Why do you say yes when you mean no?

In business – in any area of life, really – we often say yes to things we don’t have a good feeling about. We say yes when we know saying yes is going to lead to an often unnecessarily painful sequence of events that, once committed to, we have no way of backing out. In short, we say yes to things that the data prohibits.

Have you ever been in this position? I definitely have. Businesses I have worked with have been. Sometimes this is just us in our humanity, needing to learn something “the hard way.” Sometimes, we’ve already learned it the hard way and have everything we need to take a different path – but we take the hard way anyway.

Why don’t we learn the hard lessons the first time? Why do we, in business and in other places in life, insist on pain? It’s a great question and one that warrants an answer, but that’s not the question I want to address today. Rather, today I want to call you out, wherever you are in your company, and ask you to consider why you say yes to things that are not actually good for your team, your colleagues, or the company at large.

This is a pointy question. It’s intended to be. It’s intended to raise your hackles and get you defensive. I fully expect to have some of you saying, “You clearly don’t understand the nuance and complexity of business decision making if you are asking that question.”

Okay. If you want to take that tack, no problem. Conversation over. But maybe, if you’re willing to enter into this space with me today, consider the last decision you made that had a very painful impact on the business.

This is an important question because this is often what keeps us in a pattern of fire-fighting instead of developing measures for fire prevention. It keeps us in chaos because we feel comfortable that we can handle the chaos rather than working towards an unknown state of stability.

Answering this question honestly requires conviction and a healthy measure of self-awareness. Do you understand the impact your decision had? Do you need to go talk to a few people to get a better idea? Do you feel you can get an accurate read on the pulse of the lowest echelons of your company?

If you don’t know, there’s the answer to the question. Business decisions are often made with the intention of impacting the business years down the road while the immediate future is an afterthought. This is important perspective to have. But if you are continually making decisions that put the short-term health of the business in jeopardy, soon you will not have a long-term to make decisions for.

I challenged all of my friends to eliminate a word from their vocabulary this year. Many of them met this with an eyeroll and I haven’t heard anything more from them. Some of them thought about it and gave me a word. One of them said, “I’m eliminating the word ‘sure’ from my vocabulary. I realized as I was thinking about this that when I say ‘sure,’ I often end up taking on a responsibility I don’t want and don’t have time for.”

I see the same thing in business: we are afraid of not hitting goals of some kind, so rather than taking a firm stance based on who we know we are as a business and who we know we are committed to serving, we take on any customer, anywhere – even when doing so wars against the integrity and the health of the business. Or we set a goal that is in fact at odds with the health of the business, or we create situations that undo fire prevention work and set us up again for fire-fighting

Activity: Consider the last three decisions you made. They can be big or small. Are you glad you gave the response (yes/no) that you did? If you are not, why? What made you select the response that you did? Were you afraid of something? What would have happened if you gave the opposite response?