15 February 2024
Why leaders need to say ‘no’ in order to be successful
Here are 5 variables to consider when deciding to say “no” or “yes” to something.
Saying “yes” to every opportunity that comes up can help you achieve a certain level of success. However, continuing to operate from a place of automatically saying “yes” can often hold you back from achieving your next level of success, whether that be climbing the career ladder or running a successful company.
There are many reasons why people get into the habit of saying “yes.” But whether you say “yes” to open more opportunities, because of FOMO, or to please other people, the negative impact is the same—you hamper your personal and professional growth potential.
Once you get into a cycle of always saying “yes” at work, it can be difficult to break out of it. Plus, the urge to completely fill your time can spill over from work into your personal life as well.
Overfilling your time, in a work context, can look like back-to-back meetings and continuously getting pulled into projects that you shouldn’t be, or don’t want to be, involved with anymore. Quite often, filling your time by always saying “yes” is not actually productive, because it is not sustainable and it wont contribute to your long-term growth.
According to the Pareto Principle, 20% of our activities produce 80% of our results. However, when you’re so busy running around, filling up your time, you rarely consider what you need to be doing to achieve your end objective in the simplest way.
The impact of this lack of space can be grave—your health starts to suffer; you feel exhausted and drained; and you may ultimately feel burnout.
Saying “yes” to everything also means that you don’t have the space to take on aligned opportunities, that is, opportunities that are part of the bigger vision of what you’re trying to create, and that you feel excited by. Saying “no” gives you the opportunity to invest your time wisely and advance your career goals thoughtfully.
