Ejercicio 3 · Multiple choice: aprender a decir que no

Learning to say no at work

The advice is everywhere: protect your time, set boundaries, learn to say no. It is repeated so often that it has begun to sound like a personality trait rather than a skill, something you either have or lack. That framing, argues the occupational psychologist Ravi Desai, is the reason most people fail at it.

In his research, Desai asked two hundred employees to record every request they received over a fortnight and what they did with it. The results were not what he expected. Very few people accepted everything. What they did instead was accept quickly and then negotiate privately with themselves afterwards, working late, cutting corners, or quietly dropping a task nobody was monitoring. On paper they had been helpful. In practice something had been abandoned, and usually it was the piece of work with no audience.

Desai is unconvinced by the popular scripts, the polite formulas that promise a graceful refusal. In his interviews, people who used them were often perceived as evasive. The employees who refused successfully did something less comfortable: they made the cost visible. They said which existing task would be delayed and asked the person making the request to choose. This turns a refusal into a decision that somebody else has to make, which is, he admits, precisely why it is so rarely done.

He is also wary of blaming individuals. An organisation where every request must be personally negotiated is one that has pushed the work of prioritising downwards, onto people with the least information about what matters. Teaching them to say no more elegantly, he suggests, treats the symptom and leaves the cause exactly where it was.