Hello blog readers,
In the project business, it can happen that you don’t have the possibility to do another task because you don’t have the capacity or would overwork yourself. Therefore, it is essential to make the experience of refusing tasks at a very early stage. Because by always saying “yes” to everything and overworking yourself, the quality of your work decreases and you feel mentally used up relatively quickly, which could also lead to burnout syndrome in the worst case. Therefore, I would like to describe the so-called sandwich method, which could help you say “no” better and help the person asking the question understand your “no”. Start your feedback on the question of whether you can accept the further task with a positive sentence. For example, “Thank you for trusting me with this responsible task. The second component of your feedback is the negative feedback, i.e. saying “no”. In the example, this would be “Unfortunately, I don’t have the capacity to take on another task at the moment. I could only work on the topic in the next sprint.” You round off the whole thing with a positive message, the so-called “lid”. With the statement “If you like to work on the topic, you are welcome to come to me with questions, and I could give you hints for the solution”.
We summarise:
4. the lid (decision question) (slice of bread )
3. solution / alternative (salad)
2. delimiting message (salami)
1. introduction (slice of bread )
I am curious to see if this method helps you say “no” in everyday project work.
