As you progress in your career, and master certain key skills…what you need to be successful in the future changes. Yes, you’ll always have your attention to detail, problem solving and analytical skills….but you won’t find yourself using those in the same capacity as you become responsible for other people, head up departments, divisions. So what have I found to be helpful that no one tells you?

The ability to say no. So when you first start out, you have to say yes….whatever people throw at you, you need to show you can handle. You don’t get to pick what you work on. But what I’ve found to be an underrated skill is the ability to say no. This great article struck a chord with me. (BTW, I block time always….)

I used to joke my job as COO was to say no. The challenge is that you don’t have unlimited resources….no one does. And when you say yes to everything, you’re ducking the hard work of prioritization. And when you say yes, people think you believe in their project. So they go off and get started, have meetings, and using resources on something that may not be important. It’s hard to kill a project once you said yes.

Often, I would see annual budgeting sessions run like this: everyone gives all their ideas/wish list, you size them all, and then you decide what you’re doing. When I ran these processes, what we did instead was 1) what’s carryover (meaning you have to finish them), and then I would ask everyone to “force rank” their projects. I knew we only had so much we could spend….so I took everyone’s 1, 2, 3 ….until I hit the mark. At that point, I’d let people horsetrade, but they needed to give something up in order to get something in….a zero sum game.There’s a reason why the bouncers are at the entrance of the club…they don’t let everyone in and then start throwing people out to hit the maximum occupancy limit.

Did people like it? No. But it worked.