put all of that in, in a thoughtful way, and probably there's some stuff, I don't know about it that you do and some stuff you don't know about it that I do. So if we actually have the conversation, very likely we'll decide together, that that's not the thing I should do. We will decide together that some other things should happen. And maybe it's that someone else should do the thing. Or maybe it's I should do a different thing. Or maybe it's that we all should do a whole different thing entirely.

Paul: 12:28

And I think that exploration is super important to do, particularly when you feel in yourself the need to say no, and the impulse to say yes. Because what that tension I feel usually comes from is the realization that you want to say no to the request, and yes to the relationship. And we often feel like if we say no to a request, we're actually saying no to the relationship, that we that it will damage the the working relationship that we have in some particular way. And when we're caught in that bind, that is where it can become really, really useful to explore what is the larger context about this? What is the real request that's here? What's the impact that you want to have? Because there may be in that exploration something that I discover I can say yes to. I would say no to your initial request. And I don't want to. And I may even end up saying no to whatever we uncover, but I think it's really useful to do that exploration of what might I be able to say yes to.

Karen: 13:41

So just to pull together the pieces, when we're saying yes or no to something, pausing to think about and probably to talk about is that a thing that actually works for me? Is that a thing that will actually work for the team? Is that a thing that will actually have the effect that we're hoping for? And are there other factors that need to be considered in there? And if as we're answering those questions for ourselves, we can actually ask them and explore them with the person who's asking, very often the result is that putting all of that information together, we end up with a far better plan than the one first proposed. And so just really encouraging us when we get asked a "will you do a thing," when we're given a request, to pause and pay attention to the feelings. If we're like, "Yeah, sure, absolutely. I can do that," great. But if there's a part of us that saying no, to track that while we probably want to say yes to the relationship, we may want to say no to the request. And that's a really good time to do some exploration and figure out what's going on in the space and what might work to say yes to the relationship, but not get caught in a task that we aren't going to feel good about.

Paul: 15:01

Absolutely. Well that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 15:06

And I'm Karen Gimnih. And this has been Employing Differences.