I used to work for a man that said, "It's important to find reasons to say yes, saying no is simply too easy."

Obviously if you're reading this you probably already know that I'm a writer, however most of you don't know that I also have full-time career. In my "professional" life I'm in a management position and I supervise several people on multiple levels throughout my organization. In fact most of the time when I'm in the building I'm the highest level of authority present.

Now, I'm not saying this to be braggadocios, I'm simply setting up enough background information so that you know I have some business talking about this subject today since it is quite the deviation from what I would normally blog about.

I think it's important for people, especially those that have some influence over the lives of others to find reasons to say yes to those they supervise. When your employee comes to you and asks for something it's easy to say no. When you say no you don't have to deal with it anymore, you don't have to take the risk that whatever it is their asking about might not pan out in your favor.

That is a pretty poor excuse for holding people back from their full potential. Because you're lazy, or afraid you'd rather take the easy route. But is it that easy?

When you hold people back, or you don't find a reason to say yes then you've just sealed your death warrant. Now I'm not saying you have to say yes all of the time. Sometimes no really is the right answer, but only after you explored all of the possibilities that yes could have provided.

If you don't then your best most talented people will eventually leave. They will either find a manager that is better equipped to provide them with the appropriate work life balance and who fosters their creative abilities, or they'll leave completely and become your competition.

Here is an example from today that precipitated this blog posting.

I had an employee that performs between adequate and excellent on a fairly consistent basis. He approached me and asked to switch his days off. He currently has Fridays and Saturdays off, which is better than most people, and I initially didn't see a reason to move him to Sundays and Mondays like he requested.

Now to make things a little clearer I work in a facility that runs 24/7 and we have to have a certain number of people here at all times. So in order to accommodate his request that would mean I would have to switch his days off with another employee.

If I had been a lazy supervisor my analyses of the situation would have stopped there and I would have said no, be happy with what you have.

Instead I thought if he's not really happy with his days off, even though their pretty good, then maybe others aren't happy either. So I put together a blank schedule and passed several copies of it around to all of the employees at his level. I asked each of them to rank 1-8 which set of days off they would want the most to the least.

I then compiled the results and discovered that over half of them desired different days off from the ones they had, AND not all of them wanted a piece of the weekend.

To make an already long story short; I announced today what the new schedule would look like starting in February and everyone was getting their number 1 choice. So, this one request that I invested a rather minimal amount of time to say yes to ended up improving the morale and work/life schedule for all of my employees.

Now that's pretty cool.

As always thank you for taking the time to read this extra long post, and please take the time in your own lives to find reasons to say yes.