How do you say no to a boss?

That's the million-dollar question, because everybody has this question at one time or another, in one form or another. It's about really workload. It's not about behavior.

This is not about toxic bosses, vicious bosses, predators, or any of those overtly problematic things. Most bosses are reasonable. They are mostly competent. And, by definition, most are overwhelmed and overworked, and too busy with too many things, and they likely have pressures and problems with their own bosses. And it may not be your boss. It might be an investor. It might be somebody in your community. It might be somebody who exerts a strong influence on you.

Now, how do you push back, when you need to?

You have a lot on your hands but, as always, that's a good problem to have. The idea is to look at this as: “I have too many things to do. How do I cut down on the number of things I have to do. And how do I talk to my boss about this, so that it comes across as reasonable?” I'm going to explain to you how to approach this in just three steps.

It will involve calculating the time that is available to you, the budget, the resources you have, and how clear the task is. Unfortunately, often, the most troublesome part of this is that what you're supposed to do is not clear: maybe it's changing all the time, or the list is too long, or too ambitious, or you have a client who keeps changing the parameters and is difficult to deal with.

Let’s look at those three steps to deal with this kind of situation.

1 - Focus on clarity

The first element is to get serious about obtaining clarity. Why? Because, these days, everything seems urgent, and everything is important. People come to you—people below you, people reporting to you or your colleagues, people above—they come to you and say, “This is important.” It could be a client. “This is urgent. This is critical.” This is where you pause and say, “Let's be clear. Why is it urgent? Is it urgent to you? Because what's urgent to you is not necessarily urgent to me.”

You must adopt the posture of not automatically saying yes to everything. You're dead if you do that. Everything seems urgent today, because there's an emotional response to some kind of fear, to some kind of risk, to some kind of imagination. I want you to avoid falling into the trap of fake urgency. That means you have to find a way to talk about the fake urgency, to identify what’s fake versus what’s real.

The first thing to remember is that urgent and important are two different things. Usually, things that are important are not, by definition, urgent, and things that are presented as urgent are, frankly, often not actually important. Now, that said, if your boss comes to you and says something is important to them, it's important to you. But if it's a colleague, a partner, a consultant, or somebody else coming to you and saying it's urgent, that’s when you need to pause and take this step, to clarify if it's a “that's urgent for you, not necessarily for me” item. This is a good conversation, one you want to have.

In addition, you want to establish specifically what's expected. Write it down. Get very specific on what needs to be done. Often, people don't spend enough time writing this down, but this is about clarifying your agreements.

That brings us to the third part of obtaining clarity, and that is to manage agreements. It's a very powerful thing when you speak to people about agreements. “Here's our agreement,” you say. “Here's your role, and here's my role. Here's what I'm going to be doing—not [this] and not [that].” This is key because when we don't have clear agreements, it becomes very confusing—and the blame will always be placed on you.

2 - Prioritize and eliminate

A client of mine came to me and said, “Hervé, I have too many priorities. I just can't do it; my day is crazy!” I replied, “Wait a minute. These are not all priorities. You should have—at maximum—five priorities. I think you're confusing priorities with tasks.”

I explained, “Priorities are very different from tasks. What you're responding to is people are saying this is urgent and important, and that it's a priority. ‘Priority’ is just another way of saying urgent and important, but it's not actually a priority, right?”

A good example of a clear priority is: “This year we're focusing on marketing.” Or “This year we're focusing on clients in Northern Europe.” Or “This year we’re cutting costs” or “This year, because of COVID-19, we're making sure we take care of our employees’ health and safety.” That's a priority—it's general and it's strategic.

The goal is to become very good at differentiating between tasks and priorities.

Are you familiar with the law of Pareto? It says that 20% of what you do generates 80% of your impact and that 20% of what you do creates 80% of your stress. Now, from among all these tasks that you have, most of which are not priorities, what are the 20% of your tasks that need to be done and will create 80% of your performance—real performance?

Now, let's talk about the bottom 20%. One thing that nobody does in any industry is asking, “What do we eliminate?” If you did, people would be startled and say, “Eliminate? You mean doing less?” That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Yes—eliminate the bottom 20%.

3 - Your boss is there to be your partner in success

Your boss is not a divine ruler, master of all, a kingly, overly powerful entity. They are somebody with whom you should and can have an adult conversation. What you want to do is to really nail down an agreement with this boss about partnership. You are partners in this success.

In a previous article and video, I emphasize focusing on making your boss successful and strengthening your relationship with them. That's really an attitude that changes the game. You work for them, and not the other way around. Now that you have credibility and influence, you want to say to your boss:

“You're going to be focusing on these exciting, strategic issues. And I'm dealing with all the unexciting operational matters, right? I get that, but even so, I do need some of your time to navigate this:

• Can we have an agreement that we need to work as a team to create your success?

• When I send you an email on this, you'll respond?

• When I call a meeting, will you come prepared?

• And throughout the year, or throughout the month, or throughout the week, can we touch base to stay mutually accountable and in synergy?

Ultimately, you want to ask: Can we have a mutually beneficial partnership?

I assure you that these adult-to-adult conversations change the game—your hierarchy will learn to respect you. You're now somebody who is creating boundaries, who is defining how success will be created, and who is mentally strong enough to partner with them. Most of the time they will say yes to most of your requests. After all, they know that you are the builder of their future success.

This is when you can start really pushing back on which fake priority can be eliminated or reduced.

In summary, the first step is to obtain extreme clarity; the second step is to use the Pareto Principle to define which 20% creates 80% of the impact. Regularly make a list and eliminate the bottom 20%. It's a very courageous approach, but I know you can do it.

Finally, approach your boss positively, as a friend and a partner in success. “I'm trying to make you successful, right? All right then, how are we going to partner in getting things done?”

Enjoy the process—it works.