CIO Journal
Here’s something you might only know if you quit your job, wrote a book, sold your house, drove to Minnesota (over the Rocky Mountains in January), got stuck four days in a blizzard in Iowa, and started helping companies with their data:
Sometimes, you help people the most by telling them they don’t need your help.
When people call me for help with their data, it’s usually because they’re stuck, like a car spinning its wheels in snow. I spent a few months helping a client get unstuck, but at every turn, they insisted I solve their problems with Excel. For me, that felt like cleaning the snow off my car’s windshield rather than strapping chains on the tires.
How many times have you heard someone say, “I can’t do my job because I don’t have data”? The call comes right at the deadline for a business decision. I say this from experience: by graciously saying “no” to their request, you often help them find a simpler alternative.
Saying No Gracefully
Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, says “we can either make the hard choices for ourselves or allow others—whether our colleagues, our boss, or our customers—to decide for us…We can try to avoid the reality of trade-offs, but we can’t escape them.”
Anyone who’s walked the tightrope between saying “no” to their boss and keeping their job for long knows this: executives struggle to accept this truth about trade-offs.
Nobody likes hearing the word “no,” so McKeown offers excellent advice for saying it gracefully, without offense:
Separate the decision from the relationship.
I once faced a situation where a colleague continually diverted work to my team. We didn’t always have the capacity to take on new projects, and in many cases, solving business process problems with reporting solutions didn’t make sense anyway. By saying “no,” I’d have to accept blame for the deadlines my colleague missed.
It would have been easy to let this situation escalate to a full-blown leadership conflict, something you’ve probably witnessed in your own workplace. That didn’t happen. It took several years, but when my colleague finally recognized that I made my decisions for the good of his team and the business - even at personal risk - he slowly began to trust me. When I said “yes” to a project, he knew he could count on me.
He realized that I cared about his success as much as I did about my own, even when I was saying “no” to a request.
Saying “no” gracefully doesn’t have to mean using the word no.
Just because you’ve decided not to do something doesn’t mean you need to slam a door in someone’s face. Essentialists choose “no” more often than they say “no.” For example, when you understand the ultimate business goal of a data solution, you can explain how shortcuts actually delay the project.
Another common way to say “no” gracefully is to clearly define the project’s details, spelling out what’s included and what is not. Most leaders would rather have a partial commitment with high confidence than an overcommitment that carries significant risk.
Focus on the trade-off.
The more we think about what we are giving up when we say yes to someone, the easier it is to say no. It’s much easier to do this when you know your roadmap priorities. You can say, “We’d love to work on your project, but here’s the plan everyone agreed on.”
McKewon tells how this helped him: “Simply having an understanding up front about what we were really trying to achieve and what our boundaries were kept us from wasting each other’s time, saddling each other with burdensome requests, and distracting each other from the things that were essential to us.”
Make a Real Decision
What does it mean to manage data with “grace”? Caring about the interests of others, even when saying “no.”
I knew that using Excel to solve my client’s problems wouldn’t satisfy them in the long run. After failing to convince them that they should fix the data in their system instead, I finally said, “You’ve got the wrong consultant. I’m a data consultant, not an Excel consultant. You don’t need my help.”
Within two months, they called me back to discuss how to move forward with the system changes.
When people realize you’re making a real decision, they start to trust you more. They may not like your answer, but they also prefer a clear, graceful “no” more than a vague, uncertain “yes.”
To remind you of this week’s data concept, enjoy Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, from the Frictionless Data Spotify playlist.