Yes...and
We’ve all been there. In the shower that morning, you have a brilliant insight, and you rock up to work buzzing with anticipation to tell your boss about your genius idea. After sharing it, the boss looks thoughtful for a moment and remarks, ‘Yes, but…’ and your world shatters into a thousand shards of disappointment. It doesn’t even matter what the boss said next. We all know that ‘Yes, but…’ means ‘No’ or even ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a few.’ A dreaded variation of ‘Yes, but…’ occurs with the preface ‘With respect…’, which of course means your idea is about to be thoroughly disrespected, and of course the prelude to the ultimate put-down is ‘With the greatest respect…’
As managers, we have to be wary of the insidious ‘Yes, but…’ which shuts down ideas before exploring them for even a moment. Over time, the surest way to shut down all creative input in a team is for the manager to act as the minister of ‘Yes… but’. Why would anyone propose a new idea if they know it’s only going to be shot down immediately? The leader who is fond of ‘Yes, but…’ soon finds that the team will simply wait to hear his or her ideas and then just build on those. The creative capacity of the team has instantly shrunk from the collective brainpower of the entire team to the innovation of a single person – the leader. There’s even an acronym for this dynamic: HiPPO, which stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, or the tendency for colleagues to defer to the highest paid person in the room.[i]
Luckily, there’s a very simple hack to ‘Yes, but…’, and it’s ‘Yes, and…’ Changing this one word flips the whole tenor of the conversation on its head. It encourages, builds upon and validates the idea and the colleague. Try making a habit of immediately responding ‘Yes, and…’ to an idea. You may not even know what you’re going to say next, but that preamble programmes your brain to start thinking about how the concept might work, or how you can go even bigger or bolder. Remember, you don’t ultimately have to implement the idea, but giving it a little airtime goes a very long way in helping your team feel engaged and valued. You may also surprise yourself about the idea’s merits, which you hadn’t considered until you explored it a bit. Even when you fundamentally disagree with someone, dwelling in their reality or context even for a minute or two will help them get behind whatever solution you ultimately adopt because they feel that you listened.[ii]
After actor and founder of the Comedy Store Players Neil Mullarkey taught the power of ‘Yes, and…’ to a team at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), one person said, ‘I’ve found so many of my emails were “yes, but…”’ At the BBC, a lot of people were worried that they’d come up with a turkey, so the best idea would just look like the good one you had before but rejigged. However, the best ideas are ones like the television series The Office. Where did that come from?? That concept didn’t look like other British sitcoms. The Head of Comedy at the BBC almost made a big mistake when he said, ‘I like this pilot, but could we have somebody else play the character of David Brent? Maybe he doesn’t have to be such a loser?’ It simply wouldn’t have worked without Ricky Gervais in that role playing it the way he did. Ultimately, the BBC decided to ‘yes…and’ the idea and double down on the David Brent character being cluelessly incompetent and even more humour coming from his team being so disillusioned and disaffected as a result.
Jazz musician Alex Steele uses this ‘yes…and’ exercise to illustrate the dynamic of accepting and building on a musical idea. When he introduced the concept to the leaders of a European clearing bank, his client later reported that everything changed after that: the culture, morale, innovation. They even correlated this difference in dynamic to profit growth.
When I introduced ‘Yes…and’ to the executive team of an antipodean mining services company, their respective departments almost immediately returned to me, demanding, ‘What did you DO to them?! The difference is night and day!’ Of course, the difference wasn’t just that they were using the magic phrase, but the phrase triggered a different behaviour. If a leadership community is committed to a different behaviour, then the organisation’s culture will also de facto change.
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Adam Kingl (www.adamkingl.com) is an educator, consultant and keynote speaker. He is the author of Sparking Success: Why every leader needs to develop a creative mindset and Next Generation Leadership.
[ii] Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).