Courage to Say “No” to Work

This post is the ninth in a series of ten that are currently being featured on LinkedIn in honor of the Crossland Group’s 25th Anniversary.

Like most leaders of young organizations, when I first started the Crossland Group, I didn’t feel like I could be discerning about the work we were taking on. In our first few years, we were in the mode of actively building our business by offering our services to anyone who wanted to hire us. 

A wake-up call came several years later when one of our main clients informed us that it was not renewing our contract because it felt that we were too reliant on that work. We started looking at how we were developing business and our work. It became clear that we were taking on some clients who were simply not ready to do the work. In other cases, our capabilities and values were misaligned with the client’s or we had become an “extra pair of hands” and stayed in an account too long. It was a pivotal point for Crossland that prompted important discussions around our purpose and values. We made a decision to be more intentional about the experiences we wanted to cultivate for ourselves and with our clients.  

Saying “no” to work is both a conscious and difficult decision. We take on financial and reputational risk by choosing to walk away from new or current work. And yet, in our many years of making choices that don’t compromise our integrity, we have garnered much more respect with very little regret. We acknowledge that not everyone can be selective about the work they take on, but we encourage those organizations that can to consider the long-term benefits of saying “no.”

#Crossland25