Just Say No

One of the greatest threats to your leadership is the undisciplined habit of saying “yes”. Ideas are so tempting. If you are not careful they will woo you and lure you off course and off mission. 

Andy Stanley, once said:

“There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing.”

There is a time and place for ideating but there is also a time and place for executing. Do your team and the organization you lead a huge service and execute on the ideas you’ve already decided upon. Learning the art of creating both a “yes” and “no” culture is very important. You want your culture to breathe life into ideas and give birth to innovation. A “yes” culture can do that. However, a “yes” only culture can also create so much activity that you might confuse “activity with progress”.

The ideal is learning how to say “yes” in order to say “no”. For example, if someone were to ask me to hang out most Sunday mornings at 9am, I would easily and abruptly say “no”. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out, it’s just that I have already said “yes” to something. My “no” was easy and not offensive because I had already said YES to something. What if you created similar YES’ to the topics of conversation you hate saying NO to. As for my example: I’m actually freed up now on Sunday mornings due to COVID but you get the point. It is a breakthrough idea to create what I call a pre-determined “yes” list. 

Create a “YES LIST” for things like budgeting, vacation policy, scheduling, etc. Your values for yourself and your organization should populate this “YES LIST” so that you’re able to say NO based on something. 

Again, “the secret of concentration is elimination”, it’s time to re-learn the 1st word you learned as a child: NO! :) 

Onward!