Here’s a difference between people who are a pleasure to work with, and those who aren’t, in one sentence:
The great people to work with look for reasons to say “no” while the less-great people look for reasons to say “yes.”
Let me explain, with a simple comparison:
Imagine hiring a chef, who is a genius, and every single request you give them, they have a genius, excellent, awesome reason why they can’t do it. For every single one. Can you put in tomatoes? No, they’re not in season. Can start an hour later? No, I have another engagement afterward so I can’t push ours back. Can you buy the vegetables on your way over? No, I don’t have the time.
Even if every single reason is justified and unassailable, the pattern is strong: he’s just not doing what would give you the best experience.
Now compare this to the chef who, perhaps less of a genius, goes all out to do what you want. Can you put in tomatoes? Sure, but they’re out of season, so they probably won’t taste perfect, plus they’ll be more expensive. Can you start an hour later? Sure, but that means we’ll have one hour less to cook, so I won’t be able to cook everything planned and will have to remove one of the two appetizers, is that okay? Can you buy your vegetables on your way over? Sure, but that would delay me 20 minutes so I may have to remove one appetizer and the vegetable store near me is absurdly overpriced, are those problems?
Do you see what I did there? What the second chef did wasn’t just say “yes” to all requests. That’s what robots do (actually, not even robots do that.) Instead, with each request, instead of just saying “no,” she articulated that she can do it but added in the necessary trade-offs, then let her client decide if these were worth it.
This is definitely the winning strategy with clients: let them know the trade-offs and make the decision themselves.
That same point, reframed, is that your default answer should be “yes” to clients, always, but, in real life, every request does have a (usually implicit) trade-off. Thus, by forcing your client to address the trade-off, you force him to clarify if he really does need or want that. The power of that isn’t so much him clarifying it for you, but rather, him clarifying it for himself.
Even if you ignore this advice, there is something even worse than defaulting to “no” for clients. It’s defaulting to “no” and not telling them that. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow” the “mañana, mañana, mañana” culture. That destroys expectations and brings about breakdowns sooner rather than later. If you’re going to find genius reasons to say “no,” that’s perfectly fine—they are genius reasons, after all—then just make sure you’re direct and open with your client or boss about it.
