Should You Accept That Assignment?

Should You Accept That Assignment?
11:12 AM Wednesday October 14, 2009 | Comments (14)
Email
Tweet This
Post to Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Print
RELATED PRODUCTS

10 Must-Read Articles from HBR
by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Overdorf, Thomas H. Davenport, Peter F. Drucker, Daniel Goleman, Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John P. Kotter, Theodore Levitt, Michael E. Porter, C.K. Prahalad,Gary Hamel
Buy it now »

How to Get the Right Work Done
by Gina Trapani, Steven DeMaio, Tony Schwartz, Catherine McCarthy, William Oncken Jr., Donald L. Wass, Stephen R. Covey
Buy it now »

HBR's Must-Reads on Managing Yourself
by Peter F. Drucker, William Oncken Jr., Donald L. Wass, Stephen R. Covey, Robert E. Quinn, Robert S. Kaplan, Tony Schwartz, Catherine McCarthy, Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander
Buy it now »
One of my first blog posts, "How I Learned to Say No," was about giving myself the permission to refuse work-related requests for my time, even though my natural (dare I say "knee-jerk"?) instinct is to say yes. Since then, as a part-time teacher and freelance editor and writer, I've done pretty well at saying no to projects when I should, and I've improved my process for deciding whether yes or no is the right answer for a new assignment. Here's what I've learned to do:

1. Interview the offer, not just the person making it. Few people accept an opportunity without first asking the person who's offering it what she expects in terms of time commitment, deadlines, and other fundamentals. What matters just as much, though, is having a personal dialogue with the project itself. That doesn't mean talking to an inanimate object or an abstraction, but it does mean imagining yourself doing the work day in and day out before you say yes. For example, does the idea of dealing with the project's many moving parts make you dizzy, or, on the flip side, does its lack of discrete steps seem like a prescription for procrastination? In short, look the offer in the eye and ask, "Do I really like you?"

2. Identify the stakeholders' stakes. "Who are the stakeholders?" is an obvious question to ask when deciding whether to take on new work. You need to know which people have an investment in the results and whom you'll be dealing with day to day (not always the same folks). The tendency, though, is to assume that once you identify the key people, and their roles and titles, the rest is clear. That's often not so. What stakeholders want out of a project sometimes doesn't match, or even complement, the official roles they play. Indeed, that might be why someone new — you — is being asked to step in. This type of information is certainly relevant to how the work should be done and, therefore, may affect your decision about whether to do it at all.

3. Know the history and size up the future. Any project, even an apparently brand-new one, has a history — a set of circumstances that landed it where it is today. Getting basic information about that, and about where things are roughly headed, is essential to understanding the big picture and deciding whether you should participate. For instance, you might be willing to do unedifying grunt work that will ultimately be used in a product you find intriguing. But you also might hesitate to work on the next, airbrushed evolution of something with a checkered past.

4. Look at your whole palette. The array of things you're involved in at a given moment can affect what else you sign up for. Clearly, the biggest issue is time, but that's not the only factor. For example, you may decide for or against a commitment based on variety: Am I doing too much of the same thing right now or, perhaps, too many different types of things? That question might seem self-indulgent on its face, but the realities of monotony on the one hand, or of feeling scattered on the other, can have very practical consequences.

What are your criteria for deciding whether to say yes or no to a new assignment?