How to Get Better at Saying No

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Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Our families, schools, and workplaces often train us to comply: taking on additional work when asked, agreeing with the group's consensus, and going along to get along with our bosses and colleagues. So, even when we're told to "think different" and "embrace conflict," we often hold ourselves back. But when individuals learn to say no more often, it can have huge benefits for their careers and organizations, says Dr. Sunita Sah. A psychologist and professor at Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business, she shares a research-backed framework for evaluating whether to comply or defy at work and offers advice on how to do both more effectively. Sah is author of the book Defy: The Power of No In a World That Demands Yes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Got 30 minutes? Join Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin for a new monthly edition of the Capital Ideas podcast, brought to you by Capital Group, home of Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.
0:36.1	Are you guilty of going along to get along, thinking your team was about to make the wrong decision but not raising your concerns?
0:46.3	Agreeing with your boss's ideas when you have better ones?
0:50.3	Saying yes to an assignment when you'd much prefer to say no?
0:53.3	Today's guest says this kind of compliance is a bigger problem than we might think,
0:58.0	in our everyday lives and especially at work.
1:01.0	When we acquiesce to avoid conflict, or even because we think it will help us get ahead in our careers,
1:07.0	it can become a vicious cycle, leading us to behave in ways that aren't at all aligned with our long-term goals or true values.
1:14.2	She explains why we fall into these patterns and how we can break out of them, to get to a point where we're either complying from a position of understanding and power, compromising, or just saying no.
1:25.6	Dr. Sunita Sa is a psychologist and professor at Cornell's S.C. Johnson College of Business.
1:31.1	She wrote the book, Defy, the power of no in a world that demands yes.
1:35.7	Sunita, hi, thanks for being on the show.
1:37.5	Hi, it's wonderful to be here.
1:49.1	Let's start with the devil's advocate question.
1:54.6	You argue that we live in this world that wants us to comply with convention or authority.
1:57.5	But there are some benefits to that system, right?
2:02.1	You know, we don't want everyone walking around not doing what they're told or expected to. Well, I think the danger in constantly complying is that we might not think about it.
2:10.4	We actually comply much more than we think we do. And even though the U.S. is known and has ideals
2:17.2	for individualism and freedom of choice,
2:20.7	in some of my experiments, what I see is an extremely high rate of compliance, even when we're
2:27.3	given advice that we know is bad. And it's in these situations that we want to be able to speak up and we want to be
2:36.8	able to act. And we see in the business world certainly a lot of lip service paid to
	...

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