Time Management - Marc Mancini

Learning to Say No 85
• Suggest a trade-off. If you explain that you’re willing to
find some other way to contribute, you’ll underscore your
goodwill. For example, if your boss suggests you do
something and you’re convinced that you’re the wrong
person to do it, explain your perceptions and suggest taking
on another task that you know needs to be done.
• Don’t put off your decision. “Let me think it over ...” is
probably the most common way for people to postpone
an inevitable “no.” And it’s utterly unfair. Be courageous.
If you know that you cannot or will not do something, be
decisive and say it, then and there. Delaying a decision is
only justified in intricate situations.
An Exercise
Make a list of current responsibilities to which you probably
should have said no. How might hindsight have made you do
things differently? Does this suggest any resolutions for the
future? One reminder: unfortunately, there are things
you’d probably like to say
no to that, for “political”
reasons, require a yes.
Dealing with Meetings
and Committees
“A meeting,” said one pundit,
“is an event at which
the minutes are kept and
the hours are lost.”
The average executive
spends half of his or her
week in meetings. Of this,
about six hours’ worth,
according to several studies,
is rated as totally
unnecessary. Yet, in many
businesses, meetings have
How Not to Take No
for an Answer
Of course, the opposite problem of
learning how to say no is getting others
to say yes.The solution is persistence.
In sales, the single most common
reason for failure to close the deal is
that the salesperson never asks for
the business.The seller tiptoes
around the question, never coming
right out and asking the customer to
say yes. And, when the first response
is no, even those salespeople who
bothered to ask tend to give up.
You need to be able to say no and
mean it, but you may have to be persistent
enough to get others to say
yes.