Say “No” with Confidence!
Do you have trouble making decisions? It’s easy to confuse the “urgent” with the “important” or choose an option that feels easy instead of the one that’s best. Many of us also tend to say “yes” in the moment, later regretting that answer.
A college senior I coached last year was having trouble deciding on graduate school. While visiting the campus of the one she chose first, she saw that she’d selected the safer option. She realized she wanted a bigger life and now attends grad school abroad.
A small family foundation I’m advising on philanthropy faced a tough choice. The board leaned toward inviting grant requests openly via their website. I suggested they consider their capacity to promptly review proposals. To start, we’re creating a process to invite short applications from targeted organizations closely aligned with the foundation’s mission.
Last time, I shared about my first development job. Though I didn’t stay long, I’m proud that, in one instance, I was able to use “strategic refusal” to manage my workload. My boss asked me to administer a photo contest, produce a calendar and send it to the group’s members -- on top of my job managing all the development activities in a $1M nonprofit. It felt risky, but I told him “no”, explaining that the calendar would divert my attention from higher priority activities with a better return on investment.
A HANDY LENS TO WEIGH RISKS AND REWARDS
With so much pain and uncertainty in the current climate, nonprofit leaders struggle to identify which of the countless directions they might take is going to be the best — from decisions on fundraising and advocacy to programming, budgeting, technology and staffing. The “Strategic Refusal Framework” is a tool that just might help you efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff and move forward with confidence.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Executive coaches Luis Velasquez and Jordan Stark contend that too many leaders don’t push back on “impossible goals” when they should. Either the board or CEO proposes something the leader senses would waste resources and not turn out well. Too many decisions are based on impulse, conflict avoidance and/or an overly rosy forecast, they say. Instead, the coaches urge leaders to slow things down, reiterate priorities, surface trade-offs and say “no” strategically – so that what they say “yes” to has the best chance to succeed.
The framework’s creators offer great tips for talking to others that may need convincing:
· Reframe saying no: Focus on the decision’s impact on the organization, rather than its effect on your or your team’s bandwidth
· Reframe refusal as prioritization: I did this by persuading my boss that the calendar would pull me away from more impactful fundraising activities
· Show the cost of saying yes: Surface the risks in terms of lost human and other resources
· Present feasible alternatives: Describe the high-importance/high-feasibility choice as the one with the greatest rewards.
This highly rational tool requires calm minds and enough runway to pause and reflect on the larger context. I share it in the hope that it will help you increase buy-in for what you know is the right way to create sustainable results without overwhelming your organization, your people or yourself. Later, I’ll present strategies to tap into another kind of intelligence to help make decisions and lead effectively.