The power of yes
Early in my career, I was the typical headstrong young engineer - I knew what I thought was right and I wasn’t shy about it. So there was a lot of “no” in my interactions with other people. Not a lot of listening, and not a lot of collaboration. Since I was stubborn, quick on my feet, and smart, I tended to feel like this was successful, and to some degree it was. But it’s a very limited way to approach getting things done. Let’s explore a few examples.
At one point at Google, another team wanted something from my team, that I didn’t really want to do. We argued a bunch over it, and weren’t really getting anywhere. Finally, I reversed course and said “yes”, but I added some of my concerns into the yes - we had to broaden the scope so that the solution was more general, I wanted obligations from the other team in terms of support, and I had a bunch of questions that they needed to do work to answer. The other team decided that the approach they were pushing on wasn’t actually what they wanted, and we found a different path. None of what I had asked for was done maliciously - they were the real concerns that were in my head at the time, I just hadn’t been saying them, using “no” as shorthand. But saying “yes, and…” instead of just “no” let us have a real conversation.
Here’s another example - something I’m still embarrassed about. I took a negotiating class once. There was an exercise before lunch where you roll-played either being a musician’s manager or a radio executive, trying to cut a deal. I happened to get someone I knew well as the partner, we quickly found some easy middle ground, felt happy, and went to lunch early.
But…the real point of the exercise wasn’t to just settle on that middle ground, but to think about how else each party could help the other. The other groups that spent time on the negotiation found much more value together than my friend and I had. Sometimes a huge amount more. I had thought we were in an easy “yes” mode, but in fact, we were saying “no” to the harder conversation, and we completely missed the point. Saying “yes” and really engaging in the negotiation together would have given both of us much more than we wound up with.
Sometimes it’s subtle to understand if you’re saying “no” or “yes, and”. Yes is almost always a better place to start from - it goes by many names, like “growth mindset”, “inclusiveness/empathy”, and sometimes, just plain “listening”.
Yes is much more powerful than no.