Agreeing to every request is the first mistake to avoid, says the Financial Times' Pilita Clark.
I kept thinking about that letter on the drive back home, because knowing how to say no at work has always struck me as an essential skill. Knowing how to do it in a pandemic, when job insecurity is rife, seems even more important.First, it is exhausting and there is a large chance that life is draining enough right now, whether you are lucky enough to have a job or not.
But there is a third, less apparent reason why saying no is vital. It makes it more likely that you will become what a lot of workers are desperate to be at the moment: Influential and indispensable.In my experience, the most valued people in the office are not the ones who take on the most ludicrous workloads or play the best office politics.Rather, they demonstrate their worth by being easy to work with and super competent.
An older journalist offered some advice I never forgot. “Distract the baby,” she said, explaining it was never a good idea to refuse to do something outright. Rather, one should listen and, if the request was truly mad, come up with a plausible alternative that would satisfy the requester. His book, , was written before the pandemic. But one of its central ideas is the need to avoid what he calls “over-commitment syndrome”: The understandable urge to prove one’s value at a time of great anxiety and uncertainty.“Fight it,” he says. “If you try to do everything for everybody, you’ll end up doing nothing for anybody.”
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