The Three-A Trap

The Three-A Trap

“No” may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is also the most difficult to say well..

When I ask the participants in my executive seminars at Harvard and elsewhere why they find it challenging to say No, the most common answers I receive are:

• I don't want to lose the deal.
• I don't want to spoil the relationship.
• I'm afraid of what they might do to me in retaliation.
• I'll lose my job.
• I feel guilty – I don't want to hurt them.

At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship. Exercising your power, while central to the act of saying No, may strain your relationship, whereas tending to your relationship may weaken your power.

There are three common approaches to this power-versus-relationship dilemma:

Accommodate: We Say Yes When We Want to Say No

The first approach is to stress the relationship even if it means sacrificing our key interests. This ts the approach of accommodation. We say Yes when we want to say No.

Accommodation usually means an unhealthy Yes that buys a false temporary peace. I give in to a child's demand for a new toy to avoid feeling guilty that I am denying him something he wants, only to find that it just leads to more and more demands – and both of us being trapped in an endless unhappy loop. When the boss asks you to work over the very weekend that you and your spouse have been planning to get away, you grind your teeth and give in, fearing you will lose that promotion you want, even if your family life suffers. All too often, we go along to get along, even if we know it is not the right decision for us. Our Yes is actually a destructive Yes, for it undermines our deeper interests.

Accommodation can also hurt our organizations. Take an example from Chris, a participant in one of my seminars: “I was working on a huge $150 million deal with colleagues at my company. We had worked very hard on it and thought we had done a good job. Just before the deal was finalized I decided to double-check the numbers one last time. As I did the calculations, it became all too clear that the deal was not going to be profitable for us over the longer term. Because everyone was so excited about it, and people could not wait to make it official, I couldn't bring myself to throw a wrench into the works. So I went along, knowing that the project was bad for us and that I should speak up. Well, the deal happened and, as I had feared, a year later we were cleaning up a huge mess. If I had that situation in front of me now, I have no doubt I would speak up. It was a costly but valuable lesson.”

Think about Chris's fear of throwing “a wrench into the works” particularly because “everyone was so excited about it.” We all want to be liked and accepted. No one wants  to look like the bad guy. That is what Chris was afraid would happen if he brought up the uncomfortable facts. Everyone's excitement would turn into anger against him, or so he feared. So he proceeded to OK a dal that he and others later came to greatly regret.

There is a saying that half our problems today come from saying Yes when we should be saying No. The price of saying Yes when we should be saying No has never been higher.

We say No when we want to say Yes. Illustration by Elena.

Attack: We Say No Poorly

The opposite of accommodation is to attack. We use our power without concern for the relationship. If accommodation is driven by fear, attack is driven by anger. We may feel angry at the other for their hurtful behavior, or offended by an unreasonable demand, or simply frustrated by the situation. Naturally we lash out and attack – we say No in a way that is hurtful to the other and destructive of our relationship. To quote one of my favorite lines by Ambrose Bierce: “Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

Consider what happened in one large business dealing between a state government and a large corporation the state had hired to build and run a computer system to manage the state's payments to the poor, elderly, and sick. A quarter of the way through the year, the computer system had eaten up half of the state's available budget. Naturally fearful that the budget would soon be exhausted, the state officials canceled the contract and took over the project from the company. The officials were angry at the company, and the company managers in turn were angry at the state, each blaming the other for the problem.

The state officials were nevertheless interested in acquiring the computer and its database from the company because of all its valuable information. The estimated value of the computer system was $50 million. To the company, which had no alternative use for the system, the value of the system was nothing if they could not sell it to the state. To the state, the system was easily worth the $50 million because trying to re-create the data might cost them more – and besides, they did not have the time. Normally, an agreement would not have been at all hard to reach since it was in the interest of both sides. However, because each side's anger led them to attack with destructive Nos, the negotiations descended into finger-pointing. Each side stood up for itself by attacking the other. The result was no agreement and $50 million in value going up in smoke. The years later, the state and the company remained locked in litigation, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on legal expenses. Both sides ended up losing heavily.

Many of our problems come from saying Yes when we should be saying No, surely just as many come from saying No but saying it poorly as the state government and its corporate supplier did. We live in a world in which conflict is ubiquitous – at home, at work, and in the larger society. Think of family feuds, bitter strikes, boardroom fights, or bloody wars. Each time people attack each other, what message are they really delivering? At the heart of every destructive conflict in the world, small or large, is a No. What is terrorism, the great threat of today, if not a terrible way of saying No?

We say No poorly! Photograph by Elena.

Avoid: We Say Nothing at All

A third common approach is avoidance. We don't say Yes and we don't say No; we say nothing at all. Avoidance is an exceedingly common response to conflicts today, particularly within families or organizations. Because we are afraid of offending others and drawing their anger and disapproval, we say nothing, hoping that the problem will go away even though we know it will not. We sit at the dinner table with our partner in cold silence. We pretend that nothing is bothering us at work when in fact we are seething with anger at our co-worker's behaviour. We ignore the injustice and abuse inflicted on others around us.

Avoidance can be costly not only to our personal health, producing high blood pressure and ulcers, but also to our organization's health, as problems fester until they become unavoidable crises.

Avoidance, in whatever domain of life, is deadening. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The Combination

The three A's – accommodation, attack and avoidance – are not just three separate approaches. Usually, one spills over into the other, resulting in what I call the three-A trap.

We all too often start by accommodating the other. Then, naturally, we begin to feel resentful. After suppressing our feelings for a while, there comes a point when we suddenly explode, only to feel guilty afterward at the destructive impact of our attack. So we lapse back into accommodation or avoidance, ignoring the problem and hoping it will disappear. We are like a mouse caught in a maze, rushing from one box to another but never getting to the cheese.

All three approaches were at work in the crises that hit Royal Dutch Shell in April 2004, when it was revealed to have over-reported its oil reserves by a whopping 20 percent. The company's public reputation was damaged, and its credit rating was reduced, while the chairman, the head of exploration, and the chief financial officer all lost their jobs.

The reason for the false reporting was the chairman's insistence that a barrel in oil reserves be recorded for every barrel pumped out of the ground – to which no one had the courage to say No, despite the clear evidence that what he was demanding was insupportable. Shell's head of exploration tried to raise the alarm but, pressured by the chairman, publicly accommodated even if he privately bristled. The tensions boiled over a year later when, after the chairman gave him a negative personnel evaluation, he counterattacked with a blistering e-mail message that surfaced publicly: “I am becoming sick and tired of lying about the extent of our reserves issues and the downward revisions that need to be done because of far too aggressive/optimistic bookings.”

While the chairman attacked and the head of exploration alternated between accommodation and attack, the chief financial officer resorted to avoidance, hoping that somehow the problem would go away. But it didn't and that somehow the problem would go away. But it didn't and, in the end, resulted in a huge mess with severe consequences for all involved.

We say nothing at all. Photograph by Elena.