Fast Company | Business + Innovation: Kristin Muhlner is the CEO of NewBrand Analytics, which helps companies monitor social media chatter about them. She also has mastered the art of saying no, resolutely refusing to become overextended in all corners of her life. Fast Company caught up with Muhlner to learn how to wiggle out of networking, email, and even--gasp!--charitable work.
13 comments:
I have a hard time saying no to people when they ask for things and it is definitely something I need to work on. This article is really good at letting you know it is okay to say no and give yourself a bit of a break. You do not have to always be working, helping others and overworking yourself to get all of this accomplished. This is not a work setting but I see a lot of people not saying no enough during playground. I myself was guilty of this last year, you go into the week only being a part of two shows and then next thing you now you are working on seven and haven't gotten enough sleep and become less valuable as a worker. Saying no isn't always a bad thing, in fact saying yes in the end could cause more harm.
I do agree with this article that saying 'no' sometimes is super helpful, but I feel like the advice she gives for saying now, is very specific to her and people like her. Yes, if you're a CEO and you are in a lot of the situations she is in, then sure, follow her guidelines. But if you are in any other situation, that advice might not apply. In any situation, it's good to say 'no' every once in a while, but maybe not specifically where she says to say no.
I am not sure how much this would apply to say, a college arts/theatre students as much as it does people who already have stable jobs. That is not to say that people here do not have a problem with saying no, because I have seen it during every playground, that IS a problem here. Some of the tips Muhlner gives to people are unavoidable in our world. The one that stood out to me immediately was the big bold letters that read, “Don’t Network”. When you are a freelance or theater anything networking is livelihood. It cannot and should not be avoided. Also, her form of networking she is complaining about is more for the corporate world and is not really what any of us do unless you get really high up there. Also, the say “no” to all nighters is a generally good rule for anyone, but sometimes in our world it is 100% unavoidable, depending on what you do in theatre. There are such things as 36 hour calls and overnight calls, and generally they can pay very well so I wouldn’t necessarily avoid them.
With all that being said I think it is always important to keep in mind the concept of not overstretching yourself. I have worn myself out and it can take days to recover. Sometimes those recovery days are not worth it.
It might be better for everyone to strike a good balance between saying 'yes' and saying 'no'. I think we have a problem with being too heavy-handed with either one saying or the other; the author comments how necessary it is to not kill yourself working so many different projects or so hard on one particular job. In the age we live in, it's become so commonplace to have jobs completed in seconds or minutes. Sometimes, I don't think we realize that we aren't like our computers, and we get frustrated very easily when the result takes days or weeks or quite a few tries. I think the quality of our work and our daily lives will be ameliorated if we take some time to slow down and perhaps say no to the less important objectives we are surrounded by.
I totally understand what the author was going for here, however I'm horribly confused. I think that the original point about how we should learn to say no to things that may not necessarily be worth our time was interesting and probably useful, but I can't say I agree with how many things the author seems to think aren't worth the time. It got to the point where I wished that the article was satire.
If these points of threshold were actually useful to the author to become successful, good for them, but I can't see this list applying to a very wide variety of careers.
I agree with this article on one hand because the ability to say no is a specific skill that a lot of people don't use. Students are a great example of this. Students often don't say no and take on far too many tasks between school, extracurricular activities, and professional opportunities, and this causes them to ignore their possible personal lives and also pay no mind to self care. It surprises me that some people don't agree with this article for the most part because even though our school can be extremely competitive, there is no need to have a mental breakdown over trying to do everything. This is one of the key things our professors are often trying to teach us is how to produce work of a great quality while still not burning ourselves out.
"No" is one of my favorite words in the english language. In fact, it is actually a word that I need to start using more often, especially when it comes to committing to jobs. I feel like I am always saying "yes" because of my friendly outgoing personality. However, I tend to regret it when I swamped with all of the work I need to do. I think it what would help me say "no" to tasks would be if I knew what the task required before committing to it. Wouldn't that be nice? People telling you how large a task was before asking you to help them with it? Maybe someone will read this comment and tell me the commitment before asking? One can only hope!
Perhaps the whole article is best summed up by one of it's subheadings: "Save the world? Nah." A couple of her suggestions were a little hard to swallow, such as the say no to networking events paragraph, but in general I took the article to mean that one should only commit to those things that will absolutely benefit yourself. Not overextending your commitments is tremendously important, and certainly an issue here at CMU Drama. After some scheduling mishaps last year, I definitely am always much more wary of committing to anything this semester. There have definitely been instances where I have turned down outside commitments because the rewards of being involved were outweighed by the increased workload.
There is a fine line between having a backbone and being unavailable and therefore not easy to work with. I think it's important to know what your interests are; you can then build off of them, pick projects you're interested in, and then be more eager and more willing to say "yes."
Of course, at this time in my life, I find it difficult to say no to people, especially superiors, because, as they say: "beggars can't be choosers."
Still, it's important to not work on projects that go against your morals or are ideas that you don't want to be associated with.
The idea is to be considerate with a backbone.
In general, I agree with a lot of what this woman is saying. However, I truly believe that each of these points really depends on what field you are in. For example, in theatre, if you are constantly saying no to networking, you are deteriorating the possibility of getting a job. The same is true for not answering email. Theatre is all about collaborating and communicating. I know that, personally, I do not feel positively towards my peers that never answer their email. Some may say that since this woman is a CEO, she does not need to answer her email. However, I completely disagree with this sentiment. What kind of example and expectation is this woman setting for her employees if she never responds to their emails?
In general, I think learning how to say 'no' is important. I just think we need to be careful and make thoughtful, honest decisions on what we say no and yes to, especially in a line of work that requires a lot of communication.
This article is definitely a mix of general advice and Muhlner’s own opinions. I agree, of course, that it’s important to refrain yourself from taking on too many responsibilities and stepping in when you don’t need to. I agree it’s important to take time off and get enough sleep.
I don’t really agree about the networking and email things. Muhlner is at a point in her career where she can afford to disregard networking events, but that’s not true for many people. Similarly, the point she makes about a CEO not needing to answer unless they are asked a question makes sense, but the way it’s phrased makes it sound like she doesn’t think people should answer their email, which is of course counter-productive.
The most interesting thing about this article is actually the fact that she IS writing from this specific position in her career and life, which means that for us who are young and starting out, this advice is to be taken with many grains of salt.
The more articles I read about the mythical "work/life balance", the more I think the term inadequately describes the concept. Work is a part of your life. Even when you aren't in college, and in a work-related building from minimally 9am-11pm Monday thru Friday, you still spend a substantial amount of time and brain-space at your job, the thing you do to (hopefully) earn a living. If that's not part of your life, then I don't know what is. What people who use the term "work/life balance" are trying to describe is having a life outside of work, which prevents things like burnout and turning into an apparition once you leave the office.
With those points in mind, I understand what the author is trying to get at, though, as a CEO of a corporation, her time constraints and control over the scope of her work is vastly different then ours. I highly doubt that she graduated college and was immediately offered a job as a CEO. I took her specific strategies as part of an overall thesis that "if you don't personally do everything, everything will still happen successfully, so focus on the things that are the most directly beneficial to you."
Furthermore, I think we, as workers in a fairly specific industry, tend to overestimate how unique or special the work we do actually is. We don't actually perform magic. We are bound by the same constraints of time, money, people and space that other industries are, and though our product is such that it necessitates more real-time collaboration than, say, developing a cell phone, "production" in whatever form it takes is generally the same beast. I worked for my father's optometry practice this summer, practically as far from the theatre industry as you can get, and we had much of the same discussions we do in production meetings: patron flow patterns, delivering exceptional services and products, balancing the cost/quality of services we provide with the ability of patrons to pay. I'm getting a little tired and frustrated with hearing on an hourly basis how different we as an industry are. Ultimately, we make a thing that people purchase in order to earn enough money to pay our student loans and feed ourselves. The artistic fulfillment is gravy.
Taken with a grain of salt, this is an incredibly useful article. I certainly agree that people say yes to too many things and that it then cripples them. I don't understand the point of doing everything if you're so stressed you can't enjoy any of it. This semester has been a big lesson in how having a little more breathing room can make a huge difference in the amount of sleep you get and your general happiness. It is so tempting, especially in our industry where the work is less about checking off boxes and more about the quality of the work, to keep working and dumping hours into a project. When you do that you feel like you're really "giving it your all". But it can be exhausting and it burns you out very quickly.
While I can see how some of her points may seem to not apply to college and theatre, I think they do. While there are differences, there are certainly corollaries. While networking is important, I can certainly see the emptiness she talks about when it comes to talking heads who just want to talk to you so that you know who they are. I also see how it is important to not micro-manage and understand how circles can quickly close after you leave, as she puts it. The corporate world is cutthroat in a similar but different way than theatre.
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