Flashcard: Hearing "no"
One bad boss and two tactics to get to "yes"
It’s the night before a pitch. I’m standing in the studio looking at about two dozen huge foam core boards. The pitch team favors an analog style, no slideware for us. Each board is covered with pieces of paper that were designed, printed out, and affixed to the boards. The hundreds of pieces of paper are mostly blue. The prospect we are pitching uses blue and green for their brand colors and the designers used blue.
My friend, who runs the studio, is with me. The boards arrayed around the room represent days of intense work by a large team that we run. They tell a story of the consumer research, strategic insights, and creative ideas. Most of us have not slept much the last couple of nights. My friend and I take naps in shifts on a couch in someone’s office, just running home to shower and get new clothes. But tonight, it’s 10pm and the boards are done and look great. I’m feeling hopeful that I’ll get home by midnight and get a few hours of sleep before the pitch the next day.
The CEO walks into the studio, with some other senior people. He looks at our work and says, “I don’t love the blue.”
My friend and I look at each other.
“That’s one of their brand colors,” my friend says.
“I’m not feeling the blue. It needs to be green,” he says.
I try to explain to him the number of hours it will require to redo all of this content in green instead of blue. I tell him that our teams haven’t slept more than a few hours for days. That it won’t make any difference to the client which of their brand colors we lead with, either one will do.
“We can’t get this done by tomorrow,” I say.
He has this way of tilting his head as if he is considering what you are saying, like he read it in an article somewhere, but I always suspect he’s not listening at all.
“You have to,” he says. “This is a pitch winning change.”
We redo all the boards. We are up all night.
And we lose the pitch.
This was a long time ago, and I don’t remember the client we were pitching, or exactly what words everyone said. But I remember that CEO would not hear no from me. There was nothing I could think of to motivate him; talking about the people who would be impacted, that we didn’t need to do this to win, nothing worked.
I was younger then, and naively assumed that he was, like the rest of us, focused on winning with the least wear and tear on our people. I realize now that if we had started with green he would have made us change it to blue. It was about power, or dominance, or putting my friend and I – both women – in our places.
What do you do when your boss won’t hear no?
My clients often bring up how to get their direct reports or peers to hear no. But what if it’s your boss? Today’s flashcard is about hearing no, saying no so that it can be heard, and getting to yes. And this could work for wherever you are in the organization, but I’m going to focus on the boss.
First, I’m going to assume here that the behavior or business decision at issue has no moral or ethical component. So, this is not about the time I told the owners of a creative agency that they couldn’t strip down to their underwear at work, and A bthat a blow-up sex doll was not an appropriate party decoration. Although that would be a fun newsletter -- all the crazy things I’ve really had to say to men at agencies.
I am also assuming that the boss in question is concerned about what is good for the business and the people who work there. Because clearly, not all of them are.
That said, let’s look at those decisions where everything is appropriate and above board, people have good intentions but don’t agree about the path forward. Here are two tactics to try to get people to hear no, and to get to yes.
First, try to find some common ground. This is what I was trying to do with the Bad Boss about blue. You know why you think a decision is the best choice. But you need to know why the person who disagrees with you thinks their option is best. This is especially important if the person who won’t hear no has more power than you do.
Imagine this scenario: a creative director is arguing that a particular location is the best creative choice for a tv shoot. The account person is arguing that they need something closer to the client’s house because the client won’t get on a plane. The producer is arguing that the location is too expensive and is going to blow the budget. You can see that all three are using different rationales. Each is important to the person using it, but not important to the others.
When you have key goals in opposition – in this case, creative excellence, client relationships and balanced budgets – you are going to get conflict.
When you can understand and address the concerns of the person on the other side, you have a better chance of compromise. The creative director who goes to the producer and suggests a cut in another part of the shoot budget to cover the cost of the location she wants is going to have a better chance of getting to yes.
Most people are going to be considering one of these key factors in work decisions.
1. Money. Profit, margin, new revenue, personal compensation, budgets. In the example above, this is what the producer is considering.
2. Reputation. This could be the reputation of the company, of a team, or someone’s personal reputation. A brand is a kind of reputation and that would fall here. The creative director in the example is focused on the reputation of the agency and with her reputation as a creative director.
3. Relationships. With direct reports, bosses, colleagues, clients, partners, board members, prospective employees or clients. The account person is in this bucket, putting the relationship with the client first.
4. Ethics. The conflict may be over an ethical or moral belief. For example, if someone on the creative team doesn’t want to shoot in a state that has taken political action they find repugnant. This can be especially challenging when ethical viewpoints are in strong opposition. Look at any example of someone not providing products or services to another on “religious” grounds. Imagine the conflict between a pharmacist who won’t sell emergency contraception and his co-worker who is a pro-choice activist.
Find out what is important to the person you are in conflict with, and see if you can reframe the discussion to show why your way achieves their objectives.
The second tactic is to agree on ground rules up front.
If you are having to say the same no over and over again, agree to ground rules up front.
A tool I use all the time with my clients is a yardstick. Ok, it’s another term of art, technically a second flashcard, so you get a BOGO here (BOGO is buy one get one free).
I’ve worked for a couple of places where the owners were creatives. I was the money person – making it, keeping it. We would have ongoing conflicts about creative projects they wanted to take that were interesting to them creatively, but would lose money, sometimes great swathes of money that would put the business in jeopardy.
I waited until they were receptive – that is, when the financial outlook wasn’t too positive. And then in a leadership team meeting got them to agree on five principles that would be our yardstick for measuring new business. It was all theoretical, we weren’t talking about an actual opportunity. It is important to make a yardstick outside of an actual decision-making process, so it can be business focused.
I always try to make an acronym out of the yardstick values, to make it memorable. So using Money, Opportunity, Reputation, and Ethics you would talk about your MORE. Be clear how many of the boxes need to be ticked. In other words, if your yardstick is about doing great work, having a profit margin of X and the resources to handle the work, you should have to have 2 out of three. One isn’t enough.
These work for any kind of business where you have the money people and the makers at odds.
Once everyone agrees on the yardstick values, it’s much easier to use that to get people to hear no. It's not foolproof. But if a leadership team is genuinely committed to running a profitable business and treating people well, you can usually make some headway.
And for those of you who are bosses? Hear the no. Realize how hard it can be for someone to speak up to you, and listen to them, with or without the attentive head tilt. If you are overriding someone who has expertise where you do not, listen more. Even if they don’t get their way, they’ll remember that you paused to listen and respected them enough to hear them out.