Great leaders gracefully say “no” far more often than they say “yes.” Great leaders are crystal clear on their highest priorities and therefore gracefully say “no” at least 20 to 30 times more often than they say “yes.”
As a leader, are you teaching and coaching your direct reports, your team, your colleagues, and all those within your organization to carefully prioritize and then gracefully and appropriately say “no, no, no?”
A simple, graceful and appropriate “no” is, without doubt, one of the greatest, most effective, and most inexpensive productivity and success tools in the world.
We are approaching a new year. More than any other time during a given year, people and organizations are now carefully planning and prioritizing for the coming year. Careful planning and prioritizing for effective performance demands many difficult trade-offs. Trade-offs necessitate and demand frequently saying “no.”
In many organizations, employees throughout the organization have never been taught the power and importance of the word “no” and how to effectively use it. In fact, most are literally afraid to say “no.”
What about your direct reports, teams, colleagues, and employees throughout your organization? What about the culture of your organization? Are you modeling, teaching, and leading all within your organization to clearly understand the value and the critical necessity of saying “no” to most things so that they can say “yes” to those few most critical priorities?
There will never be a better time to revisit and to re-emphasize this critically important leadership and success principle. Make 2015 the year of saying “no” to almost everything, so that you and your colleagues can enthusiastically say “yes” to the very few things that are truly most important.
