by Megan Hustad
No, indeed, it won’t do. Once you’ve decided you’re ready to move up or on, control of your day is important because you need to be spending less time on small tasks and more time on significant tasks—like updating your resume. Thanks to the aforementioned mass layoffs, most offices these days are very thinly staffed, so there is no end to the time-consuming administrative chores that get dumped on those lowest in rank. You think you’ll get caught up someday, but you won’t. So you say no in order to keep your desk reasonably free. But there’s also something to be said for saying no just for the sake of saying no. It has the strange effect of plumping up some personal mystique. If you’ve been consistently agreeable up to this point (and you should have been), it will plant the suggestion in people’s minds that you’ve got ambitions beyond helping them realize theirs.
The first thing you’ll notice when you start saying no is that people react to you differently. It can mean you find yourself in sticky situations where you’re expected to nod in agreement but you suggest an alternative instead. Or that awkward moment when you decline happy-hour drinks for the third time in a row, while in the past you were always game, and the colleague who invited you lingers by your desk, absentmindedly running his index finger back and forth across the top of your cubicle, waiting for a lengthier explanation that never comes. However subtle these rejections, they put people on notice that you’re “going through some changes.” Maybe you’re not a team player after all. You might get funny looks, as if you just made an inappropriate joke but no one dares ask you to repeat it. For the former yes person in the office, like Cynthia, the strain is often the greatest because her new stance means big changes for her colleagues as well. But as Cynthia eventually realized, people were not necessarily thinking unkind thoughts about her in these moments. They were simply mildly put out that now they’d have to do the work themselves—and adjusting to a new reality wherein she wasn’t quite so pliant.
Finding a right way and a right time to start incorporating strategic no’s into your day is difficult. A number of the Apprentice candidates apparently knew enough of Trump’s plain-spoken “no thanks” posturing to try it for themselves. Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth refused to pitch in on the episode seven apartment cleanup, insisting that being clunked on the head by a piece of falling plaster gave her dispensation to sit things out. She also thought she’d be wise to say no to sharing in the camaraderie. “I made a conscious decision not to establish relationships with [my fellow contestants] during the taping… because I thought it would cloud my judgment,” she later told an interviewer.53 The result was that she got branded group villain. Then there was Tammy Lee, who thought that Trump’s opinion of her was the only one that mattered; she too said no to cozying up to her fellow contestants, and ended up fired for being “disloyal” to her team. And when Nick Warnock didn’t like the let’s-pretend-Kwame-Jackson-is-an-NBA-star stunt at Planet Hollywood, he refused to participate, saying he thought it was unethical and in bad taste. No one, including Trump, seemed charmed by his stance.
Clearly, all these people were aiming for a particular effect and airballed. Nick ended up looking petulant rather than principled, as if he were simply saying no because it was someone else’s idea. Petulant is not what you want. Petulant is not “high Energy.” So phrasing is important.
Heidi Bressler’s experience suggests that the effective no is also a question of leverage. Near the end of episode five, when Heidi thought she was going to be taken to the Trump Tower boardroom for the “You’re Fired” showdown, she made sure everybody in the candidates’ suite knew she felt it was undeserved and that she was very upset. She ranted in a vocal fit—some of it bleeped out—that dragged on far past the point of everyone’s comfort. (Which is to say that her phrasing did not impress either.) She boasted later on that this was typical of her, as she was “an upfront person,” but her fellow candidates stared at her whirling-dervish-in-three-inch-heels act with mild concern. (In a rare moment of droll analysis, Omarosa commented, “Well, Heidi speaks her mind, but what’s on her mind isn’t always that appealing.”) The problem with this performance was that the performer had no leverage. It didn’t matter if Heidi disapproved or was saying no, this really isn’t working for me, because—after only five weeks in a highly competitive setting—she hadn’t yet proven her value. And if you make a show about being unhappy when no one within earshot cares enough to try to return you to happiness, you’ve not so much raised people’s estimation of you as made a big problem for yourself. What you’ve got is loud and spastic. What you want is rigorous.
An example of how the pros do it comes from Slater’s account of Trump’s visit to one of his new building sites. As the two men approached the site, Trump noticed something screwy with the curb. He called the site manager over and within minutes everyone had heard how Trump felt about the lousy workmanship—he was furious. Not much else about the curb incident was said at the time; Slater and Trump left the building and moved on to other business. Later in the day, Trump felt compelled to explain his outburst. “That’s the way I get things done,” he said. It was mostly an act, he admitted, “but I did feel that way. It was a terrible job.” Trump’s philosophy was that painstaking attention to high standards was essential to his bottom line; if one small corner of the brass empire looked shoddy, the entire brand would suffer. So he was always looking out for chipped paint and upholstery stains, he said, for burned-out light bulbs and droopy flower arrangements. And he knew that when he withheld his approval, somebody would scurry around until everything was fixed. His perfectionism was a form of multitasking—it got stuff done, and it got it done by other people, which was a bonus. But it also burnished his image as a man who had an agenda, standards, and an ability to set things in motion.
How would this work in real life? First of all, Trump’s example should reassure you that if you abandon perfectionism at some point in your career, perhaps at this very crucial point right now, you can—and will probably want to—pick it up again later. In order to start saying no, this isn’t working for me, and get the desired response, you have to have lived through chapters 1-10 of this book. You can’t start saying no too soon, because then you don’t have the necessary leverage. If you haven’t asked enough questions, you might not know enough about your colleagues to anticipate their reactions. Your no will also have zero effect if you’ve historically been seen as a slacker.54 But when you’re quite convinced the moment is right, you start firing yourself by sloughing small tasks first. “You don’t even have to say no, you’re not going to do something. You just don’t do it,” Teresa, an assistant to an overbearing man, claimed. “When I realized that he didn’t actually read the reports he was asking me to prepare all the time—overnight—I decided to have ‘forgotten’ to do it one morning.” Her boss got the point, and now she’s only asked to prepare them when he really needs them, taking care to tell her why he needs them and precisely how urgent they are. (She’s in the same job, but enjoying it much more.)
You also start selectively turning down some of those requests for little favors, and sitting on replies for a while. “I began waiting longer between e-mails,” said Cynthia. “Whereas I used to respond with the ‘No, stay strong. That Weight Watchers angle is really going to change people’s lives’ e-mail within hours of receiving a client’s panicky message, now I wait a full day—at least—before I send reassurance.”
You gradually reduce your visibility. Whereas before you’d stay late, time-stamping e-mails at 10:30 p.m., now you don’t, and you let people see you walk out the door with everyone else, or even earlier. You stop showing up for the meeting five minutes ahead of schedule, as you used to, but get there right on the dot at 3:00, maybe even 3:01, subtly implying that you’ve got better things to do than wait for proceedings to begin. (While I’m on the subject, I’m willing to wager it was no accident that Trump entered the Apprentice boardroom after everyone was already seated. And also, that he would have said he was “real
ly busy today” upon entering—as he did notably in episode one—even if he’d just been standing in the wings picking his cuticles for the past half hour.) Firing yourself is a slow weaning process, in other words. You’re not preparing yourself to move on so much as preparing other people for your moving on.
At the same time, you start praising junior colleagues to the skies. Because the first question on everyone’s mind will be, If you’re not going to be doing all this work, then who will? Which brings us back to Martha Luck’s neurotic secretaries: Your boss is less likely to promote you if he doesn’t already have someone on staff who can do your job as well as you can. Your boss is also less likely to get testy when you give notice if he has someone on staff who he suspects is as competent, or even more so, than you are. So your primary task becomes convincing your boss that you’re not indispensable, because those ranked below you are ready, willing—chomping at the bit, really—for more responsibility.
It’s a process that might be started by increasing the amount of happy vibes you send out in all directions. Trump’s books are full of references to idiots, morons, scoundrels, charlatans, losers, human garbage, and the occasional “total dope.” But a closer reading reveals he’s equally adept at throwing kisses, and on The Apprentice, his willingness to tell people how much he cared was on full display. Advertising executive Donny Deutsch, who lent his name and time to episode two, is “the best there is.” Yankees manager George Steinbrenner is “a truly great winner.”55 When Trump tells Broadway impresario George Schoen-feld that he’s taking his kids to see Cats, he turns down Schoen-feld’s offer for free tickets but tells the world about it in The Art of the Deal—a book chock-full of thank-yous for services rendered—saying that it was “a nice gesture from a very nice guy.” Don Imus is also told he’s the greatest. (Trump’s exact lines are another marvel of the well-packed message: “I tell Imus he’s the greatest, and I invite him to be my guest one day next week at the tennis matches at the U.S. Open. I have a courtside box and I used to go myself almost every day. Now I’m so busy I just send my friends.”) Judith Krantz is both a nice woman, he tells us, and did you know, author of three number-one best-selling books in a row? The verdict on Cardinal O’Connor is that he’s very personable but also “a businessman with great political instincts.”56
It may simply be that Trump recognizes you can only get away with calling people morons when you couple that with out-sized demonstrations of love for other people—nonmorons, presumably. In your case, proceed more modestly. You start by working in a reference to how capable someone is, or how well he does such-and-such, whenever you’re talking with the boss or other company decision makers. You consider using the word superstar to describe your cubicle neighbor, f And you start sharing information with your junior colleagues, taking them to lunch, passing on as much insider information to them as you can. Usually, if they too have some ambitions, they’ll be thrilled to have additional chances to show off what they can do. And the vague, perhaps even subconscious, suspicion that you’ll be getting out of their way soon—also fun for them. Best of all: If before, you feared that saying no made you appear selfish and mean, well, this should take care of that.
In Think Like a Billionaire, Trump indulges in the following rumination: “I’ve been in the same offices at Trump Tower for over twenty years. The location and space work as beautifully today as they did twenty years ago. It’s not dumb luck, though. I knew exactly where I would be today twenty years ago.” It’s a clunky boast, sure, and of questionable veracity, but it nonetheless contains a kernel of truth about Trump and many more people like him. They know exactly what drives them, and they have a clear, distinct picture of what success for them looks like. Sometimes, as in Conrad Hilton and the photograph of the Waldorf slipped under his desktop, this picture is a literal one.
This concrete vision frees them to say no to what doesn’t fit the picture very easily. Trump once described how he turned down an offer from a Texas friend to go in on some oil wells together. They were talking on the phone. ‘‘Listen,” Trump said, “there’s something about this that bothers me. Maybe it’s that oil is underground, and I can’t see it, or maybe it’s that there’s nothing creative about it. In my case, I just don’t want to go in.” So he didn’t. Several months later, oil went “completely to hell,” as Trump put it, and every partner lost every cent they put into the deal. It’s a striking anecdote, but not for the fact that Trump’s reaction prevented his losing money. It could just as easily have gone the other way and still been a good story. What’s striking is that Trump pinpointed, with considerable self-awareness, what didn’t work for him: He couldn’t see it. The oil was underground, and there wouldn’t be any “breathtaking” building involved. So he excused himself without regret.
A few final thoughts that might help get you to that same I’m going to have to pass on that oil deal, but hey, thanks! So good of you to think of me place:
Do strive for no’s that don’t come padded in lengthy explanations, in
other words, keep those polite declines brief. Those who say no, but wrap that no in bubble wrap and ribbons and lengthy apologias as to why they have to say no, are probably in thrall to the same idea that lengthy apologizers are: that excess verbiage makes it go down easier. It doesn’t. Too specific rejections are also problematic, as book editors will tell you (being too specific can give the rejected the idea that if she just fixes those one or two little things, then…). As long as the tone is gracious, less is more. There are times and places to speak your whole truth, but this is not one of those times. A good basic formula, pared down to the essentials: gratitude for the offer, then a no that keeps you as the subject of the sentence. In other words, not “That’s a terrible idea, no way,” but more “Thank you so much for asking, but I’m going to have to pass.”
One corollary: Maybe is never a suitable prelude to no. A lot of people say maybe when they’re too “nice” to let people down right away, so they stall, encourage false hopes, and then, perhaps a week later, say no. It’s an old salesman’s saying, but worth repeating: The first-best answer is a yes, the second-best answer is a no. Saying maybe is, as Trump would say, a yuge waste of time.
Don’t Stop talking to people. See “Do be completely democratic in outlook,” from chapter 5.
Don’t have a perfect attendance record. While it’s important to be seen, it’s also important not to be seen sometimes, if only so people will wonder why you’re not there. It could even result in them thinking about you at greater length than if you had shown up. Take days off.
Do understand that a superior’s refusal to do something is not necessarily a sign of ineptitude. I was once called to the corner office. The boss was in a bit of a panic. “Do you know anything about printers?” he asked me. He couldn’t get his desktop printer to work, his own assistant wasn’t there to help, and he had no idea how to begin addressing the problem. As it turned out, the printer wasn’t so much broken as it was out of paper. At the time I thought this was really disturbing. I have since realized that this kind of learned helplessness is fairly typical of people occupying the higher ranks. It’s not that technology has outstripped their ability to keep up, or that they’re incredibly out of touch (they may be out of touch, but that’s another matter). Not knowing how to interpret a desktop printer’s flashing red error button is a lifestyle choice. Some men and women choose not to worry about it, because they realize they can convince someone to come running to their aid while they contemplate larger, more abstract transactions.
Don’t expect to build a career on tending to undotted i’s. Your e-mails are straight out of The Chicago Manual of Style and your boss’s look as if Jessica Simpson typed them up. This is troublesome, because you can’t expect people to reward you for something they clearly don’t value themselves. Which is not to say that you should lower your standards if your attention to detail is greater than your boss’s. It simply means you shouldn’t wait for pats on the back, or pl
an on using your perfectionism as a bargaining chip when angling for a promotion.
Do smile like you mean it. Or don’t smile when you don’t mean it. A lot has been written lately about the utility of smiling—that just doing it can actually change your mood for the better, that it makes you look more attractive and affluent. (Charles M. Schwab liked to say he owed his million-dollar salary to his megawatt smile.) But distinctions should be made among smiling in order to boost your serotonin levels, smiling because you’re happy already, and smiling in the way that got the Apprentice candidate Amy Henry branded a Stepford Wife by one of Trump’s senior staffers. A lot of people smile because they think the situation calls for it; they smile an obligatory smile, and it’s horrifying. (The Pan American smile, in other words.)
Consider, then, how Trump is either scowling or looking constipated in most of his own publicity shots. He is seldom photographed smiling. Given that, as he so often stresses, the details are not lost on him, we can assume this is deliberate. He insists you should always believe in what you’re selling—“if you don’t really believe it yourself, it’ll never work, it’ll never sell, it’ll never work, and you’re going to be miserable.” So if you honestly can’t find a reason to smile, if you can’t sell your mood with conviction, then maybe try another facial expression. Surprise, wide-eyed fascination, amusement—any of these could work. As long as you realize that overestimating your ability to dissemble is always alienating, and never more so than when you’re smiling a fake smile.
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There’s a reason Trump and The Apprentice come last in this book—a reason beyond chronology, that is. It only occurred to me when I watched the candidate Ereka Vetrini, who, in episode eight, having just informed Bill Rancic that she planned on taking him to the boardroom showdown with her, which meant she considered him partly responsible for that week’s loss, feels compelled to add, “It’s not personal.” Bill recognized that this comment was not really meant to soften the blow to his ego (and was probably only said to forestall him getting mad at her), so he replied with something like, “Just because you say it’s not personal, doesn’t mean it isn’t.”