The Astronaut's Guide to Saying No
This week in Launchpad we worked on self-management, and one of the conversations that kept surfacing was about boundaries, specifically, when to push through and when to say no.
It's a genuine dilemma for most professionals, particularly those in technical or engineering roles. You've been rewarded your entire career for being the person who figures it out, who steps up, who delivers.
Then you move into leadership, and suddenly that same instinct starts working against you.
I've been thinking about how different this looked in astronaut training where speaking up and saying no is part of their professional practice. A crew member who took on too much became a risk to the entire mission. Ground control actively monitored workload. The culture supported people in protecting their capacity.
The skills were trainable: assess your bandwidth honestly, communicate your limits clearly, and understand that declining a request isn't a personal failing.
But most workplaces don't operate like that.
Most professionals I work with get promoted to team lead and keep the same approach that made them successful as individual contributors: "I'll handle it."
Which means they end up:
- Staying late to finish work their team should be doing
- Becoming the bottleneck on every decision
- Saying yes to every request because it feels faster to just do it themselves
- Wondering why their team isn't stepping up
The challenge here is that the behaviours that made you excellent technically can actively undermine you as a leader. Saying no, delegating properly, and protecting your capacity become essential skills.
In high-stakes environments, pretending you have bandwidth you don't have gets people hurt. The same principle applies in leadership, just with different consequences.
If you're leading a technical team and finding that your old approach to workload is becoming unsustainable, let's talk about how leadership development could help.
Have a great weekend,
Susan
